40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges 15:9-16:4 (Episode 214)

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

The Philistines carry out a plan to capture Samson, but the jawbone of a donkey is weaponized to thwart it. Samson visits a prostitute and takes the gates of the city with him when he leaves. And we meet the woman he loves that will be his undoing. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. Also, while you're over there, you can check out all the other content that 1517 is producing, all the articles that we're coming out with every day during the quarantine, the videos. You can go over to YouTube, type in 1517, subscribe to that, ring that bell so you can see all those Chad Bird videos popping up, all those conversations on the Decalogue that

are coming out now, where Chad and Scott Keith and I are going right through the Decalogue. We're doing the very un-antinomian thing of actually talking about the 10 words from God. But, you know, it might be a little bit different than you think it is. So maybe go check it out. I mean, it might even be a little bit different than... I can't remember, Chad, when we went through the Decalogue in 40 minutes, which, of course, we've done. I don't think we spent as much time on each word as we do in those videos. No, definitely not.

What are we doing, like 20, 25 minutes per commandment, something like that? Yeah, no, we didn't spend nearly that much time. We've just grown in our knowledge so much over the years. We have much more to say now. That's right. That's right. As we've gotten older, we're more familiar with breaking the commandments. We're drawn from personal experience.

We have more to say. All these commentaries are autobiographical. That's right. So, yeah, go check those videos out. They're all over there on YouTube. In fact, you've got to go to YouTube to watch those. That's the only place they are. uh chad how's the how's the quarantine treating you so far dude my state is about to open up

same here yeah i think uh our governor texas governor just uh had a press conference i think it was yesterday yeah yesterday where he kind of he said they're just gonna let everything let everything expire and they're doing i guess like everybody you know phases so doesn't affect me a whole lot because i work from home uh but uh it will make things easier i mean i got family members out of work my wife's been out of work for weeks now so we'll see what happens with uh dental hygiene and all that kind of that kind of stuff but yeah we're just uh holding steady yeah well my haircut's a little more complicated than yours so i'm looking forward to the the soft open that was on the list of things you get to open up pretty soon so i think i got about a week

left uh of this and then i'll be able to go get this ridiculous thing on my head uh trimmed up yeah the the buzz cut makes a little bit easier to do yeah i was i was i almost came out of this with one um my wife forbid it she said i don't have uh the right head she said well it's always wise to listen to our wives right it is especially when they tell you i don't want you to look that way yes yeah wisdom let us attend she said i said a buzz cut's not bad she's like it's not the haircut it's your tiny little head so there's there's that at least i guess it's bigger than her saying your big huge head she just this is true it could be worse she said my head my head's just too my head's too little for that haircut i guess yeah we left samson saying that uh this was

all over you know yeah he's done yeah the conflict is is done uh there's gonna be no more feuding with the philistines yeah he's basically just going to live out the rest of his days uh under his vine and fig tree sipping wine singing sonnets that's all these that's the rest of his life yeah peaceful samson yeah that's it that is until uh until things don't turn out that way yeah he uh the philistines seem like they that they can't let this 300 fire tail uh thing just they they don't they're not they're not going to let that be the end of it it doesn't seem no no they've got to get rid of him somehow. So their next tactic, as we'll see coming up here, is to involve his own countrymen. You know, if it didn't work for them to take him out themselves, be like, oh, well,

maybe we can always enlist his fellow Israelites and see if they can help take care of the problem for us. So we left off in chapter 15 of Judges with verse 8, and this is after the whole fox tail incident where he burned up the crops and then he struck them ruthlessly literally he struck them leg on thigh with a great slaughter which is a phrase i think we should bring back into english i mean that's a great idiom somebody asked you uh you know how'd the fight go oh man i struck him leg on thigh it's probably a wrestling term i suspect something like that yeah i have no idea what that means i don't think anybody does it's just just a hebrew idiom meaning he uh he did him bad i mean he he really ruthlessly i guess is a is a good translation as anything uh but that's

