Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Gates of Gaza
Judges 16:1-17
1 Samson went to Gaza, and saw there a prostitute, and went in to her. · WEB
Gaza's gates on his shoulders prove his strength is intact — then Delilah asks for its secret four times, and the fourth time he hands her the vow.
Samson went to Gaza, and saw there a prostitute, and went in to her Judges 16:1.
The verb again — saw Judges 14:1 — and this time in the heart of Philistine country. The Gazites lock the city and wait at the gate to kill him at dawn; Samson rises at midnight and walks out carrying the gate — doors, posts, bar and all — to a hilltop facing Hebron, forty miles of ridge away Judges 16:2–3. The episode establishes, immediately before Delilah, that his strength is fully intact and his enemies entirely unable to take him by force. What force cannot do, the next verses will do by asking.
He loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah Judges 16:4.
The only woman in his story he is said to have loved — and the first, the text notes, to be named. The lords of the Philistines — all five — come to her with a contract: entice him, and see in which his great strength lies... and we will each give you eleven hundred pieces of silver Judges 16:5. Fifty-five hundred pieces of silver, a fortune, for a secret. They have finally understood that Samson is not defeated by binding but by intimacy.
"Please tell me where your great strength lies, and what you might be bound to afflict you" Judges 16:6.
What follows is a game played four rounds, and the game itself is the indictment. Delilah's question never varies and is never disguised — she asks, in so many words, how to bind and afflict him, and each time she tries the answer with an ambush in the inner room Judges 16:9 Judges 16:12. Green cords, new ropes, the seven locks woven into the loom: each lie edges closer to the truth, the third one touching his hair. A man who plays at betrayal with the terms of his consecration has already half surrendered them.
"How can you say, 'I love you,' when your heart is not with me?"... When she pressed him daily with her words and urged him, his soul was troubled to death Judges 16:15–16.
The method that broke him at Timnah breaks him again — a woman's daily pressure wielding the word love Judges 14:17 — and the narrator's phrase is exact: his soul was troubled to death. Not deceived; worn out. Samson knew what she was doing — three ambushes had sprung — and stayed.
He told her all his heart... "No razor has ever come on my head; for I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother's womb" Judges 16:17.
The secret, when it comes, is not a fact about hair. He told her all his heart — the vow, the womb, the consecration, everything the angel had announced before his birth Judges 13:5. The strength never resided in the hair as a physical property; the hair was the last surviving mark of a lifelong separation to God whose other terms — the vineyard, the carcasses — were already spent Judges 14:8–9 Judges 15:15. To shave it was to finish, deliberately, the dismantling he had been doing carelessly for years. He handed the last of his consecration to the person contracted to destroy him, and called it his heart.
held with reason What this mark means