Samson and the Magical Mystery Hair
Posted
Monday, July 23, 2007
by
Adam Mattison
Categories:
Judges
Every good Theoblogian knows by heart the story of how Samson lost his strength. Despite all his success against swords and spears, he allows himself to fall into the hands of Delilah, she wheedles from him the secret of how to make him weak like any other man, and he ends his life as a slave to the Philistines. However, recent study of the Samson cycle has led me to ask the question, how did Samson know this would happen? Who told him that shaving his hair would take away his strength? I believe the secret to his secret lies in the terms of the Nazirite vow.
Samson is unique in all of Scripture in that he was a Nazirite from birth (with the possible exception of Samuel who is sometimes placed in this category based on 1 Sam. 1:11, where Hannah vows that Samuel will never cut his hair. However, neither the verb nzr, from which we get the term Nazirite, nor any of its cognates is ever used of Samuel. In addition, no mention is made of the other Nazirite obligations in connection with him, and it seems that Samuel’s role in the ceremonial worship of Israel, particularly with the sacrifices, as in 1 Sam. 8:9, 10:8, and 16:5, would have precluded him from being a Nazirite. To me it seems preferable to say that Samuel though was dedicated to God and had the hair to prove it he was not a Nazirite proper. An additional interesting note is that Samson is actually the only Nazirite named in Scripture). However, this does not mean he was a permanent Nazirite. The requirements of a Nazirite vow are found in Num. 6:1-21, and there are only three of them (though, of course, presupposing obedience to the rest of the law); first to abstain from grapes in any form, second to avoid dead bodies and third not to trim the hair or the beard.
Samson has a real problem with keeping this vow. Truthfully, he doesn’t even live as a good Israelite, so perhaps this should not surprise us. He spends all his time in Philistia, all his buddies are Philistines, and he ignores the women of Israel in favor of a Philistine bride. It is in, in fact, in the story of Samson’s bride that we get out first indication of how seriously he takes the obligations of his special dedication to God.In Judg. 14:5, Samson is traveling down to Timnah (and I will leave the intertextual implications of Timnah for Charlie to deal with), a city only a few miles from where he grew up (Samson is not much of a traveler), when the author notes that he is passing through a vineyard. Now, why is this detail included? Do lions often hide in vineyards? Were there no other roads to Timnah? I will suggest, that though it is not explicit in the text, we are at least meant to suspect that Samson is violating his vow and is in the vineyard sampling some of its produce. Even if this is not the case, in 14:8, 9, Samson comes back to the corpse of the lion and takes some honey that he finds there for a little snack. In addition to being fairly distasteful, he has clearly broken the Nazirite injunction against touching dead bodies. In fact, it happens again in 15:15 when he employs the jawbone of a donkey as a weapon and kills a thousand men and, depending on how you handle the Hebrew, perhaps even drinks water that miraculously flows from it. In 16:19, Delilah lulls Samson to sleep, a sleep evidently deep enough that he does not awaken even when she has his head shaved. While I know from anecdotal evidence (and yes, Sam, I am referring to you) that such a thing is possible, I do wonder if this is not another indication that Samson occasionally was known to look upon the wine when it was red. At any rate, it is clear that at several points Samson does not keep his vow, and yet he does not lose his strength, and so surely it must be more than vow-breaking that finally takes it from him in 16:19.
It seems, then, that there is something special about Samson’s hair, and something about shaving his head that is different than eating grapes or handling corpses. But what might that be? Is it magical hair? Is it somehow the hair that makes him strong? I don’t think so. First of all, there is no mention of hair in 14:6 when he first displays his characteristic supernatural strength (13:25 does mention the Spirit of the Lord stirring Samson, but this seems to refer to the prompting of the incident described in chp. 14 [cf. 14:4] rather than the spiritual empowering of 14:6). He is already a young man at this point and his hair must certainly have been quite long, so why does his strength not appear until now? Second of all, after his capture by the Philistines, the author includes the statement in 16:22 that Samson’s hair has begun to grow again. Many see this as a sign of hope in the text, a sign that Samson is slowly recovering his strength, but I think it makes exactly the opposite point. Samson’s hair grows back but his strength does not return. It is not until his prayer in 16:28 that he is strong again, and the terms of the prayer make it clear that he is not expecting the growth of his hair to make the slightest bit of difference, nor does he seem to expect the return of perpetual spiritual empowerment that he had previously enjoyed (although perhaps this was simply because he knew a building was going to fall on him in a few minutes).
So if Samson does not lose his strength because of breaking his Nazirite vow, and if the hair itself had nothing to do with his strength, then what exactly happened to him? More importantly, how did he know it would happen? I think it is because, though he spent his life ignoring the Nazirite vow, he was at least familiar with its terms. According to the law, it is not simply that you do not cut your hair, but rather that you do cut it . . . when the vow is over (Num. 6:5, 18). This is the significance of Samson’s fateful shearing. He was a terrible Nazirite, no doubt, but a Nazirite still. Cutting his hair signified the ultimate rejection of the vow, a sign that his covenant with God had ended. This was why I think he lost his strength, and how he knew he would lose his strength. It was not that he violated one of the three requirements for a Nazirite, not that his hair somehow made him strong, but that he terminated the vow, lost his status as a Nazirite and as a result lost the spiritual empowerment that went along with it.
Samson knew the significance of the act, and so, however careless he may have been in vineyards or around dead bodies, he was still careful with his hair. I think when we understand the role hair plays in the story, we can understand better the portrait of Samson that the author paints. He is no victorious hero, he does not go down in a blaze of glory. He is a captive of his own sensuality whose lifetime of disregard for his Nazirite vow finally led to his destruction in a final act of petty revenge. The story of Samson is meant to be read as a tragedy, the last chapter in the decline of the judges, and the abandonment of his covenant with God, in the very face of God’s perpetual blessing, helps to make that point and also makes him a fitting representative for the Israelites of this period.
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