what it says he struck him leg on thigh so he took him out with a great slaughter and then for some reason he goes and lives in the cleft of the rock of edom i don't know why he was living there maybe he just wanted a little bit of a he does seem to be a loner yeah maybe he just needs some a little bit of alone time little little samson retreat there to the cleft of the rock of edom but he's not going to get much uh peace and quiet because beginning with verse nine we hear what the plan of the philistines is going to be so they they more or less are going to force the israelites hand in this situation it says they went up and they camped in judah so i'm assuming before this they kind of, you know, they kind of kept their boundaries in place. The Philistines were ruling

over the Israelites, but it wasn't like they were going in and raiding them left and right. At least we don't get that impression. But in this case, they do. It says they went and they camped in Judah. And well, my translation has they spread out in Lehi. ESV has they made a raid. I think made a raid is a little bit of a stretch here. The verb for spread out is actually an agricultural term like if uh if you don't mow your yard or weed it or anything like that it's going to become like over overgrown right and this is this is what the verb means it's it's a word that's taken from a field if you don't tend to your field it's going to get overrun or overgrown that's what's described here so they spread out uh is is what's going on here in in a place the name is significant

lehi or lehi in hebrew and you got to know what it means to kind of capture the what the story is all about it means jawbone so we're gonna this is the story where we have a donkey jawbone that's going to be the weapon that samson uses against his philistine enemies so but that's the place it's called jawbone or lehi and then it says the men of judah just are more or less asking the philistines what's up i mean why have you come up against us and they say well because we want you we want to bind samson so that we can do to him as he did to us so this is like the philistines version of the anti-golden rule instead of doing unto others what you want them done unto you they want to do to him as he has done to us i don't know exactly what they have

in mind? Are they going to tie a fire to his tail? Are they going to burn him? What are their plans? We find out later what they actually do, but whatever it is they have in mind, they're wanting to get their revenge. So you got to almost laugh at the idiocy of this whole account. So instead of the Israelites coming to Samson's aid, as happened with a lot of the other judges, you know, most of the time the judges, they weren't loners. They'd go out and they'd rally the troops, right? Hey, let's go, let's go fight the enemy. In this case, rather than the Israelites rallying around Samson, they rally in order to basically do the Philistines bidding. So 3,000 of them, I guess, you know, strength in numbers, one against 3,000, 3,000 men of Judah, they go to

where this cleft of the rock where Samson's hiding out. And they, they read in the riot act, don't you know the philistines are ruthless over us what then is this that you've done to us so you know why'd you uh why'd you stir the pot why'd you cause trouble for us and samson reveals that his his philosophy is exact same as the philistines as they did to me so i have done to them so they both got laid by the anti-golden rule a lot of eye for an eye going on here yeah a lot of eye for an eye hey they burned my almost wife and her dad so i went out and i burned their fields eye for an eye five for a fire so they say to him well we've come to bind you so that we may give you into the hands of the philistines it's like they're telling him ahead

of time they're probably scared to death i suspect and samson says uh more or less okay right swear to me that you will not attack me or some translations have kill me so more or less you know promise me you're not you're not going to do me any harm i guess he wasn't he wasn't worried about what might happen to the phil with the philistines he just wants to make sure his own countrymen aren't going to take him out and they say okay all right we're not going to we're going to tie you up and then we're going to hand you over but we won't kill you going promise so they brought out these two new ropes we're going to meet ropes again by the way in the whole uh episode with Delilah. Same word that's used there. These two new ropes, and they tied him up, and they

brought him up from the rock. So that's the scene. 4,000, 3,000 men of Judah, they tie Samson up, two new ropes, and they start leading him down toward the Philistines. That's a lot of guys to go get one guy. It's a lot of guys for one guy, yeah. that's how you know just how you know these guys are a little freaked out like what we need i don't know we go get this guy we need a couple thousand dudes yeah i mean it really it shows you just how not just how scared the philistines are of him but how scared the uh the men of judah are too everybody's scared of samson yeah and it does

