He Wist Not

Samson is the strongest man in the Bible and he is not the hero of his own story. He is a warning with a happy ending, and the happy ending is not the one you were told in Sunday school. Read him whole, with the harlot and the hair and the blinding left in, and you will find the most frightening sentence in the Old Testament, and after it, the last prayer of a broken man, which God answered.

A promise to a barren woman

He begins the way the great ones begin, with a woman who cannot have children. "And there was a certain man of Zorah, of the family of the Danites, whose name was Manoah; and his wife was barren, and bare not" (Judges 13:2). Israel has been under the Philistines forty years. Nobody has cried out to God this time; that is the thing to notice. In every earlier cycle of Judges the people cry and God sends a deliverer. Here nobody cries, and God sends one anyway.

The angel of the LORD comes to the woman, not to her husband, and tells her: "thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines" (13:5). Begin to deliver. Not finish. The angel says so before the boy is born. "And the woman bare a son, and called his name Samson: and the child grew, and the LORD blessed him. And the Spirit of the LORD began to move him at times" (13:24-25). At times. The Spirit's coming and going is written into the first sentence about him.

The Spirit who came upon him

Everything Samson does that matters, he does when the Spirit comes. The text says it each time, and it uses the same words each time. He wants a Philistine wife, and his parents object, and the narrator lets us in on something they cannot see: "his father and his mother knew not that it was of the LORD, that he sought an occasion against the Philistines" (14:4). God is going to use even this. On the road a young lion comes at him, "And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand" (14:6). At Lehi, bound with new ropes by his own countrymen and handed to the enemy, "the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire… And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith" (15:14-15).

And then, for the only time before the end, he prays. He is dying of thirst after the thousand, and he says the truest thing he ever says: "Thou hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant: and now shall I die for thirst?" (15:18). Thou hast given. For one verse he knows whose strength it is. God splits the rock and he drinks and "his spirit came again, and he revived" (15:19).

So long as he kept it. Ambrose has read the story to the end.

Gaza, and the valley of Sorek

Chapter 16 opens with a sentence nobody reads to children: "Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went in unto her" (16:1). He carries the city gates off on his shoulders that night, and the strength is still there, and that is the trap. Nothing has happened to him. He has slept with a harlot in an enemy city and woken up as strong as ever, and a man who does that learns the wrong lesson.

"And it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah" (16:4). He loved her. The text does not say she loved him; it says the lords of the Philistines paid her. Three times she asks where his strength is, three times he lies, three times she binds him and cries "The Philistines be upon thee," and three times he snaps whatever she tied. He is playing. He thinks it is a game, because it has always been a game; nothing has ever held him.

"And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death; That he told her all his heart" (16:16-17). All his heart. What he tells her is the vow: "There hath not come a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother's womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me" (16:17). He still knows what he is. He has known the whole time. He hands it to her anyway, because she wore him down, which is how it usually happens. "And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she began to afflict him, and his strength went from him" (16:19).

The sentence

Here it is. Read it slowly, because it is the reason this story is in the Bible.

He wist not. He did not know. The Hebrew is the ordinary verb yada, to know, the same word used of Adam knowing Eve; it is knowledge of the most intimate kind, and he did not have it. He woke up the way he had woken up a hundred mornings. He said what he always said. He shook himself, expecting the familiar surge, and it was not there, and he did not find out until the Philistines had hold of him. The hair was not magic. The hair was the outward sign of a vow, and the vow was the outward sign of a relationship, and the relationship had been over for some time before the razor. He had been to Gaza. He had told all his heart to a woman who was selling him. The LORD had departed, and Samson, who had never once in his life felt the Spirit come except as strength, had no way to feel Him go.

That is the frightening part, and it should be. A man can lose what he had and go on saying the old words and making the old motions and not know. Not because God is cruel, but because the man stopped paying attention to anything but the strength. The site has a whole letter on this, Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, and David's prayer in it is the prayer Samson never prayed: cast me not away, take not thy holy spirit from me. David asked because he knew it could happen. Samson found out.

"But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house" (16:21). Gaza. The same city. The eyes that saw the harlot there, put out there. The man who carried off the gates, turning a millstone inside the walls, blind, like an animal.

Howbeit

And then the smallest verse in the story, and the one that turns it. "Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven" (16:22). Nobody makes anything of it at the time. The Philistines do not notice. Samson may not have. But the narrator puts it there, right after the millstone, so that we know something the lords of the Philistines do not: it is not over. What grows back is not hair. What grows back is the sign, and the sign only means anything if the One it points to has not finished with the man.

They hold a feast to Dagon and bring him out to be laughed at. "Call for Samson, that he may make us sport" (16:25). Three thousand on the roof. A boy leads him by the hand, because he cannot see; he asks the boy to let him lean on the pillars. And then Samson prays for the second time in his life.

Remember me. Strengthen me. Only this once. It is not a clean prayer; he wants his eyes paid for, and he says so. But look at what is in it that was never in him before. He asks. He does not shake himself and go out as at other times. He knows now where the strength was all along, and he asks for it as a gift, once, from a God he has every reason to think has finished with him. And the God who had departed comes back. "And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life" (16:30). His brothers come and carry him home and bury him beside his father. "And he judged Israel twenty years" (16:31).

Where this lands

You would expect the New Testament to leave Samson out. It does not. When the writer of Hebrews runs out of room in the chapter on faith, he says: "the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subdued kingdoms… out of weakness were made strong" (Hebrews 11:32-34). Out of weakness were made strong. That is not the lion or the jawbone; those were strength made stronger. That is a blind man between two pillars, asking. Samson is in the roll of faith for the last prayer, not the first twenty years.

And the shape of the ending is the shape of the gospel, which is why it is here. A man of God, mocked at a feast of his enemies, led out to be made sport of, standing with his arms stretched out between two posts, and by his death doing more than he ever did in his life. Samson did it with a prayer for vengeance and brought the roof down on three thousand. The One he was a shadow of did it with a prayer for forgiveness, and what came down was not a roof. The Spirit that came and went on Samson, that departed and he wist not, came down on Christ at the Jordan and, John says, "it abode upon him" (John 1:32). Remained. For the first time in the whole long story, He did not leave. And everyone who is in Him is asked to do the one thing Samson did not do until he was blind: notice, and ask, and abide.

Related: Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, The Vine, Born Again, and The Security of Salvation. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.