A riddle

Samson, the prophesied one who would begin to deliver God’s people from the hand of the Philistines, found a young lady among the Philistines he wanted to marry.  The chosen one of God, dedicated to Him from birth, chose to intermingle with his people’s enemies.  On his way to arrange the wedding, a lion attacks him and he kills it with his bare hands.  He tells no one.  This isn’t really a big deal to him.  A little while later when he travels the same road to his wedding feast, he turns aside to see the lion’s body.  To gloat over his past kills perhaps?  To relive the excitement?  Curiosity?  What he finds is bees have made a nest in the rotting carcass, in a dry and arid environment, after the scavengers have eaten it out, the skin probably made a pretty good tent for the industrious little stingers.  Without mention of smoker or protective clothing, Samson reaches in and scoops out some honey and goes along his merry way enjoying the unforeseen fruits of his God-given strength.  And it gives him an idea.  He makes a wager with his groomsmen, his party-goers on the first day of his seven day feast.  Solve my riddle and i’ll give you all new clothes.  Do not solve it, and you gotta get me a month’s worth of new clothes.  A princely closet that would be in an age when most folk probably had one outfit and one Sunday-go-to-meeting’s.  

The riddle:

Out of the eater

something to eat.

From the strong

comes something sweet.

For six days they try and fail.  Then they threaten to burn down Samson’s fiancé in her father’s house and she pesters Sammy into telling her the answer.  The next day, with what i can only imagine are the smuggest sneers of feigned innocence, the Philistine guests propose…

What is sweeter than honey?

What is stronger than a lion?

To say Samson is incensed is fair.  After a crude reference to their cheating and calling his fiancé a cow, he kills thirty Philistines (different ones) and takes their clothes and gives them to his former guests.  At least he honored the bet, i suppose.  Samson himself is a bit of a riddle to me.  He’s comic book material.  His is the kind of story that makes the Bible sound like myth.  He’s uncomfortable to our theology: a Nazirite of God from birth, who drinks (we assume) touches dead animals and even eats out of them, who holds God in his debt, arrogant, swaggering, disdainful, a carouser with foreign women and prostitutes, essentially the worst stereotype of Alpha Male Jock and yet God miraculously blesses him.  Why?  What’s going on here?  Is it as a demotivational poster Matt Colflesh shared with me has said, “It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.”?  A morality play then?  

i highly doubt it and here’s why, it has the opposite effect.  When i said that Samson is uncomfortable to our theology, that’s pretty much the only people he offends, well, other than Philistines, is theologians.  Otherwise, he’s the guy we wish we could be, the jerk the girls want to be with, the guy who without boasting or hyperbole, simply knows he can take anybody and everybody in the room.  Not just a pretty face and rippling pectorals, he’s often the smartest guy in the room too.  He’s living life on his terms, bowing to nothing and no one.  He’s everything Fakebook tells us we should be, inwardly mocking all the lesser mortals when he deigns to think about them at all.  Even his death brings the house down!  “And the dead whom he killed in his death were more than he killed in his life.”  Epic!  Why aren’t there more movies about this guy?  He’s a marvel superhero!  Flawed, powerful, tragic, heroic and lucratively larger-than-cgi cinematic!

And that is the point.  What is stronger than a lion?  Samson was.  What is stronger than Samson?  Death.  For all his muscles, for all his cleverness, for all his independence, this apex of masculinity could not beat death.  

What is sweeter than honey?  How about love?  For all his muscles, for all his cleverness, for all his independence, what he kept searching for and never finding was love, loyal, lasting and true.  Everyone feared Samson, no one cared for him.  He “knew” many women, but none knew him.  

Seriously, why isn’t there more movies about him?  Isn’t this the human condition?  No matter what we achieve, no matter how great we become, no matter what glories we garner, battles we win, vengeance we strangle out with our own two bloody hands, we can not beat death, we cannot find true love.  Even his death did not free the Israelites from the Philistines.  They would come back, eventually even killing Israel’s first King, Saul and his sons.  So what was the point?  What did this pinnacle of human virility accomplish?

A fitting epitaph on his stone could have been Solomon’s, “Vanity, vapor, a chasing after of the wind.”  Or perhaps, “Mene, Mene. Tekel. Upharsin.”  

But God…