Naso (Haftarot)

Haftarah: The Birth of Samson

The haftarah for this week contains the account of the birth—or, more properly, the annunciation of the birth—of Samson, in Judges 13:2-25. The connection to the Torah portion lies in the Nazirite practice imposed upon the infant from the womb, the law of the Nazirite (Num 6:1-21) being one of the halakhic subjects developed at some length in this parashah, which is a potpourri of various subjects only tenuously related to one another. Our haftarah may be compared to the account of the birth of Samuel in 1 Samuel 1 (also read as a haftarah, on the First Day of Rosh Hashanah), as well as to the handful of other accounts of the visitation of childless couples (Abraham and Sarah in Gen 18:1-16; Isaac and Sarah in 25:19-26), either by angels or by God, informing them of the anticipated birth of a child.

Samuel bears a particularly strong resemblance to Samson, because he too was set aside for a special purpose from infancy: his mother, Hannah, vowed that the child born to her would be dedicated to God all his life—meaning, in practical terms, that he was raised in the Sanctuary as a kind of priestly apprentice, and that “no razor would ever touch his head”: i.e., that he would be a Nazirite (v. 11). But in the case of Samson, Nazirite status originated from above, not from a mother’s vow. Birth legends are a fascinating genre, known in almost all human cultures since time immemorial. The message is that a man’s great accomplishments in adult life are foreshadowed by unusual events surrounding his birth, as if these strange, miraculous circumstances were an omen of future greatness. If my memory serves me correctly, even in “atheistic” Communist China various miraculous legends surrounded the birth of Mao Ze Dong.

One of the interesting features of this chapter is the contrast between the banality of Samson’s parents, and the strikingly miraculous events they undergo. Samson’s father, Manoah, is an unknown farmer from the Danite village of Zorah (near contemporary Beit Shemesh), in the inland valleys of the Land of Israel, whose wife is childless. One day, the woman encounters an angel who informs her that she will bear a child, and instructs her that she must observe a strict Nazirite discipline during her pregnancy, while the child will be a “Nazirite to God” from the womb, and become a savior of Israel from the Philistines. She tells her husband, who is suspicious, and prays that the “man of God“ will come back so that he may hear the tidings personally. The two of them go out to the field (significantly, the angel does not appear at their home), and there the angel repeats his words.

In this latter scene, his supernatural nature becomes blatantly obvious. Unlike the angels who appeared to Abraham, he refuses to eat, and asks them to instead offer the kid to God. When they ask his name, he replies, “Why do you ask my name, for it is hidden.” The angel “acts miraculously” (v. 19), and then ascends heavenwards in the flames of the altar. Twice in close succession we are told “and Manoah and his wife see” (vv. 19-20). But it is only when the angel fails to return later that Manoah is convinced that this mysterious figure really was an angel. His reaction is one of anxiety: “We are going to die, for we have seen God” (v. 22). But his wife, who is clearly both wiser and less hysterical then he, points out that “If he’d wanted us to die, God wouldn’t have accepted our offering.” The child is born; he is named Shimshon (a name derived from shemesh, “sun”; are there echoes of archaic sun-worship in this name?); and the chapter concludes: “And the spirit of the Lord began to stir in the camp [i.e., territory] of Dan, between Zorah and Eshtaol.”

It is interesting that these very same parents, who have at least tasted a Divine vision of sorts, appear in the very next chapter as ordinary, conventional people, blind to the Divine plan involved in Samson’s choice of a wife. (For a fine literary analysis of this chapter, see Yairah Amit, The Book of Judges; The Art of Editing, Chapter 5.2.3 [Hebrew edition: 269-281; English: 289-304.)

Excursus: What Manner of Man was Samson?

As I have noted on several previous occasions, the haftarah ends too soon for my taste. As the really interesting stuff comes in the next three chapters, I beg my readers indulgence for a brief excursus on the adult Samson.