it does seem like samson he's willing to go with them because he samson's not interested in like killing his own his own people yeah he doesn't want to fight he doesn't want to fight with them right yeah i mean that is at least one mark in samson's favor he's at least all the killing he does at least it's not against his own countrymen yeah because you know we haven't had that happen with other judges i mean he could have freaked out right then like yeah you're not taking me and then just had a big old fight on his hands and he doesn't obviously doesn't he obviously we're about to see he's obviously not opposed or he obviously has no intention of anyone going through with this plan yeah but he's saving the uh the resistance to this plan for somebody

else yeah yeah this is true and they're gonna uh there's gonna be a lot of resistance going on in just a minute so they they they bring him to this place uh called lehi which i mentioned earlier means jawbone and the philistines are just uh as happy as they can be they shouted as they met him It's like a war cry, right? They go out to meet him, and they think, finally, we have Samson. And then, at that moment, as has happened before, God's spirit steps in. The spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, or came upon him mightily, so that the ropes that were on his arms were as flax that is burned with fire, and his bonds dropped from

his hands. so i just like they i don't know how big these ropes were or cords they tied him with but just basically like tying up somebody with thread just popped him popped him right off and then instead of pulling out a sword instead of grabbing a spear instead of using his sling or something like that uh he looks around and he finds a kind of weapon that we would all use in a situation like this the fresh jawbone of a donkey yeah that's gotta be a book title somewhere you know you mentioned that other book like killing a uh uh killing a lion in a pit on a snowy day the fresh jawbone of a donkey yeah not to be not to be confused with an old jawbone this is yeah

this is fresh this is a fresh one yeah this is probably i i've thought about that i i wonder if this is another one of those cases where we we see samson just deliberately uh involving himself with with a dead animal right we saw it happen with the lion uh where he broke his his nazirite bowel by messing around with the honey inside the carcass of a dead lion and uh here we have him you know grabbing the fresh jawbone of a donkey meaning that it was was not old and dried up but uh i guess from a recently killed donkey who knows they might have been like leading him around on a donkey he might have been like if you just ripped that jawbone right out of that donkey's face yeah well if you could rip a lion like you would a baby goat i suppose he could do

that to the to the poor donkey too so he he reaches out takes it and weaponizes it and before you know it there's a thousand dead philistines on the ground this is this is just crazy that a thousand guys one of the things i think that this story is so nuts that you're like wait a minute this guy kills a thousand guys with like he's just spinning in circles with this thing and just like wiping guys out as they like come at him yeah who knows what's going on here uh he must have had his back up against a you know a rock or something where he couldn't get where they had to come at him uh only from one direction but uh one thing that's interesting and and you don't sometimes maybe you don't see it because the story is so crazy is that we've

like, we've heard about donkeys before and people are always, and all these other judges are riding on them. Right. And they're riding these donkeys and then you're like, well, this is like a sign of, of, uh, you know, power or royalty, that kind of thing. We have Jesus riding in on a donkey. Samson's a different kind of judge, man. He doesn't ride on donkeys. He, he slays people with junk with donkey jawbones uh and i don't i don't know exactly what to make of that but it could have been the jawbone of anything and it's the jawbone of a donkey and

it's not as though donkeys are isn't the first time we've heard of donkeys associated with judges but it's the first and last time we'll hear about donkeys in this way and and there is there's something interesting about as samson as sort of this as this christ figure that that slays his enemies with a with a donkey jawbone looking different than christ who like on his way to go slay death and the devil and hell and all this rides into jerusalem on a donkey uh he's gonna go uh you know he's gonna go and and do this on the cross but there there's this there is this weird i don't know exactly how to connect the dots but there's some dots there that somebody could connect i suppose yeah yeah i hear what you're saying i don't know exactly how to connect them

either i mean it's if anything it it it matches the unconventional nature of samson right like everything he does well almost everything he does it's just like it's unlike the other judges i mean he's he's he's like them in the in the sense that he's has this propensity to adopt philistine ways or pagan ways but i mean he's just he's not your typical he's got an unorthodox unorthodox judge in the sense that he's he's unconventional but whatever whatever that however those dots are to be connected that's that is what he does and i'm just picturing everybody just taken off right because there's nobody else mentioned in the whole rest of the story like the people of judah who uh his his his captors they take off and presumably he would have killed all 3 000 of

