Samson

• 1. Introduction

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  Samson, the last of the judges described in chapters 13 to 16 of the Book of Judges, once set a riddle at his own wedding feast. It went: "Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet." The riddle was built from two private encounters with a lion that only Samson had witnessed. He was one of the last leaders who judged the twelve tribes of Israel before the monarchy began. According to the biblical account, God gave him extreme strength. This documentary asks where that strength came from and what could take it away. It asks who finally brought him down, and why readers in several faiths have argued over him for centuries. It also asks why scholars set him beside heroes from other cultures, and why soldiers, composers and filmmakers keep borrowing his name.

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• 2. A Promised Child

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  Manoah of Zorah, a man descended from the Danites, had a wife who could not conceive. The Book of Judges places their story in an age of repeated conflict between Israel and Philistia. The text presents it as discipline, with God handing the Israelites over "into the hand of the Philistines". Into this household came the Angel of the Lord, who told Manoah's wife that she would soon have a son. The boy, said the angel, would begin to deliver the Israelites from the Philistines.

  The angel's instructions covered the mother and the unborn child alike. She was to avoid all alcoholic drinks and unclean foods, and the boy's hair must never be cut or shaved. He was to be a Nazirite from birth. In ancient Israel, people who wished to be especially dedicated to God for a time could take a Nazirite vow. It required abstaining from wine and spirits and leaving the hair uncut, among other rules.

  Manoah's wife believed the messenger. Her husband had not been present, so he prayed that God would send the messenger again to teach them how to raise the boy.

  When the angel returned, Manoah asked for his name and received a refusal: "Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding." Manoah then prepared a sacrifice, but the angel would allow it to be offered only to God. He touched it with his staff, flames engulfed it, and he rose into the sky in the fire. Manoah feared for his life, since it was said that no one could live after seeing God. His wife reasoned with him. If God had planned to kill them, she argued, he would never have shown them such things.

  In due time Samson was born, and his parents raised him by the angel's instructions. As a young adult, he left the hills of his people to look at the cities of Philistia.

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• 3. Riddle and Revenge

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  In Timnah, Samson fell for a Philistine woman and decided to marry her, over his parents' objections that she was not an Israelite. The narrative treats the match as part of God's plan to strike at the Philistines.

  On the road to ask for her hand, a lion attacked him. The Spirit of the Lord, who seizes Samson repeatedly in the story and blesses him with great strength, came upon him, and he tore the animal apart. He told no one, not even his parents. He reached the woman's house and became betrothed to her.

  Some time later he returned to Timnah for the wedding. On the way, he saw that bees had nested in the lion's carcass and made honey. He ate a handful and gave some to his parents.

  Thirty groomsmen, all Philistines, sat at the wedding feast when Samson offered them a wager on his riddle. If they solved it, he would give them thirty pieces of fine linen and garments. If they failed, they owed him the same. The riddle was a veiled account of the lion and the honey.

  The groomsmen were furious and threatened Samson's new wife. They said they would burn her and her father's household unless she learned the answer. She begged him in tears until he gave in, and she passed the solution on. Before sunset on the seventh day, the groomsmen turned the riddle back on him by asking what was sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion. Samson replied: "If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle."

  Ashkelon, roughly 30 miles away, was where Samson went to settle his debt. He struck down thirty Philistines there and gave their garments to the groomsmen. Still in a rage, he went back to his father's house. Meanwhile his bride's family gave her to one of the groomsmen. Some time later Samson returned to Timnah to visit her, unaware of this. Her father refused him and offered a younger sister instead.

  Three hundred foxes became the instrument of Samson's answer. He tied them together in pairs by their tails, fastened a burning torch to each pair, and let them loose in the Philistines' grain fields and olive groves. When the Philistines learned the reason, they burned Samson's wife and father-in-law to death. Samson slaughtered many Philistines in return, saying, "I have done to them what they did to me." He then took refuge in a cave in the rock of Etam.

  An army of Philistines then went to the tribe of Judah and demanded that 3,000 of its men hand Samson over. Samson agreed on one condition, that the men of Judah would not kill him themselves. They tied him with two new ropes. As they were about to deliver him, he broke free. Using the jawbone of an ass, he killed 1,000 Philistines. His road next led to Gaza.

