Listen to and follow the Worst of Bible podcast on your favorite platform. Check our Twitter. Read the story below.
So this guy Samson has a bit of a Superman backstory, but with a What if Superman were a total jerk twist. It also has a tad of Jesus in it, as if God had made a test run for unexpected pregnancies and what to expect when you weren’t really expecting.
So Samson is born to a couple called Manoah and… well, the woman happens not to have a name because the Bible basically cares fuck all about women. Anyway, Manoah and the wife of Manoah have no children, because the wife of Manoah is “unable to give birth”, as the book of Judges states, or maybe Manoah’s little swimmers are just simply recalcitrant little buggers, who knows, let’s just go ahead and blame the woman, shall we?
But once again, I digress. Long story short, for reasons unknown Manoah and his wife have no children and have long given up on having any. So when this man visits them and announces they’d be having a kid soon, they’re sceptic at first, but upon realizing said man is a messenger from God, happily accept this unexpected development. The angel tells them:
“You will become pregnant and have a son whose head is never to be touched by a razor because the boy is to be a Nazirite, dedicated to God from the womb. He will take the lead in delivering Israel from the hands of the Philistines.”
Interesting detail: The Israelites are in the hand of the Philistines because God put them there in the first place, after once again having a falling out with his people. God is pretty good at solving problems he created in the first place. Bit like starting a fire to extinguish so you can be the hero.
So Samson is God’s Chosen One, a savior, and he is born to a host couple on earth, not unlike Superman, but unlike Superman, he decides to go down the path of being an outright asshole. Think the movie Brightburn. And speaking of similarities with Superman, Samson does also have his very own Kryptonite:
Cut his hair and he loses all his powers and God’s blessing.
One day Samson is wandering around when his eyes fall upon a Philistine girl, so he tells his parents:
“I have seen a Philistine woman in Timnah; now get her for me as my wife.”
Entitled little fuck, if I’ve ever seen one.
His parents aren’t too keen on this kind of daughter-in-law, given she’s the enemy. But Samson is quite adamant about it, so they make the journey down to Timnah to get it over with.
En route, Samson happens upon a lion and kills the beast with his bare hands. A total badass thing to do, but this is where things get bizarre (bizarre by Bible story standards, that is). According to the Bible, after he kills the lion with his fucking bare hands, the following happens:
But he told neither his father nor his mother what he had done.
Why, though? Only a total psychopath would keep it to himself that he just killed a fucking lion, let alone with his bare hands! Either that, or Samson kills animals as a habit and has been going Dexter all over Judah’s fauna and maybe that’s why he doesn’t think it’s news. Imagine killing a bloody lion without any weapon. The least you can do is tell the story and then say something badass like “No biggy”, but keep that to yourself? That’s a red flag right there. Psycho.
They then get to Timnah, Samson speaks to the woman, decides she’s not just looks and a marriage is arranged. And they live happily ever after.
Unfortunately, no.
Some time later, Samson returns to Timnah for the wedding. On his way there, he seems to have said to himself, hello, didn’t I kill a lion here with my bare hands, let’s see what happened to the carcass. The Bible recounts:
In it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey. He scooped out the honey with his hands and ate as he went along. When he rejoined his parents, he gave them some, and they too ate it. But he did not tell them that he had taken the honey from the lion’s carcass.
Now this is really starting to piss me off. For fuck’s sake, what kind of batshit mental psycho does not say what happened. If this isn’t the perfect party story, I’ve never seen one.
“Guys, you know, that honey you’re eating? Funny story, actually. I killed this lion a while back, and when I returned to the carcass, some bees had moved in, and that’s where this honey is from.”
Who doesn’t tell this story?
Well, Samson, for one. At this point it might just be sloppy writing, or this dude has severe mental issues. Speaking of sloppy writing, I believe I discovered some kind of biblical continuity error. Remember when the angel delivered the message about the little wunderkind Samson? He said he’d be a Nazirite. Now, a Nazirite was an oathtaker who vowed to dedicate this life to God and had to follow specific rules to retain God’s blessing, the rules being:
* Abstain from all wine and anything else made from grapes.
* Refrain from cutting the hair on one's head
* Not to become ritually impure by contact with corpses or graves, even those of family members
Numbers 6:6 is pretty clear about this, saying:
Throughout the period of their dedication to the Lord, the Nazirite must not go near a dead body.
So what on earth was Samson doing around that lion carcass in the first place? Why didn’t he lose God’s blessing? In his place I’d have socially distanced the shit out of myself and that dead lion. This is literally Game of Thrones Seasons 6 to 8 levels of Hello, we’re DB Weiss and David Benioff and we don’t give a single fuck about anything anymore so fuck you and your loyalty to our show.
Be that as may, Samson arrives in Timnah and a wedding is held. And as wedding’s go, pretty normal stuff, including totally stupid wedding games nobody cares about.
Same here: Samson presents a riddle to his thirty companions from his wife’s tribe. If they solve the riddle, they win clothing, if they don’t Samson wins clothing. Here’s the riddle:
“Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but this is less a riddle and more like like Samson going, What am I thinking?, channeling his inner Karl Pilkington.
Once again it’s Samson being an obnoxious jerk for no damn reason. You and I, we obviously both know the answer, but we have the benefit of the narrator being our friend. But as a Philistine wedding guest?
Little wonder that the Philistines resort to pressuring Samson’s wife to help them solve this, well, riddle of sorts. She agrees and successfully pressures Samson into telling her the answer.