the philistines if they hadn't taken off he's only able to kill a third of them at uh as it is but anyway um that's what happens he uh and then i mean as as most of us i don't know about you but after i kill a thousand men i usually write a little poem yeah i sing it is that what you do let's sing a little little ditty yeah it's it's full of word plays so this is the this is the word play so the the hebrew word for for donkey and the hebrew word for heap like a pile are homonyms or homographs rather well homonyms and homographs meaning they're written exactly the same and they're spelled exactly there and they're they're said exactly the same so we have of course have words like that in english as well so when he says with the jawbone of a donkey heaps upon

heaps the word for donkey hamor is the same word for heap hamor so he's just making a little cute word play there you know samson he's all into word plays and riddles and songs and renaming things he's i got i've mentioned before i mean he might be kind of a he's not just a big dummy i mean he does he is kind of creative you got to give him that he's pretty quick uh i mean if i killed a thousand guys probably the the next thing i would do would not be sit down be like you know i need to write a poem and it needs to have some good puns in it yeah that's samson so with the jawbone of a donkey heaps upon heaps uh with the jawbone of a donkey i have killed a thousand men there you go and then uh he's after he says his little uh his little poetic lines he throws away the jawbone

and he named that place ramat lehi which is jawbone hill a pretty good name for it i suppose it's a pretty good name and as you were saying that so this place that this happens is the word means jawbone right yeah yeah yeah lehi yeah it means uh means jawbone so appropriately named there's a lot of punting going on in this particular story did it mean that before this i don't know i mean it's that would be that'd be quite the coincidence right yeah it would be quite the coincidence i suspect not it's probably one of those kind of retrospective sort of things for yeah it's named that because of this this particular incident so jawbone hill there you go and then it just kind of gets it just gets weirder and weirder because the next thing

uh you hear is that now samson is extremely thirsty i imagine seems odd yeah i guess i mean he put out a lot of uh effort killing a thousand philistines this is uh this is the first prayer by samson right i don't believe that we have encountered uh yeah this is his first recorded prayer i i should say so here's what he has to say he so he became very thirsty and he he called that's important because of what we're going to hear in just a second as far as the name of the place so he he called to the lord he cried to him and here's what he said he says you have given me this great deliverance by the hand of your servant and now shall i die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised i mean it's it starts out as a okay prayer i suppose i mean he's

acknowledging that God was the one who was at work to give him this great deliverance. And he calls himself the servant of God. But then he just kind of turns right around and in typical Samson fashion makes it sort of all about himself, right? I mean, I'm thirsty. And if it's like, if I don't get some water, I'm going to fall into the hands of the uncircumcised. It just seems a little bit strange to me. I don't think the uncircumcised is going to be looking for Samson for quite a

while after that slaughter yeah well i mean it's it is a it is a weird thing i mean he's basically saying just killed a thousand guys uh with a jawbone of a donkey uh which is a pretty incredible feat it is a i mean are you gonna really let the guy who did that die of thirst that's i mean that's not the way this guy has to i can't go out like that i like that yeah i mean that would be a disgraceful way for a warrior such as myself to die. Well, if we say anything about this, we at least say, well, God is merciful, right? So he actually answers the prayer of Samson. God splits this hollow place at Lachey and water starts coming out of it. So Samson has his drink. He has his fountain right there. So he drinks, his strength returns, he is revived. And so never

to let an opportunity pass when he can't speak a riddle or write a little piece of poetry or rename a place, he names this particular place Ein HaKoreh, which is the Hebrew for spring call or something like that. So this is, he called out to God, Kara, and therefore he names this place the spring of where I called out, something like that. And it's in Lahi to this day. And then we have this kind of strange ending to this chapter. It's strange only because it makes it sound as if the story of Samson is over, but it's not. It says, so he judged Israel 20 years in the days of the Philistines. Now, from what we know of the earlier chapters in Genesis, when you read something like that, you'd be like, oh, okay, all right, I guess that's it for Samson. But that's not the way it

