Authors: David Grossman
Furthermore, contact with a prostitute means giving something precious and very personal to a total stranger, to someone who has no real interest in the essence of the person she or he is having sex with. This is the off-putting element of prostitution, and also, of course, the key to its appeal: the radical intersection of the most intimate and most impersonal, the most private and the utterly public, the sperm and the stranger.
Viewed this way, it is clear why Samson would choose this option: when he sleeps with a whore, he again exposes his ‘mystery’ to a complete stranger. Again he flirts with that need he has, to give without giving himself away, to pose a riddle but withhold the solution. Yet again he can be in the midst of the most intimate act, the act of
knowing
, and remain unknown, undeciphered.
For this would appear to be what Samson is always looking for – that point of elusive, dubious contact that never offers full satisfaction, or solace, or genuine closeness. And least of all, love. Which never provides what he needs most – to be given fully to another, and to be received by that person in a way that enables full self-disclosure, so that, perhaps, he may be healed at last of the remoteness he has felt since birth.
Why does he behave this way? Why does he never try to redeem himself with the help of another ‘appropriate’ soul, who might be truly responsive to his deep need, and cure him of his dreadful core experience of strangeness?
We can broaden the question to inquire why, so frequently, do people undermine themselves in the very areas where they need the greatest salvation? This is the case for individuals, yet also for societies and nations, which so often seem fated to repeat, with depressing regularity, the most tragic choices and decisions of their history. And in Samson’s case, too, this destructive force is definitely at work, which
is apparently why he manages all his life to be true to the distortions imposed on him by others, and is again and again alienated from his own vital and authentic needs – the need for genuine love and acceptance, the yearning for relationships of honesty and trust.
Which is why Samson goes not only to a whore but to a whore from Gaza. In other words, to a place doubly alien, and moreover to a woman who he is sure will immediately turn him over to her countrymen; in any case a visit that will surely lead to his falling into the hands of the Philistines, who for quite some time have been raring to take revenge for everything he has done to them.
And indeed when the Gazans learn that Samson is to be found at the house of the prostitute, they gather at once and lie in wait for him at the gates to the city, through which he will have to pass on his way out of town. They lie there in silence all night, intending to capture him at daybreak and kill him. But Samson stays with the woman only until the middle of the night; then he rises, goes
to the city gate and surprises the ambushers. It would seem that he guessed the Philistines’ plot and therefore left the whore earlier than expected in order to take them by surprise. And if so, this lends credence to the speculation that it wasn’t just the whore he was after, but also the experience (and even the ‘joy’) of fear, tension, and humiliation bound up in the very act of making love to her – not merely because of her expected disloyalty, but also, perhaps mainly, from the knowledge that at the heart of their sexual intimacy, strangers are also present.
These strangers are in fact far away at this moment, but they are very much present in their intentions and in the air of conspiracy that spills into the room where the two are making love. And this way Samson gets to seize the two electrodes of feeling that he courts incessantly: powerful intimacy, together with the penetrating recognition that the borders of secrecy and privacy surrounding him and the woman are open to one and all, and that their sexual union has been violated from the first. This
way he reconfirms to himself the recognition that has in large degree shaped his life and determined his path, and will continue to make him miserable till his last day, namely, that intimacy – all intimacy – is, by definition, polluted.
‘At midnight he got up, grasped the doors of the town gate together with the two gateposts, and pulled them out along with the bar. He placed them on his shoulders and carried them off to the top of the hill that is near to Hebron.’
And though, as we noted, it is never said that Samson was a giant, here he seems gargantuan. As he does in the famous illustration by Gustave Doré, ‘Samson Carrying Away the Gates of Gaza’, in which Samson is seen climbing a hill (apparently approaching Hebron; there are no such hills in the Gaza area).
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The sky above him seems to open, and he is showered with celestial radiance. But Samson himself does not see this light; he nearly collapses under the weight of the huge gate, which separates him from the light, and the image is one of a being who is half-godly and half-human, suffering and afflicted.