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• 4. Delilah and Dagon

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  In Gaza, Samson visited a prostitute while his enemies waited at the city gate to ambush him. He tore the gate from its hinges and frame and carried it to the hill in front of Hebron.

  Delilah lived in the valley of Sorek, and Samson fell in love with her. The Philistines approached her with an offer of 1,100 pieces of silver for the secret of his strength. Samson teased her with false answers. First he said fresh bowstrings would bind him, and then new ropes. Finally he said his locks would hold him if woven into a weaver's loom. Each time she tried, and each time he woke and broke free. In the last case he wrecked the whole loom and carried it off.

  Delilah kept pressing, and Samson finally gave way. He told her that his strength came from God because he was a Nazirite, and that a razor had never touched his head. If his hair were cut, the vow would break and the strength would leave him. Delilah coaxed him to sleep in her lap and called a servant to cut his hair. His strength left him, and the Philistines seized him. They gouged out his eyes, took him to Gaza, and set him to turning a large millstone to grind grain.

  The Philistine rulers gathered in the temple of Dagon, one of their most important deities, to offer a sacrifice for delivering Samson into their hands. They summoned him so the crowd could watch him perform. The temple was so packed that spectators climbed onto the roof. All the rulers of Philistia were there, some 3,000 people in all.

  Samson asked to lean against the supporting pillars to rest. His hair had meanwhile started to grow back in prison. He prayed, and God gave him the strength to break the pillars. The temple collapsed, killing Samson and the people inside.

  Samson's family recovered his body from the rubble and buried it near the tomb of his father Manoah. A tomb structure on top of the mountain at Tel Tzora is attributed by some to Samson and his father. A separate tradition, passed down by the traveler Isaac Chelo in 1334, places the burial at the monument called al-Jārib in Sheikh Abū Mezār, a ruined village near Tel Beit Shemesh. Visitors were once shown a hewn rock there, Qal'at al-mafrazah, thought to be the altar Manoah built. Judges 16 closes by saying that Samson had judged Israel for twenty years. Later commentators filled in many details of those years that the text leaves out.

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• 5. Three Traditions

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  Bedan is the name that rabbinic literature gives Samson, linking him to a judge whom Samuel mentions in his farewell address in 1 Samuel 12:11. The Book of Judges itself never uses that name. The name Samson comes from the Hebrew word šemeš, meaning sun. Rabbinic writers tied this to Psalms 84:12, where God is called "a sun and shield". As God protected Israel, so Samson watched over it in his generation. The Talmud, in Tractate Sotah 10a, holds that his strength was divinely derived.

  Sixty cubits is the breadth that Jewish legend gives Samson's shoulders. Many Talmudic commentaries reject a literal reading, since a person that size could not live normally in society. They explain it instead as the ability to carry a burden 60 cubits wide, roughly 30 meters, on his shoulders. The legends also call him lame in both feet. Yet when the spirit of God came upon him, he could cross from Zorah to Eshtaol in a single stride. His hair rose and clashed so loudly that it could be heard just as far. He could lift two mountains and rub them together like clods of earth. Like Goliath's, though, his strength brought woe upon its owner.

  Amnon and Zimri, both punished for their sins, are the models the rabbis hold up when they criticize Samson's licentiousness. In this reading, his eyes were put out because he had followed them too often. Yet the tradition also praises him. In his twenty years as judge, he never demanded the smallest service from an Israelite, and he never took God's name in vain. That is why Delilah knew at once that he spoke the truth when he called himself a Nazirite. The rabbis add that the temple of Dagon fell backward, so that he was not crushed and his family could find his body.

  In the Talmudic period, some seem to have denied that Samson was a real person and treated him as a purely mythological figure. The rabbis of the Talmud judged this view heretical and tried to refute it. They gave him a mother named Hazzelelponi, in Numbers Rabbah Naso 10 and in Bava Batra 91a. They also gave him a sister called "Nishyan" or "Nashyan".