works here. That finishes off this particular section, but we have a whole other chapter coming up about the life of Samson, and we're going to have this same verse repeated at the end of it about him judging for 20 years. Don't you wish we had the whole story, like the life of Samson? Because what we have is so entertaining and so kind of out there that I can only imagine the exploits that he was engaged in throughout the rest of the 20 years. Well, I know you're going to be shocked by this dan but prepare yourself but samson uh sees a woman that he likes and so he takes her yeah very very unsamsung like for him to engage in this behavior but he does he goes down to gaza so i mentioned in the last podcast that the philistines had a pentapolis

comprised of so five cities and gaza was one of those cities but it wasn't just one of them it was the southernmost of those five cities. This is about, oh, around 45, 50 miles from Samson's home. So I don't know exactly what he's doing that far from home, but presumably he just kind of meandering around doing his thing. But he ends up in Gaza. And as with his almost wife, the first woman that he was going to marry, he sees her, right? That's the same thing that happened with her so she was good in his eyes he saw her he liked her he wanted her so he arranged the marriage in this particular case though it's not going to be a wife it's a prostitute so he goes to Gaza he sees a prostitute there and he goes into her Hebrew for as intercourse with her

and I guess he stays the night there there's a little bit of uh if you're if you're following along not in a in a digital bible but like a actual book bible you're probably going to have some footnotes or something like that saying the text here is a little bit ambiguous it is seem to be some words dropped out here and this happens a couple times in chapter 16 of judges where there's some missing phrases where it's like it's incomplete in the hebrew and so what translators have done is they've pulled a couple of phrases from the Septuagint, which is the old Greek translation of the Hebrew, and they've kind of inserted those in there just to provide a more of a smooth, smooth transition. This happens on occasion in the Old Testament where it seems as

if something has been just omitted for some reason, probably a copyist error, and instead they go with the oldest translation we have, which is the Septuagint. And they work with that to kind of smooth things out in the translation. Anyway, what happens is the people of Gaza, the Gazites or Gazites, whatever you call them, they find out that Samson has arrived there. And so they surround the place where he's at. I don't know if this is like a brothel or just the home of the prostitute, wherever it is, wherever they are, they surround the place. They lay in wait for him all night at the gate of the city. Of course, that's going to be the only place of entry and exit was this gate. And you should know that I wish we were somewhere where I could actually

draw this. It's kind of hard to describe in words, but the gates of the city weren't just a gate. But when you entered, or when you will say when you exited, you were going through like a narrow tunnel like structure. And on either side would be these guard rooms. So it wasn't like you just walked up to your front yard gate, opened it, walked out, you would like enter into a narrow, narrow space. And on your right and on your left, there would be these, these small rooms where the guards would be stationed. and then you'd get to the gate so it wasn't like he just walked up open the gate and was able to get out he would have had to pass by these guards for some reason there's no mention of guards doing anything in this case but that's kind of the scenario here so they're waiting for him and i don't know maybe they fall asleep whatever it is they keep quiet all night and they say here's the plan soon as sun rises we'll kill him yeah good luck with that samson wakes up at midnight, gets up, and he takes the doors of the city gate and the two posts, and he pulls them

up along with the bars. I'm trying to picture this in my head. He puts this on his shoulders, and he carried them up to the top of the mountain, which is opposite Hebron. this is just this is incredible hebron is 40 miles away from gaza so you're i mean it it's impressive needless to say that he's able to actually raise the gate of the city along with the post and put this on his shoulder but to think of him then you know doing an ultra marathon from gaza to hebron not just to go there but to take it up on top of the mountain and deposit there is uh it's quite a scene yeah so he's walking for more than a little while walking for more than a little while and i have no idea why i mean we're not really told why