Here too, as in all of Samson’s exploits, is a feat the like of which is nowhere else to be found in the Bible, and which again is a kind of extravagant, significant performance: a stranger comes to the city, and when he leaves he takes with him its gates, the very thing that divides the inside from the outside. He penetrates the boundary of the city and confiscates the barrier that creates the distinction between the locals and outsiders or enemies. This too, of course, carries a symbolism that is anything but foreign to Samson’s internal discourse, but here it is framed from a new angle: in the uprooting of the gates can be discerned not only Samson’s familiar, even reflexive intention to hurt and humiliate the Philistines; but also, if you will, an echo of defiance, even a unique
protest
on Samson’s part against the violation of his own intimacy.
And thus, from the sight of this man ripping out the gates and bearing them off on his back, the reader may derive mild comfort from the thought that, even if Samson’s great mission of battling the Philistines has been imposed on him from above, and if his whole
life is a journey determined in advance, here Samson manages to muster a few sparks of free will, as yet again he finds a uniquely self-expressive mode of carrying out his task.
* * *
In the woods, on the way to Tel Zorah – the mound that is believed to mark the spot of the biblical Zorah – can be found yellow signs pointing to the ‘Grave of Samson and Manoah’, an irresistible spur to curiosity. The mound, of greyish brown rendzina soil, is covered by an assortment of thorns and sparse yellow stubble. At the crest is a patch of concrete and two graves, a modest tomb of sorts fashioned of stone blocks with a pair of little blue domes. On one of these is written, ‘The Righteous Judge of Israel, Samson the Hero, of Blessed Memory, Who Judged Israel as Did Their Father in Heaven’. Also inscribed is the day of Samson’s death: the 24th of Tammuz. ‘The Righteous Manoah’, it says, in the calligraphy used by scribes of Torah scrolls, on the other dome,
‘of Blessed Memory, Who Saw an Angel of God Face to Face’. Incidentally, Samson’s mother, whose encounters with the angel were closer than her husband’s, merited neither a grave nor a monument in the family plot.
These, of course, are not the actual graves of Samson and his father. No one knows who, if anyone, is buried here. The monument suddenly appeared in the late 1990s, its provenance unclear. But the spot was quickly sanctified by believers, who come here, singly and in groups, lighting little oil lamps at the foot of the graves, praying for cure from illness, brides and grooms for their children, success in business, babies for their barren daughters. At midnight, one may find Hasidic Jews of the Bratzlaver sect who have come to pray for redemption and mourn the destruction of the Temple.
Nearby is the mouth of a large cave. The concave receptacles of an olive press are carved in the stone. Once a donkey walked here in an endless circle, turning a round millstone – which today lies here, broken – that pressed the oil from the olives. A
large square wine-press is also carved out of the stone floor. From its size it would seem to have been one of the main wine-presses of the region, and since grapes needed to arrive at the press as soon as possible after being picked, one may gather that the terraces at the foot of Tel Zorah once teemed with grapevines.
At the top of the mound, beside the graves, someone has placed a tiny cupboard containing bibles and prayerbooks. One small bible, with bus tickets stuck in its pages as bookmarks, opens at once to a wrinkled, frequently fingered page, stained with sweat and tears:
‘After that, he fell in love with a woman in Nahal Sorek, named Delilah.’
* * *
Who is Delilah? The Bible furnishes no answer, not even whether she was a Philistine like Samson’s other women. On the other hand, she is the first woman in the story who is identified by name, and the only
one whom Samson explicitly loved. But where did he meet her? What did he see in her? There is no way of knowing. Nor how he courted her, and what was different this time, when he was actually in love, as opposed to the others. And most of all – what does the silence of the text suggest about the feelings of Delilah toward Samson?