  The Epistle to the Hebrews praises Samson for his faith. Ambrose, following the portrayal of Josephus and Pseudo-Philo, describes Delilah as a Philistine prostitute. From her he draws a warning: "men should avoid marriage with those outside the faith, lest, instead of love of one's spouse, there be treachery." Caesarius of Arles read Samson's death as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion of Jesus. He wrote: "Notice here an image of the cross. Samson extends his hands spread out to the two columns as to the two beams of the cross." He also equated Delilah with Satan, who tempted Christ.

  Two angelic announcements open the comparison that more recent Christian commentators draw between Samson and Jesus. Angels foretold both births and predicted that each child would save his people. Samson was born to a barren woman, and Jesus to a virgin. Samson defeated a lion, and Jesus defeated Satan, whom the First Epistle of Peter describes as a "roaring lion looking for someone to devour". Delilah's betrayal is likened to Judas Iscariot's, since each was paid in pieces of silver. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, in A Guide to Scripture History: The Old Testament, notes that Samson was "blinded, insulted and enslaved" before his death. Jesus, he adds, was "blindfolded, insulted, and treated as a slave" before his crucifixion. Brewer also compares Samson dying among "the wicked" with Christ crucified between two thieves.

  The Quran and authentic hadith never mention Samson by name. Non-canonical works of Quranic exegesis do, particularly in the study of tafsir. Ibn Abi Hatim, a hadith scholar, quoted Mujahid ibn Jabr describing Samson as an Israelite who wore armor and struggled in the way of God for 1,000 months. Al-Tabari and Abu Ishaq al-Tha'labi brought Samson into the Quranic prophetic world. In History of the Prophets and Kings, al-Tabari drew on the Israʼiliyyat tradition from Wahb ibn Munabbih. In that version, Samson's mother bore him after making a vow to God. He raided a pagan society's settlement alone, armed with a camel's jawbone, and always came back with spoils.

  Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, is where those 1,000 months carry weight. Al-Tha'labi expanded the story, giving Samson the name "Shamsun ibn Masuh" and saying he raided a pagan kingdom for 1,000 months and killed thousands. This became linked with the saying "better than a thousand months" for that night. Ibn Kathir read Al-Qadr verses 3-4 as referring to Samson's lifetime, putting the 1,000 months at 83 years. Al-Tha'labi also regarded Samson as one of the prophets and messengers. Al-Dhahabi reported that hadith experts, including Ya'qub ibn Syaibah and Muhammad al-Bukhari, judged the narrator Muhammad ibn Hamid flawed. Ibn Ishaq criticized one of his sources, Salamah ibn al-Fadl, as a transmitter notorious for narrating without naming his sources.

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• 6. Hero or Myth

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  In August 2012, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University announced the discovery of a circular stone seal about 15 mm across. It was found on the floor of a house at Beth Shemesh and dated to the 12th century BCE. Its carving seems to show a man, possibly long-haired, beside a sketchy image of a large animal resembling lions in contemporary art. The figure appears unarmed, which fits the Samson story. The excavation directors, Prof. Shlomo Bunimovitz and Dr. Zvi Lederman, did not claim that the figure is the biblical Samson. Their reading, as Haaretz reported it, is that a tale of a lion-fighting hero was already being told in that region. That tale later found its way onto the seal and into the biblical text.

  Beth Shemesh, whose name means Temple of the Sun, lies near the setting of the Samson legend. That fact fed a theory popular among comparative mythologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They saw Samson as a sun god remembered as a man, with his long hair standing for the sun's rays. They also suggested that Delilah's name plays on the Hebrew word for night, layla. The idea is still promoted occasionally but has largely lost favor, because its supporting evidence is thin.

  Enkidu of Mesopotamia and Heracles of Greece are the figures that a more popular scholarly reading places beside Samson. In this view, all three are local versions of one international Near Eastern folk hero. The parallels with Heracles are specific. Both killed a lion bare-handed, Heracles the Nemean lion. Both were believed to have once been desperately thirsty and drunk water that poured from a rock. Both tore down the gates of a city. Both were betrayed by a woman, Deianira in one case and Delilah in the other, who led them to their dooms. And both died by their own hands, Heracles on a pyre and Samson in the collapsing temple. In this reading, the announcement of Samson's birth to his mother is a censored account of divine conception.