Two things strike us about Samson. First, of course, is that he possesses superhuman strength, enabling him to perform amazing feats of prowess, taking on large groups of opponents single-handedly, etc.—a kind of biblical Superman. To this day, his name serves in English as a byword for strength, resistance, durability, and the like. For that same reason, Samson is one of the few biblical heroes who is always shown acting single-handedly, rather than mustering and leading an army. (Ehud ben Gera, in Jdg 3, murders Eglon single-handedly, but he accomplishes this through cleverness and stealth—quite different qualities.) Second, he had a great weakness for women. This is in striking contrast to such figures as Elijah, Elisha, and Moses, who are rather abstemious and even ascetic characters. The first two appear to be celibate—there is no mention of a wife, and certainly not of any casual sexual encounters (see the well-known midrashic gloss on the description of Elisha as “a holy man of God” in 2 Kgs 4:9). Moses, too, though married, in later years separated from his wife: again according to the Midrash, because of the special degree of holiness required of his role.

Samson, by contrast, seems the very coarsest type of man. The very first thing we’re told about his life as an adult is that he saw a certain woman in Timnah and wanted her (14:1). His parents (almost the first pair of Jewish parents in history to worry about their son marrying a shiksa) protested that she wasn’t from their own people, but he replied that “she is pleasing in my eyes.”

We are told of his relationships with three women: his first wife, the above-mentioned Philistine girl from Timnah; a prostitute in Gaza with whom he has a one-night stand (not even that; he leaves her at midnight, carrying the city gates with him all the way to Mount Hebron; 16:1-3); and Delilah, his mistress from the Valley of Sorek. He loved them—basically, one imagines, on the crudest sexual level—but doesn’t trust them (an echo of his father’s mistrust of his mother?). One can imagine these woman as the cheapest sort of girls, perhaps as the type known in Hebrew as frekhot. Their relations take place in a world in which the two sexes are opposing camps: meeting in bed, living in a state of mutual distrust, jockeying for advantage: the classical Battle of the Sexes.

Twice, the same scene is repeated almost verbatim. He has some secret that he keeps to himself: in the first case, the answer to the riddle about the lion and the honey; the second time, the secret of his superhuman strength, namely, his long hair and being a Nazirite. Each time, the woman attempts to seduce the secret out of him, cajoling him, nagging him, pestering him (hetzikathu: 14:17; heitzikah lo: 16:16), finally telling him “If you don’t tell me your secrets that means you don’t really love me,” until he finally gives in, much to his misfortune.

The first time, he merely loses a bet in consequence, and must come up with thirty festal garments or cloaks. The second time leads to the loss of his strength, and his capture by the Philistines. This ultimately leads to his tragic end: he is blinded, taken captive, and forced to work as a manual laborer, turning a millstone. But during this time his hair gradually grows back, and with it his strength returns. One day, while there is an enormous party going on in their temple, the Gazans take him out to taunt him. This one time, we hear him engaging in sincere prayer to God: “Remember me and strengthen me this one last time, that I may have revenge for my eyes… Let me die with the Philistines” (16: 28, 30). In the tragic denouement of his life, he leans against the great pillars on which the temple stands, pushing them over and bringing the whole building crashing down, with thousands of people (a scene that, when I wrote these words in 2001, was uncomfortably similar to the Versailles wedding hall tragedy).

Samson’s blindness is interesting, rather reminiscent of that of Oedipus in the Greek legend, who blinded himself in atonement for his monstrous act of sexual sin. Sight plays a crucial factor, both in Samson’s loves (“he saw there a woman…”; “she was fair in my eyes”; etc.: 14:1-3; 16:1) and in male sexuality generally (see Num 15:39, “do not go astray after your eyes…” and its well-known midrashic interpretation). I also wonder whether Samson’s “seeing” of women, and his subsequent blindness, may also be read as an ironic inversion of his parents’ repeated “seeing” of the angel of God in the birth story.

There are numerous allusions to the animal kingdom in these few chapters: the dead lion and the bees; the foxes to whose tails he tied the torches; the jawbone of the ass uses for smiting a thousand people. He even speaks of his woman as “my heifer”: “If you had not plowed with my heifer you would not have found my riddle” (14:18). This further accentuates the wildness in his personality: a rough, unpolished, almost animal-like aspect, of a person who is able to live in the cleft of a rock, or in other wild, desolate locales.