The biblical narrator, as we have seen, is reluctant to impart this sort of information. He is more interested in actions here, just as when he rushed from ‘the woman bore a son, and she named him Samson; the boy grew up, and the Lord blessed him’ straight to ‘the spirit of the Lord first moved him in the encampment of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol’, skipping over Samson’s childhood, purging the intriguing details about the education of this extraordinary child, about his childhood pleasures (Did he strangle snakes, like Hercules? Or battle a wild boar, like Odysseus?) and his friends, or rather, as we might expect, his utter loneliness. Nothing of this is known, and we are also unaware of any younger siblings, children born without any special
mission, free of the burden of mystery, the ordinary children of ordinary parents.
And so too in the Delilah story – not a single detail offers a temporary pause in some cosy biographical nook in between the name of the new love and the forward momentum of the plot: ‘The lords of the Philistines went up to her and said, “Coax him and find out what makes him so strong, and how we can overpower him, tie him up, and make him helpless; and we’ll each give you eleven hundred shekels of silver.”’
Various works dealing with the story of Samson – in literature, painting, music, film
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– have tried to represent Delilah as a tragic figure, who had no intention of harming Samson and indeed was anguished over what happened to him after she turned him in. This sort of interpretation may be found, for example, in Van Dyck’s painting
The
Arrest of Samson
, in which Samson casts a heartrending look at Delilah as the Philistines burst into the room, seize him and tear him away from her: Delilah’s face is turned toward him in a curious
mixture of satisfaction over her success, yet pain and tenderness too. Her hand is extended toward his face in a gesture that at the same time suggests a wave of farewell, of renunciation, but also a gesture of compassion, a yearning to caress him one last time, a tender send-off as he embarks on a road of suffering.
But the text as it stands does not lend itself to such a generous reading of Delilah’s deeds and character, indeed rejects it outright. Delilah’s entire behaviour does not even hint of love, and yet it is this cruel, treacherous woman whom Samson loves, and, as we have remarked, it may well be that note of treachery that he loves in her,
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which forces the reader to broaden and loosen the very definition of love: it is probably Delilah’s cruelty, her almost transparent passion to hurt him – a level of passion that he never found in his other women – which ties him to her with twisted bonds that turn out to be stronger than any that preceded them, and which therefore, for the first time, arouse his love.
But the explanation of the compulsive need for betrayal is, in the end, so depressing, constraining, mechanical – and denying of Samson’s free will – that we seek, alongside it, another explanation, or wait a while and hope that the story itself will lead us to it.
Delilah – motivated by the promise of a handsome payoff by the Philistines – ties Samson up and teases him with a sort of two-faced foreplay. On the surface, she is trying to determine, with Samson’s compliance, the secret to his strength and a means of binding him from which he cannot get himself free: ‘If I were to be tied with seven fresh bowstrings that were never dried, ‘I should become as weak as an ordinary man,’ Samson answers, stretched out to his full length on the mattress, maybe idly stroking his long braids – all seven of them – and suppressing a smile.
Erotic amusements are a matter of taste, and being tied up with fresh tendons that have not been dried is apparently something Samson is into. Delilah at once passes the word about Samson’s fancy to the
Philistine officers. They send the requested accoutrements up to her chamber, and she ties the damp cords around his body. And all the while, remember, ‘an ambush was waiting in her room’, a most glaring example of the confusion and boundary-violation that always attend Samson’s activities, indiscriminately mixing the intimate and the public, love and betrayal.
Delilah finishes wrapping his body with the cords, and then, when he is tied tight, she says to him (in a sudden cry? a confidential whisper in his ear?) ‘Samson, the Philistines are upon you!’ Barely a moment passes, and Samson pops the tendons apart as easily as a ‘strand of tow’ (i.e., a fibre of flax) comes apart at a mere ‘touch of fire’.
You deceived me, declares Delilah, and lied to me. With astonishing coldness, and even as she spins her web of deceit, she accuses him of lying. Her eyes are perhaps flashing toward the ‘ambusher’, then fixing on Samson: ‘Now, tell me true, how can you be tied up and restrained?’
Samson – sprawled on his back? stretching with
satisfaction? – suggests a new method: ‘If I were to be bound with new ropes that had never been used, I would become as frail as an ordinary man.’