  Shamgar, another hero in the Book of Judges, also resembles Samson strongly. Judges 3:31 says that Shamgar killed 600 Philistines with an ox-goad.

  Joan Comay, co-author of Who's Who in the Bible, is among those who reject all of this. Traditional and conservative biblical scholars hold that Samson was a literal historical figure and deny any link to mythological heroes. One description calls the solar-hero idea "an artificial ingenuity". Comay believes the story is so specific about time and place that Samson was undoubtedly a real man who pitted his great strength against the oppressors of Israel.

  James King West reads the same stories differently. He sees the hostilities between Philistines and Hebrews as "purely personal and local" in nature. Unlike much of Judges, he finds in the Samson stories an "almost total lack of a religious or moral tone". Elon Gilad of Haaretz sees a moral after all. He writes that some biblical stories are flat-out cautions against marrying foreign women, none more than this one. He points to the parents' disapproval and to Delilah's part in Samson's downfall, and contrasts them with a more positive portrayal of intermarriage in the Book of Ruth.

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• 7. Art, Song, and Ritual

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  Lungau, in Salzburg, Austria, has Samson as its emblem. Parades in his honor are held every year in ten villages of the Lungau and two villages in north-west Styria. In each parade, a young bachelor from the community carries a massive figure, made of wood or aluminum, said to represent Samson. The tradition was first documented in 1635. It was entered into the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Austria in 2010.

  John Milton's closet drama Samson Agonistes is the most famous literary treatment of the story. Preserved Smith argued that it is an allegory for the downfall of the Puritans and the restoration of the English monarchy. In that reading, the blinded and imprisoned Samson represents Milton himself, the "Chosen People" are the Puritans, and the Philistines are the English Royalists. The play combines elements of ancient Greek tragedy and biblical narrative. Samson is a hero whose violent actions are softened by the righteous cause behind them. Delilah appears as an unrepentant but sympathetic deceiver, and the play speaks approvingly of the subjugation of women.

  In 1735, George Frideric Handel wrote the oratorio Samson, with a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton based on Samson Agonistes. It is set almost entirely inside Samson's prison, and Delilah appears only briefly in Part II. Camille Saint-Saëns composed the opera Samson and Delilah in 1877, with a libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire. It retells the whole story and presents Delilah as a seductive femme fatale, though the music she sings invites sympathy for her.

  Regina Spektor's indie pop song "Samson", from 2002, tells the story from Delilah's side. It includes the lines "I cut his hair myself one night / A pair of dull scissors and the yellow light / And he told me that I'd done alright." The Grateful Dead also told the tale in their song "Samson and Delilah", which they played over 350 times in live concerts.

  Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr starred in Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 biblical drama Samson and Delilah. Critics widely praised its cinematography, lead performances, costumes, sets and innovative special effects. It became the highest-grossing film of 1950 and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two. According to Variety, the film portrays Samson as a stereotypical "handsome but dumb hulk of muscle".

  Russian artists have honored Samson with special enthusiasm, because the Russians defeated the Swedes at the Battle of Poltava on the feast day of St. Sampson. The name Sampson sounds like Samson, and the lion he slew was read as Sweden, since a lion appears on the Swedish coat of arms. In 1735, C. B. Rastrelli's bronze statue of Samson slaying the lion was placed in the center of the great cascade of the fountain at Peterhof Palace in Saint Petersburg.

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• 8. A Name in Modern Conflict

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  "Against me and my enemies, O Lord!" is roughly how Samson's dying words appear in Arabic, which phrases them differently from the usual biblical rendering. The line is a proverb about an attacker who wants to harm his enemy even at the cost of his own life. The New Arab newspaper has used the expression to describe Russian nuclear strategy. In Arabic-language media, Samson's death is often called the first suicide attack. Several English-language writers read it the same way, as an attack that the text portrays positively, and have compared Samson to those responsible for the September 11 attacks. Some Christians and Jews insist instead that it was self-sacrifice.