The world in which all this takes place also operates on a very primitive, violent level. His opponents threaten to burn down his wife’s and her father’s house if she does not give them his secret (14:15); later on, they in fact do so after another incident (15:6). Nor is marriage particularly sacred or permanent: at one point, his father takes back his wife and gives her to one of his wedding companions, without anything resembling a divorce (14:20; 15:1-2; compare also the incident involving Saul’s daughter Merab in 1 Sam 18:17-19).

What manner of person, then, was Samson? And what is the meaning of his Naziritism? From what we can see, Samson is a rough, coarse, hyper-“masculine” type, hardly particularly developed either spiritually nor intellectually. He is almost a caricature of raw “masculinity”: in his attitude to women—a combination of powerful, irresistible attraction and deep mistrust and lack of intimacy (what we have learned, over the past few decades, to call “male chauvinism”); in his sheer physical power; in his rough and unpolished persona, close to nature and even to the animal world—but in an unreflective way, totally unlike the wilderness asceticism of an Elijah. More than anything, he is reminiscent of the hero of a boxing or wrestling movie.

And perhaps this is precisely the point. Ultimately, Shimshon was chosen to serve as an instrument of the Divine through no virtue of his own. Beginning with the birth scene in today’s haftarah, in which an angel appears arbitrarily to an ordinary couple who are told to raise him as a Nazirite (and his father fails to recognize the angel even when staring him in the face); through the manner in which, time and again, “the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him” (va-titzlah alav ruah ha-Shem); and ending with the automatic way in which the cutting of his long hair saps him of his strength. The hair here is not merely the symbol of his consecration as a Nazirite, but the actual instrument through which, in an almost magical way, God acts through him and fills him with power. In this respect, he is reminiscent of the hapless Uzza, who was stricken dead by contact with the ark of God (see our discussion in HY II: Shemini). What we find here, in short, is divine power divorced from any moral or spiritual message that we can recognize; a numinous power that is arbitrarily filtered through the medium of this coarse, brute individual.

Or is it possible to read these chapters as a celebration of the spiritual value of this raw masculine power? I am personally very much removed from this particular type; I have spent most of my life trying to understand what makes men of this ilk (which includes a goodly number of my fellow males) tick. But perhaps, if we belief that God is the Author of the Universe, and of all that is within it, then He is the Creator of rough-hewn, boorish masculinity too, and somewhere in His Holy Book there needs to be celebration of this attribute too. In our refinement and civilization, we need to remember the value of the crude and rough. Moreover, He somehow even chooses this selfsame rude, animal-like power to deliver his people Israel.

What does the Nazirite’s long hair symbolize? Hair is, symbolically, an effusion of sheer vitality (in a woman, too, long hair is often seen as an effusion of her sexuality; viz. Lady Godiva); it is somehow different from a long beard, uncut since youth. In the Kabbalah, the hairs of the head are seen as a symbol of gevurah, of ferocious, destructive powers. (In my hippie days, long-ago, I was once advised by a Yemenite Kabbalist visiting the court of the Bostoner Rebbe that I should cut my long hair because “too many gevurot is no simhah”). Perhaps Naziritism is the dedicating of the uncivilized to God!

From our perspective, 3200-odd years later, and after millennia of Jewish scholars and saints and philosophers and pietists and mystics, Samson seems the very antithesis of what we have come to think of as a Jewish hero. (D. Boyarin has written some interesting things about the Diaspora Jewish male as an “alternative heterosexual model”). But that, too, is precisely the point.

On another level, the story of Samson may be seen as the story of the failure of Nazirite institution. Eliminating wine and haircuts doesn’t help in the least in helping a man to curb the truly problematic urge, the sexual; it was, as said, Samson’s indiscriminate weakness for the ladies that ultimately led to his downfall. Again, on yet another level, this represents the breaking point of the Book of Judges. Both alternatives: the occasional, charismatic leadership of a hero like Shimshon (and of Jephthah, who follows on his heels); and the proto-“monarchy” of Abimelech, are equally shown to be failures. As Samuel enters the scene, the people of Israel confront a real dilemma vis-a-vis the proper form of leadership. But we shall have more to say on this problem in a few weeks, in connection with the haftarot of Korah and Hukat.