PART V.

Samson.

SECTION I.

GENERAL VIEWS.

OLLOWING the order of time, the last of the

FOLL

judges of Israel who in the epistle to the Hebrews are singled out as men of faith, was Samson. His life and acts are recorded by the sacred historian with an elaborate fulness which seems out of proportion to the measure of help and deliverance which he afforded to his people; nor is this by any means the only difficulty which we meet with in the study of the narrative.

The victory achieved by Jephthah, and his subsequent administration in north-eastern Palestine, seem to have been followed, as the victories and rule of Barak and of Gideon had been in previous ages, by a period of general tranquillity. Three judges are mentioned in succession after him-Ibzan of Bethlehem, Elon of Zebulon, and Abdon. Jewish tradition has identified the first of these with Boaz, the husband of Ruth, and ancestor of David; but it is more probable that the place of his birth was not Bethlehem in Judah, but Bethlehem in Zebulon.

The period during which these three judges successively ruled, was only twenty-five years; but that their administration was peaceable and prosperous, may be inferred from the fact that the history records the burial of each of them in his own city, and also from the very brevity of the record; for the happiest state of the body politic, as of individuals, is often that which affords the fewest remarkable events. Yet the leaven of idolatry was secretly working in the community of Israel, and was preparing for them new troubles, from enemies of whom we have scarcely as yet heard in the course thus far of their history. * The struggle with the Philistines was destined to be more protracted than any in which the Israelites had yet engaged. The Philistines were not, like the Canaanites, to be scattered by tempest; nor, like the Midianites, to be driven by one decisive blow into deserts no more to return; nor, like the Amorites, to be dispossessed in a single campaign. It was not reserved for Samson to work as effectually as his great predecessors for the salvation of his people. His work, as foretold by the angel, was only to "begin to deliver Israel." + No army was to assemble at his command. With his single arm, nerved with superhuman power, he was to engage in irregular and spasmodic struggles, to perform prodigies in the sight of the most persistent and powerful of all the enemies of the elect people, and to commence a work of which

* Jud. x. 7.

† Jud. xiii. 5.

another and a greater Nazarite was destined to see the completion.* His mighty deeds served to show the Israelites what wonders they might have performed if they would have laid hold of God's strength; while on the other hand, the manner in which his powers were fooled away under the enslavement of sensual lust, afforded a portraiture only too striking and faithful of the moral condition of his people.

Strange and bewildering as is this history in some of its features, it bears indubitable internal marks of truth. The story of Samson is not such as was likely to be invented by a Jewish historian, anxious for the honour of his nation. In the picture of the mighty Nazarite there is a verisimilitude which it is impossible to gainsay. Although dissimilar from any other character known in history, taken as a whole, Samson is too evidently a real man to allow of any doubt as to the authenticity of the strange and melancholy tale. We seem to know this man more intimately than any other of the judges of Israel. Of the majority of them no characteristic personal traits have been preserved; and even of the few whose story is related with more fulness of detail, there is not one whose development, even from his birth to his grave, we can so readily follow, whose portrait we can form to ourselves so accurately, or into whose inmost heart we are able to look with so certain an

* I Sam. vii. 10-13.

insight, as we can in the case of this hero of the Danites.

A first glance at this eccentric, yet most truly human, character, may perhaps convey the impression that it is altogether unlike that of any other man; as if its possessor belonged to some other family of beings, and had strayed upon our planet by mistake; just as an Indian butterfly is to be seen, once or twice in a century, flying in Hyde Park, the question being unsolved as to the means by which it could have arrived there. But deeper reflection will obliterate such an impression, and will lead us to the conclusion that the strangeness of the character of Samson arises not so much from its being unlike that of other men, as from its being cast in a more gigantic mould. "That which chiefly strikes us in the character of this renowned Israelitish judge, is not so much any strange peculiarity in the kind or composition of it, as merely its vast strength and largeness; he being, as it were, like Saul afterwards among the people, who was of the very same flesh and blood as they were, and only of far larger bone and muscle than they. Just so was the character of Samson identical with that of very ordinary men, their character being only more diminutive than his-cast, as it were, in a much smaller mould-and so fashioned on a very reduced scale, that they perform no feats of any kind, and are never noticed and never known beyond the narrow circle of their own domestic relationships." * Into his compo

* Bruce's " Biography of Samson," p. 4.