  Arata Takeda, a Japanese-born German academic, included Milton's Samson Agonistes among his examples of suicide bombers in Western literature. His study appeared in Contemporary Justice Review, and he also treated the idea in his doctoral thesis at the University of Tübingen. His other examples were Ajax, The Robbers and The Just Assassins. He concluded that suicide bombings are not tied to specific cultures or to religious fanaticism alone. In his view, they are a strategic option of the desperately weak, who hide behind an appearance of strength, terror and invincibility.

  Lehi, a militant group, drew on Samson's death in Judges 16 when it discussed possible suicide attacks during its insurgency against the British in Palestine. In one meeting about assassinating General Evelyn Barker, the British Army commander in Mandatory Palestine, a young woman volunteered to carry out the killing as a suicide bombing. The group called such proposals a "Samson option", echoing the words of Judges 16:30, "Let my soul die with the Philistines". Other members allegedly rejected her offer. She also had a physical disability that might have kept her from carrying out the plan. Lehi memorializes her among its fallen, though her cause of death is not described.

  Shortly before midnight on the 21st of April 1947, two condemned Zionist militants wrote "Mene! Mene! Tekel Upharsin!" on the walls of their shared death row cell in Jerusalem Central Prison. Meir Feinstein and Moshe Barazani took the words from Daniel 5:25. They then blew themselves up. The operation was known as Operation Samson, planned by Lehi in April 1947, and the original aim was to kill some British opponents as well. Lehi and Irgun veterans telling the story usually quote Samson's words from Judges 16:30.

  The Samson Option is the name of Israel's alleged nuclear strategy, and Seymour Hersh described it in a book of the same name. The name comes from Samson's death in Gaza City. In Hersh's telling, a 1967 plan for the Six-Day War was also called Operation Samson, or Operation Shimshon in Hebrew. He reports that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol secretly ordered the scientists at the Dimona reactor to assemble two crude nuclear devices. They were placed under Brigadier General Yitzhak Yaakov, the chief of research and development in Israel's Defense Ministry. One official said the project was called Spider, because the devices were inelegant contraptions with appendages sticking out.

  Trucks that could race to the Egyptian border were to carry the devices if Arab forces threatened to overwhelm Israeli defenses. The plan called for a first test in the Sinai, possibly on a mountaintop as a show of force. General Yaakov worried that he and his troops would be killed if it were used. The plan was never carried out, because Israel avoided losing with conventional weapons alone. Avner Cohen confirmed part of Hersh's account, with further details, in a 2017 report published by the Wilson Centre. The New York Times reported in an article titled "Last Secret of the Six-Day War" that paratroopers were to be inserted by helicopter to detonate a bomb on a mountaintop as a warning. Israel destroyed the Egyptian Air Force and occupied the Sinai before any test could be set up. Retired brigadier general Itzhak Yaakov called this the Israeli Samson Option. Noam Chomsky and others have said Israel suffers from a "Samson complex" that could destroy both Israel and its opponent.

  In May 2025, Operation Samson was suggested and rejected as the name for the operation that became Operation Gideon's Chariots. The reason for rejection was that the plan did not intend for the army to die with the enemy, as Samson died with the Philistines he killed.

  Samson's Foxes was a military unit formed in 1948 and now defunct. Its name comes from the story in Judges 15:4 of three hundred foxes with torches tied to their tails. The same name, Shualey Shimshon in Hebrew, now belongs to the 846th Battalion, a patrol battalion of the Givati Brigade. The Samson Unit was an IDF undercover unit that operated in the Gaza Strip from 1986-1996. Its insignia showed Samson pushing apart the pillars of the temple of Dagon in Gaza City. The unit's name and insignia passed to the Shimshon Battalion, the 92nd Infantry Battalion of the Kfir Brigade.

  FV106 Samson was a British Army armoured recovery vehicle in the CVR(T) family. Its main role was to recover other vehicles in that family, but it could also recover light tracked vehicles such as the FV430 series. Shimshon is also the name given to some Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules aircraft. They are flown by the 103 Squadron of the Israeli Air Force, known as the Elephants Squadron, based at Nevatim Airbase. That squadron formerly operated the C-130E and KC-130H models of the Hercules.

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