Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [76]
After that, Samson returns to the Philistine city of Gaza to visit a prostitute. But when the Philistines attempt to capture him in the brothel, Samson rips down the city gate.
Finally, he falls for Delilah. Although widely assumed to be a Philistine woman because Samson had a taste for “foreign” girls, Delilah—whose name may be related to the Arabic word for “flirt”—is not identified in the biblical account as either Philistine or Israelite. The Philistine leaders bribe Delilah to uncover the secret of Samson’s strength. After telling Delilah several false stories, Samson finally reveals the truth. Despite Hollywood images of Hedy Lamarr with her trimming shears, she doesn’t do the cutting. Instead, she calls for a barber who cuts off Samson’s sacred locks. His vow broken, Samson’s strength is gone. While there is plenty of Freudian-style speculation that it wasn’t Samson’s hair that got trimmed but another aspect of his masculinity, there is no biblical evidence that the Israelite strongman was castrated.
Once Samson is captured, he is blinded and put to work turning a millstone. The none-too-bright Philistines forget to keep shaving his head and Samson’s hair grows back. Brought out to entertain the crowds during a festival, Samson asks God for his strength once more and pulls down the temple, killing himself and thousands of Philistines all at once. Having received her promised payoff for discovering Samson’s secret, Delilah disappears from the story. There is no word as to whether she is among those thousands who were killed when Samson brought down the house.
If the preceding stories in Judges haven’t satisfied the baser appetites, the book closes with an even gorier tale. A traveling Levite (priest) and his concubine stop to spend the night in a town called Gibeah. As in the story of Lot in Sodom, a group of men from the tribe of Benjamin want to have sex with the Levite. And just as Lot did back in Sodom, the Levite’s host offers his own daughter and the concubine to this lust-driven crowd, but the men aren’t satisfied. To save his own skin, the Levite turns the concubine over to the crowd and she is raped until she dies. In order to incite the other tribes to take vengeance on the Benjaminites of Gibeah, the Levite cuts the dead concubine into twelve pieces and sends a piece to each tribe. The intertribal war that follows costs 22,000 Israelite lives. Then God intercedes in the battle and 25,100 Benjaminites were killed in one day. Another 18,000 Benjaminites die in the ensuing slaughter and their wives are put to the sword and whole towns are burned.
The story would have been bad enough if it had ended there, but the other tribes then realize that the tribe of Benjamin, part of the Israelite confederacy, will be totally destroyed if the surviving men of Benjamin have no wives. The leaders of the other tribes decide to kill the people of Jabesh-gilead, the one town that did not join in the attack on the tribe of Benjamin. Twelve thousand Israelite soldiers kill the people of Jabesh-gilead, “including the women and the little ones.” Four hundred virgins are then turned over to keep the tribe of Benjamin from extinction. When even those four hundred prove insufficient for the men of Benjamin, they are allowed to kidnap some girls from the town of Shiloh who come out to dance.
As the last words of Judges bluntly put it: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”
Ruth
In the Christian Old Testament, Ruth follows Judges. The Hebrew Bible places Ruth among its third section, called “Writings,” or Kethuvim. It is placed here to maintain chronological continuity. The date of its composition is uncertain.
An ancient Hebrew short story probably based on an earlier folktale, Ruth is ostensibly set in the days of Judges, but it has little in common