When it’s decision time, Samson’s thirty companions solve the riddle:
“What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?”
Being the cunning asshole he is, Samson didn’t expect this. He’s mad and replies:
“If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle.”
I have literally no idea what he’s talking about. But realizing he’s been outsmarted he decides to honor the bet. So he travels to the neighboring town of Ashkelon where he massacres thirty unsuspecting inhabitants – as you do – and steals their garments, which he in turn delivers to the wedding reception. Score settled, I guess.
Still in a rage, Samson travels home, leaving his wife behind. His father-in-law, rightly thinking Samson has called the whole damn thing off gives his daughter to some rando at the wedding.
Fast forward some undisclosed time, Samson has obviously completely forgotten everything that happened, because he returns to Timnah with the intention of spending time with his wife, oblivious to everything that went down.
Now this is awkward, because she technically isn’t his wife anymore. So the would be father-in-law tells Samson he can’t just barge into the lady’s boudoir like he owns the bloody place. He says:
“I was so sure you hated her that I gave her to your companion. Isn’t her younger sister more attractive? Take her instead.”
Samson feels humiliated and gets really, really angry. He vows to harm the Philistines.
Samson collects three hundred foxes and ties them together in pairs at their tails. He fastens a torch to every pair, lights the torches and sends the poor animals into the Philistine fields, sentencing the foxes to their death and burning down all crops, vineyards and olive groves.
The Philistines are taken completely by surprise. After finding out this happened in revenge for Samson’s fiancee being given to someone else, the Philistines arrest the father and his daughter and burn both of them to death.
When Samson hears of this, he seeks out the people responsible and goes Red Wedding all over their Philistine ass – or as the Bible puts it:
He attacked them viciously and slaughtered many of them. Then he went down and stayed in a cave in the rock of Etam.
The story’s obviously not over here. The Philistines don’t want to be the first to opt out of this spiral of violence. So they march on Samson’s cave.
The people of Judah politely ask the occupying forces what they can do for them today. The Philistines demand Samson be handed over to them. When the people of Judah hear what Samson has done, three thousand of them ask him whether he’s insane, attacking the occupying forces. I believe they have a point.
Long story short, Samson agrees to be extradited to the Philistines, under the condition his fellow countrymen don’t kill him first. The people of Judah hand him over.
But Samson wouldn’t be Samson if he didn’t have an ace up his sleeve. The spirit of the Lord cometh upon him. He bursts his bindings, grabs a donkey’s jawbone conveniently lying around and goes about slaughtering Philistines, killing a thousand of them.
So here’s the thing: Remember the vow he took about not touching corpses? I’m pretty sure you can’t go about happily killing, maiming, mutilating and dismembering a thousand enemy soldiers without coming in touch with a dead body or two in the proceedings. Not that I have any personal experience in this matter, but it seems like a statistical probability that you’d inadvertently touch a corpse. So I’m pretty sure he’d have lost his superpowers in the middle of this shlamassel. Honestly not trying to be a dick about this, but I seem to smell another continuity error. If the Bible didn’t say it was inspired by God, I’d quite probably assume the writer was making this shit up along the way.
Instead of Samson dying because he touched corpses, Samson there and then puts out a little freestyle rap about his win:
“With a donkey’s jawbone I have made donkeys of them.With a donkey’s jawbone I have killed a thousand men.”
The book of Judges then closes out Chapter 15 with the words:
Samson led Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines.
Bit lost for words here. Samson in no way is qualified to be in a position of power, but that doesn’t hinder God from appointing him a Judge, as the rulers were called back then before Israel became a monarchy. Just goes to show that even back then it wasn’t about what you can do, it was all about who you know.
At the end of this two decade rule which I can only imagine to be that of a totally demented, brutal, pervert warlord, he falls in love with a women called Delilah (I shit you not – the first woman in his life to have a name).
And here’s were everything finally goes south for Samson: He doesn’t know she’s an undercover agent for the occupying forces. She betrays him, cuts his hair and delivers him to the Philistines who tear out his eyes and blind him.
I’d like say he probably deserved this, but I do also have my issues with the Philistines who seem to have been totally daft people. Because here’s the thing: Why didn’t they at any point in the past 30 or 40 years just once think of asking some Israelite what the fucking deal is with these Nazirites. What is the secret to their success? What’s their Kryptonite? Why wait all these years and then send some girl on an undercover mission which could easily have resulted in her death.
Either everyone back then was totally dumb or this is the most unnecessarily convoluted storytelling I’ve seen in a long time. In this regards, the story of Samson is definitely more Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel than Brightburn.
But here we are. Samson has been captured, blinded and weakened and is throw in jail, where he is held in some forced labour camp. And again the Philistines make a silly mistake.
Because some time later they throw a party to celebrate the downfall of Samson, and to this end they bring him out of jail to parade him around the location. Plot twist: His hair has grown back. Rookie mistake. Just shave the fucker regularly.
In any case, Samson decides to go out with a bang and executes a suicide attack: He leans against the temple’s supporting pillars and collapses the building. As the Bible states:
Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.
Like that’s a positive thing. Going out on a high note, I guess.
That’s it, folks. That’s the story of Samson, a psychopath and mass murderer who just turned out to be God’s Chosen One. As Chuck Berry wisely said, "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.
Source: The Book of Judges, Chapters 13 to 16
Follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or per RSS, follow on Twitter and subscribe per email to get stories like these in your inbox:
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit worstofbible.substack.com
