I’m told that back in the day, and the day wasn’t so
long ago, the town of Hanover NH had a coffee shop called “The
Perfect Woman.”  The sign for the shop featured a woman’s
silhouette, without a head, implying that the perfect woman was a
body existing for male pleasure without a voice with which to express
herself.  The coffee shop had been named during a time when Dartmouth
had only male students and that reality created a hyper masculine
worldview around those parts.  The store name and sign reflected the
values that attracted customers at that time.

Sometimes the Bible has a hyper masculine worldview too,
and one of the most blatant expressions of hyper masculinity is found
in the narrative of Sampson.  Sampson’s story is complex, it has
clearly been retold over the years so that Sampson is at the same
time supposed to be one particular man, all the judges in the Hebrew
people’s history, AND the nation Israel itself.  There are layers
upon layers of meaning, and most of them express distrust of the
power of women.

In order to start to make sense of any of this, I think
I better start by explaining “what is a judge?”  You may remember
the story of the people of God being enslaved in Egypt and then led
to freedom by Moses.  After they had wandered around the desert for a
few generations and Moses died, Joshua led the people into the
Promised Land.  

Once the people got into the Promised Land they didn’t
have a king and they didn’t always have a unified leader.  Instead,
for several centuries, there was a pattern of events.  Things would
be going pretty well and then one of the neighboring countries or
tribes would want to take over Israel.  A leader would emerge
(assumed to be the leader God wanted) and lead the people in a
military victory over the aggressor.  The military leader would
continue to have the respect of the people and offer leadership to
the 12 tribes until his or her death at which point the tribes would
go back to functioning on their own.  The next time an aggressor
showed up a new leader would emerge.  Those leaders – the military
generals who gained power through winning battles and kept the power
for their lifetimes without creating dynasties – those were called
the judges.

So now you know.

Sampson is the last judge, and that has resulted in his
story also being used to reflect on the era of the judges as well.
It may be worth remembering the stories of the Hebrew Bible were
written down after centuries of oral tradition around the time of the
Babylonian exile.  Thus they were written down more than 400 years
after King David and even longer after the judges.  They were written
down in a time when the people were trying to answer the question
“why did God allow us to be defeated by the Babylonians?” and the
particular ways that the stories got told were formed by trying to
answer that question.  In that way, he’s the nation Israel too.

Sampson is presented as supernaturally strong, I mean
Superman strong.  I don’t say this to make any sense of it, just to
help you understand the story.

Sampson is a Nazirite.  That meant that he was a holy
man set apart from others by his devotion to God.  Generally
Nazirites avoided alcohol and anything unclean (like dead bodies) and
didn’t cut their hair.  In the beginning of Sampson’s story his
barren mother is told to avoid alcohol even during her pregnancy to
set him up for the work God had for him.  I say that GENERALLY
Nazirites did this stuff because Sampson broke every rule other than
the hair one well before this story.  However, the ANGEL who came
down to speak to his BARREN mother about her upcoming conception is
meant to get our attention about the greatness of the man who would
be born as well as to remind us of the matriarchs in Genesis –
creating the symbol of Sampson as the nation itself who was born
because those barren women gave birth.  The angel who spoke to his
mother told her that “he would begin the deliverance of Israel from
the hands of the Philistines.” (13:5b)

So, Sampson’s mother is the madonna of any madonna-whore
complex, she is faithful, pure, and subservient.  Sampson is really
attracted to non-Israelite women.  Women are his downfall.  First he
laid eyes on a Philistine woman and decided that he had to marry her.
His faithful parents objected, indicating that if he was going to
lead the Hebrew people it would best if he married a Hebrew wife.  He
refused to listen, and he married the Philistine woman.

Why do we care, you ask?  Well, we may not.  But his
parents did because the Philistines were at the time the aggressors
who were trying to take parts of the Israelite land and engaging them
in battle and having the leader of the Israelites marry one of them
just didn’t seem like it would help.

It didn’t.  The story is too weird to summarize well but
the Philistine wife ended up manipulating Sampson by indicating that
if he didn’t do what she wanted he didn’t love her.  Then she
betrayed him, so he left her.  Then, in order to appease his rage the
Philistine’s killed her and her father.  