why not just like walk outside the city throw the gate down and walk away but he goes all the way to hebron with the gates just in case in case they were wondering where he was at yeah and you know of course you assume the reason he did one of the reasons he pulls the gates up and stuff is that they're locked and he just decides of course you're also like if you can pull them out you can probably just break them down so yeah yeah i suspect this was uh kind of a symbolic act right i mean the there's that uh the the well-known matthew 16 quote that the gates of hell shall not prevail against uh the confession of peter and that of course is working with kind of the ancient symbolism of the gate of the city that was really where the the power was right in more

than ways of one the power was there because that was actually where the business of the city would be conducted so we we we see a scenario like that in the book of book of ruth when boaz kind of does his negotiations about the redeeming of uh of ruth happens at the gate of the city so this is where business like that would have been conducted this is where of course the guards were so you had you had power there in that way but then you also had power because this was like the most vulnerable part of the city right so you had to if you took the gates you took the city more or less yeah i mean this is this is why the term like storm the gates is a is a term uh it's if you if you rip down the gates of a place that you got it i mean this is you watch any you know medieval type shows

or movies or whatever you know if somebody wants to take a castle or a city uh the whole point of them having walls and gates and stuff was that you could have a hundred guys in this city and you need like a thousand guys to take it because that's but but if you don't have the if you don't have it it's because they have the this huge advantage right of having they got gates and walls and uh and if you just rip those things out you've really that's that's a pretty devastating blow uh in those days to a city it's not like here uh if you did something like that to one of our cities it would be a bummer but you haven't you haven't like put the entire city you know city in jeopardy at this point right yeah you gotta you gotta put yourself back into

those times when most cities were walled cities at least if they were any size because these were dangerous times so you had to have protection and that most vulnerable part would be would be the gate of the city so you take it down or you burn it or you sneak in like in the trojan war and open the gates of the city for for your friends on the outside and it's basically over at that point so he was leaving gaza basically open to attack by by doing this so it was it was a symbolic symbolic move and maybe that's why he took the gates all the way to hebron into his own territory into Israelite territory, basically to symbolically say, hey, Israel, if you want to, you can take out the Philistines.

Yeah. A quick note about talking about the gates of hell not prevailing against the church. I mean, I've heard myself for a long time, because I had heard it this way, was sort of that hell will not prevail against the church. But gates don't attack. They're not like an offensive weapon, right? and what you realize is that the the church storms hell and that so it's the the gates not

prevailing is that the the gates won't hold right so it's it's that it's that the church storms the gates of hell and obviously we have we have christ descent into hell where like he does this and of course so when stamp when samson does this it it prefigures a lot of stuff so it's whether it's samson as a type of christ uh storming the gate you know storming the gates which of course christ does whether it's the church uh the church is the one or christ is the one and samson is the one on the offense and the gate is supposed to be this thing the gates keep people in or they keep people out church does is we attack hell oh that's what we do and uh pull people out of it right we knocked it we knocked the gates down and those gates will not stand against the word of god so there's more

to it than just that because you might be like well i don't know like samson's is like on the offense here but even in that text we're talking about that when we talk about the gates not prevailing we're not talking about the gates attacking us yeah yeah that's a great way to explain it and it kind of reinforces the whole image of the church militant right we are we are marching we are the soldiers of god bear the sword of the spirit and you kind of picture the the forces of evil uh hiding behind the gates the city right yeah hoping they'll be able to defend themselves but but they won't well if if christ descent into hell means anything it means that he has left hell vulnerable yeah yeah you know a lot of the older teachers would uh would use this

particular story to talk about exactly what you were describing they would describe samson as a type of christ here yeah he was the he's just as he tore down these uh these gates of gaza so christ tears down the the gates of the gates of hell which is another one of those striking typologies because I mean, why is Samson there? He's visiting a prostitute. Yeah. But I mean, just because there's immoral actions on the part of a character doesn't mean that he can't somehow serve as a foreshadowing of Christ. I mean, look at Jonah three days in the belly of the fish, right? He's running away from God. And yet that prefigures the burial in the tomb. Okay. So that ends up, that ends that particular part of chapter 16. And now we enter into

