to the riddle which he has proposed. To pay his wager of thirty changes of raiment he goes alone across the country and takes the raiment from a Philistine city; but his pride is wounded by the deceit which has been practiced upon him, and when the Philistine coquette marries one of the guests who had come to his betrothal, he catches three hundred jackals,1 ties them together two by two by the tails, fastens a firebrand to each pair, and lets them loose in the harvest season to set fire to the Philistines' standing wheat. Then, when the Philistines, with singular injustice, visit their wrath on the bride and her father, putting her to death, Samson, with characteristic fickleness, smites them hip and thigh with a great slaughter. We next find him in the hands of more formidable foes. When the Philistines come up to avenge their wrongs on the nation which shelters Samson, and the Israelites deliver him 1 'Many interpreters, reflecting that the solitary habits of the fox would make it very difficult to catch such a number, and that Samson's great strength would be of no avail in such an undertaking, suppose that the author meant jackals, which roam in packs, and could easily, it is said, be caught by the hundred. That the Hebrew name may have included jackals as well as foxes is quite possible; the Arabs are said in some places to confound the jackal with the fox, and in the modern Egyptian dialect the classical name of the fox is given exclusively to the jackal. The decision of the question is of importance only to those who take the story as a veracious account of an actual occurrence. They should consider, however, whether the author would thank them for their attempts to make Samson's wonderful performance easy." Judges: in the International Critical Commentary, by George Foot Moore, p. 341. bound into their hands, he submits without opposition, only to break the cords which bind him, leap upon his would-be captors with a shout, and slay a thousand of them with his own hands, with no other weapon than the jaw-bone of an ass, and afterwards celebrates his exploit with a running couplet: "With the jaw-bone of an ass, I assailed my assailants; Have I slain a thousand men." 1 Twenty years later we meet him in Gaza, a Philistine city, whither, still yielding himself a slave to his unbridled self-will and self-indulgent spirit, he has gone in pursuit of a Philistine woman. The Philistines close the gates and set a watch to catch him at the dawn. At midnight he goes out, takes the gates and posts upon his back and carries them off, in scornful disdain of their boasted strength. Such a man, weak in the conceit of his own strength, never learns life's lessons. He falls in with another Philistine woman, sets his heart upon her, and, with a folly for which there is no palliation, walks open-eyed into the trap the treacherous Delilah has set for him. She undertakes to get from him the secret of his superhuman strength. Three times he mocks her with lying answers; three times discovers her treachery, and, despite it all, at last 1 Judges xv. 16. There is a play upon the Hebrew word which means both ass and heap that cannot be imitated in the English; as though he had said, "With the jaw-bone of an ass, asses on asses, have I slain a thousand men.' tells her the secret, lies down to sleep with his head upon her lap, to awake, his vow broken, his locks shaven, his strength gone, and himself an easy prey to his enemies. In servitude he learns that lesson of self-denial which he would learn nowhere else, grinds away in the prison-house of his foes, little by little gathers his strength, and in one last barbaric yet heroic effort brings down the temple of the Philistines' god, Dagon, upon himself and upon the worshipers assembled to exult over him. This story, found anywhere but in Hebrew literature, we should assume to be that half-fiction, half-history of which such stories in primitive literature are always composed; not only we should, we do assume it to be such; for the story of Samson in Hebrew literature and the story of Hercules in Greek literature remarkably parallel each other.1 To the same Semitic origin both names are traced by linguists. Both are men of extraordinary strength; of both specifically the same traditions are told; both slay a lion with their own hands; both suffer death, though in different ways, at the hands of their treacherous wives. One, a captive in Philistia, summoned to make sport for his enemies, pulls down the Temple of Dagon, and buries himself and the Philistines under its ruins; the other, a captive in Egypt, led forth to be sacrificed to Jupiter, breaks the bands which bind him, and 1 See the parallel traced in detail by Professor George F. Moore in his commentary on Judges, The International Critical Commentary, pp. 364, 365. slays the priests and scatters the assemblage. Even the custom of tying a lighted torch between two foxes in the circus, in memory of the damage once done the harvest-fields, was long kept up in Greece -a singular witness to the extent of this athlete's reputation. The modern or literary critic of the Bible, whose point of view is that given in the first article of this series, sees no reason for thinking that the same substantial stories are fiction when found in Greek literature and history when found in Hebrew literature. The value of the stories does not depend upon their historical vraisemblance; their value is in their ethical significance. The lesson of the life is plain: muscular strength mated to moral weakness never makes a hero; the man who lacks self-control can never be the deliverer or the true leader of a people. CHAPTER VIII SOME HEBREW STORIES RETOLD THAT fiction was deliberately used for didactic purposes in the parable by the Hebrew is doubted by none; there is no reason to doubt that it was half consciously used by story-tellers in folk-lore ; and if we judge of Hebrew literature by the ordinary literary standards, it is equally clear that it was sometimes artistically used by skillful storytellers for the entertainment and inspiration of their readers. Two notable illustrations of such use are afforded, one by an Idyl of the Common People, and the other by a Historical Romance. The first,1 although it describes scenes taking place prior to the organization of Israel as a kingdom, was almost certainly written after the return from the exile. In their captivity the children of Israel had learned to hate the heathen with hatred so strong that it finds expression in the phrase, "Happy is he that shall take thy little ones and dash them against the stones.” 2 With this not unnatural 1 The place of Ruth in the Biblical genealogies (Ruth iv. 22; Matt. i. 5) indicates very clearly that there is an historical background for this story, as its structure indicates very clearly that it is in its spirit and form a work of fiction. 2 Psalm cxxxvii. 9. |