Judges 13:2-24
No razor shall come on his head
The messenger appears twice, and the second time to both parents. The instructions begin with the mother, before the child exists, and the last thing they see is fire going up from the rock.
People of the Bible
Samson
Was set apart before birth and spent his life breaking every term of it, and the strength never left until he told someone why.
Samson is announced by a messenger to a woman who had no children, with instructions attached: no wine, no razor, a Nazirite from the womb. What follows is not the life those instructions suggest. He touches a lion’s carcass and eats honey out of it, marries outside the people, sets fields on fire with foxes, kills a thousand men with a jawbone, and carries the gates of Gaza uphill. The Spirit of the LORD keeps coming on him, and he keeps using it for grudges. He tells Delilah the secret on the fourth asking.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Samson
- 01
- 02
Judges 14:5-9
Out of the eater, something to eat
He tears a lion apart and says nothing about it. Later he goes back for the honey in the carcass, which no Nazirite should touch, and gives some to his parents without telling them where it came from.
- 03
Judges 15:9-17
The jawbone of a donkey
Handed over bound by his own people, who are more afraid of the Philistines than of him. The ropes burn off his arms and he kills a thousand men with the first thing on the ground.
- 04
Judges 16:1-3
The gates of Gaza
The city locks its gate and waits for morning. At midnight he pulls the doors, posts and bar out of the ground and carries them to the top of a hill facing Hebron.
- 05
Judges 16:4-21
Tell me where your great strength lies
Three lies, each tested while he sleeps, each time men waiting in the room. On the fourth he tells the truth and wakes not knowing that the LORD has departed from him.
- 06
Judges 16:23-31
Remember me, only this once
Blind, grinding in a prison, brought out for entertainment between two pillars. His hair had begun to grow again. He asks for strength once, and the house falls on everyone in it including him.
Why it matters
Samson is the last judge in the book and the clearest sign of how far it has fallen: a deliverer who never leads anybody, whose exploits are private, and who dies in a Philistine temple asking to be remembered once more. Hebrews names him among the faithful. The account is careful that his strength was never in his hair, which is only the sign, and that what he actually lost was the LORD, and he did not know it.
4 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