probably the most well-known part of a Samson story because it's been immortalized in, you know, songs and stuff like that. We, and interestingly, this is the first time in the whole Samson saga when one of the women in his life is actually named. We don't know the name of his mother. We don't know the name of his fiance. We don't know the name of the prostitute that he visited in Gaza. But we do know the name of the woman who ends up being his undoing. And of course, her name is Delilah. I suspect that there's sort of a wordplay that's intended here. When we started the Samson story, I mentioned that Samson's Hebrew name is Shemshon, which is formed from the hebrew word shemesh which means sun so samson is like sunny boy i guess you

could say it's a diminutive form but his name is connected with the sun now delilah at least the last part of her name is the word for night so you have shemesh connected with samson the sun and now you have lila which is the hebrew word for night so you kind of got this daylight nighttime metaphor that's working between uh between these two and it sort of fits too because when does Delilah do most of her work well when presumably at night at least Samson's asleep when she engages in her various attempts to find out the source of his source of his strength but anyway whatever if there's a word play going on here that's it's probably probably what it is but we have uh the first named woman who's going to be part of Samson's life and ultimately part

of his undoing yeah this is this is a complete aside and doesn't matter at all other than in my mind and maybe this is just from like you know storybook bibles or something like that but i always imagined delilah having dark hair and maybe that's just you know because you're like well she's bad so she's got dark hair all right i don't know but uh there's a that a woman that's been on the radio forever uh in the evenings and she plays songs for people she'll find the perfect song for your situation you're named delilah right that's right yeah and um and for some reason i always pictured that radio personality also with dark hair because her name was delilah and then not that long ago i i saw a picture of her and she is blonde oh and it ruined it all

and i was like that that isn't right at all like that's quick color your hair you can't be named delilah and not have dark hair it's funny you say that because i if you say delilah that's the immediate picture in my head too it's probably yeah it's probably from all those children's bible story books that we uh that we read but yeah that's that's my image i i mean i i picture her as as beautiful even though it says nothing about her beauty and picture with dark hair and uh yeah it's just a little bit of a you know just a little bit of sinister sneaky sinister quality to her which i of course does does fit with uh with her personality now it says that this is unique too i know we're we're about out of time uh so we don't get too far into this but

if if my recollection is right this is the only time that it is uh that love is attributed to samson as a motivation right so he he sees the woman that he wants to marry and she looks good his eyes which which could that word good is it it's ambiguous but i mean it's kind of a general word it could be translated as handsome or as beautiful something like that it often is in translation but whatever whatever she looked like delilah uh he loved her and he must have been like he must have been head over heels in love with her i mean he must have been like engaged in kind of a the stupid blind love if you will because as we'll see in the next episode when we pick up the rest of the story i mean it's it's hard to imagine a guy

who's quite as as blind as samson not to realize what's going on here because you know she tries it once she tries it twice she tries it three times and finally the fourth time she gets it right you would think samson would be on to this after a while as to what her real motivation was But whatever reason, it's not until it's all over when he realizes that he might have loved her, but the kind of love that she showed to him is not the kind of love that anyone would want. I think a lot of times this is pitched as sort of just this lustful thing that goes down with Samson and Delilah, but there's not really a reason to think that. there's other language that they could use that for that um if it was just and i've heard people say like well he was you know but basically this is just some some girl that he was sleeping with you know because like his marriage went bad and so then he goes to a prostitute now now he's maybe

got like a steady thing going on but it's just uh you know they're just hooking up they're just hooking up it's just all fornication and lust but but uh that's not that's not what we get i mean you get that you get from the text that that samson actually loves this person which makes it more tragic it does yeah i just was thinking that because when he finally seems to find someone that he yeah actually truly cares about she ends up being the very one who just turns on him completely and all for the sake of money and i have got loads to say about this next week hold your ammunition right that's it that's it next week we'll get into it you don't want to miss it it's gonna be well we'll see how profound it is but we'll see you then chad

all right see you then