Judges 16:31

31. His brethren The Danites.

House of his father His immediate relatives.

Took him For the terrible calamity of the Philistines rendered them unable or indisposed to hinder the removal of Samson’s body.

In the burying place of Manoah his father There is nothing in all this narrative so full of pathos as this record of Samson’s burial. Amid those native hills, and near the spot where the Spirit first began to move him to his famous exploits, (Judges 13:25,) and by the side of that father who had watched with pride the growth and wondrous power of his son, but, probably, never lived to see his misery and shame there they laid the great Danite hero in his dishonoured grave, and with mingled pride, reverence, and sorrow, remembered that he judged Israel twenty years.

Some writers find in Samson a type of Christ; others, the original from whom all the Egyptian, Grecian, and other fabulous myths of Hercules have sprung.

The union of great physical and mental powers are not to be looked for in one and the same individual. In Samson we find great strength united with wit and humour. No evidence of great wisdom and strong mental powers appears, but abundance to show that he was the slave of amorous lusts. He was rough and savage towards his enemies, yet coolly shrewd about it all; never showing sudden outbursts of fiery passion, but perpetrating some of his fiercest cruelties as if with a smile on his face. In these respects he is the most singular and eccentric character of the Old Testament history.

His prominence in the sacred history is to be explained, as in note on Judges 13:5, with special reference to his Nazariteship, and his divine commission as a deliverer of Israel. Stanley observes that the order of Nazarites was the nearest approach to a monastic institution that the Jewish Church affords us, and he calls attention to the fact “that the character of the Jewish chief who most nearly resembles the founder of a monastic order was the most frolicsome, irregular, uncultivated creature that the nation ever produced. Not only was celibacy no part of his Nazarite obligations, but not even ordinary purity of life. He was full of the spirits and the pranks, no less than of the strength, of a giant. But in all his wild wanderings and excesses amid the vineyards of Sorek and Timnath, he is never reported to have touched the juice of one of their abundant grapes.”

It justifies the Divine administration in his case that his blended failure and success in fulfilling his mission corresponded with the blended traits of his character. For twenty years we may assume that his wildness grew grave, and he added to the character of a hero much of the just judge and wise ruler; but he scarce fulfilled the promise of the angel who announced his birth. An act of apostate debauchery, committed by this judge of Israel in the midst of his enemies, closed the honourable part of his career. Taken by his foes, no “Spirit of Jehovah” touched, as of old, the sinews of his strength, and he was abandoned to a just retribution. During those years that should have been laurelled with honours, he was left to grind out wisdom in his dark penitentiary. In his final hour his heart returned to Jehovah, and his prayer was heard. In the united facts of his death and his finishing his mission with the destruction of the foes of Jehovah, we find proofs of the honesty of the historian and the blended goodness and severity of God.

CHAPTER 17

PART THIRD.

APPENDIX. Judges 17-21.

The remaining chapters of Judges have the form of two distinct appendices, one contained in chap. 17 and 18, the others in chap. 19-21, and though they record facts which probably occurred before the time of Samson, they may have been added by a later hand. But whether added by the same writer or another, they serve to show further the lawlessness and misrule that prevailed in those times when there was no central governing power in Israel. See Introduction.

Milman suggests that the times of the Judges were indeed rude, but in general peaceful and happy. Individualism prevailed; but the very reason why there is so little history is, because there was so little of contention, war, turbulence, or misery. The cruel deeds narrated were not specimens of all the rest, but exceptional, and narrated because exceptional.