At some point later Sampson saw a woman he liked so he
slept with her, she was a Philistine prostitute, and the Philistines
tried to kill him while he slept afterward, but he got away because
of his supernatural strength.  

Then comes this story.  This story fits well into what
we already know about Sampson: he is strong, he is rash, he is
fickle, he is susceptible to the charms of women, and his enemies are
looking for a way to take him down.  This fits all three versions of
the Sampson story, as does the perception of Delilah as an evil
seductress.  The story of Sampson as a man is the story of a man
whose Achilles heel was his attraction to inappropriate women.  The
story of Sampson as the judges is the story of leaders whose moral
character was lax, who could be distracted as easily as by a
beautiful woman.  The story of Sampson as Israel itself during the
Exile is the story of a nation of men who choose foreign women and
were ruined by the way those women led them to unfaithfulness to God.

Delilah is the symbol of temptation and seduction as
well as greed.  Her name means, “flirtatious”¹
while the name of her town means “choice vine.”²
 It is intentional symbolism.  She represents all of humanities fear
of the power of sexual attraction and the way it make us lose our
head.  More specifically she represents the mystery of womanhood and
the fear that some men have about women and their different ways of
being.  Delilah could easily step in as the negative female character
in just about any simplistic movie or book.  She’s the one the hero
is attracted to, she’s the one who brings him down, she’s the
original femme fatale.  

That is, unless you look at the story from her
perspective. Sampson had taken a walk one day, seen a
woman, and married her.  That woman had no say in it.  His wife had
attempted to do right by her people, and had gotten killed for it –
along with her father.  Delilah, similarly, did not have any say in
entering a relationship with Sampson.  The text says “he fell in
love with” her.  It does not say, nor imply that the love was
reciprocated.  It does not suggest that they got married.  It
certainly seems that they were intimate, but he was so important that
he got what he wanted and normal limits didn’t apply.

Delilah would have known all this.  She knew that it was
dangerous to have Sampson in love with her, that it could end as soon
as it began, and that no one was going to help her if that happened.
We have no way of knowing if he was kind to her, but we also have no
reason to assume he was.  He isn’t presented as a man with a lot of
empathetic or listening skills.  Most of what is said about him
suggests he may have been abusive.

We also don’t know Delilah’s ethnicity.  She is said to
come from a town that is on the border, just inside Israel.  If she
was from there she may be an Israelite nor she may be a Canaanite.
But since the Philistines come to her, and since every other woman
Sampson is said to have been attracted to is Philistine, I think it
is likely that she was a Philistine.  Now, we can’t KNOW this, but
2/3 three choices mean that Sampson was not the leader of her people,
and I’m willing to take that seriously.  While the way the text is
usually read blames Delilah for selling out her man/leader for money,
it may well be that she was trying to save her people as well as her
own skin.  If she was a Philistine then what she did was patriotic!
She saved her people.  If she was a Canaanite, there was no reason
why she should have been loyal to the Israelite leader who had taken
over their land.  And if she was an Israelite (which I think makes
the least sense in the story) she at least had incentive to try to
end his life before hers got abruptly ended for her like his first
wife.

Delilah decided to seek the information she needed.  We
don’t know if the money induced her or simply gave her courage, but
she tried.  She tried a bunch of times and he seems to be playing
with her.  He certainly seems to know what she’s up to, which is why
it makes no sense that he answers her.
However, she plays the one card she has.  This is the key to this
story.  It is verse 15, “Then
she said to him, ‘How can you say, “I love you”, when your
heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not
told me what makes your strength so great.’ “  She throws
his claim of love back in his face, claiming that if he won’t tell
her his secret than he doesn’t really love her.  This was EXACTLY the
way his first wife got a secret out of him.  Apparently he found this
argument particularly convincing.

He
told her.  She did it.  It worked.  He was captured, humiliated, and
enslaved.  SHE lived.  If her people were the Philistines or the
Canaanites, then her people were better off as well.   She used her
power, which in this case was something she didn’t even want to begin
with.  The power she had was that this man said he loved her (or
maybe did love her) and she manipulated that to survive.

The
thing is that we often don’t have the upper hand in life.  Sometimes
it is like this: being a woman walking down the street in the village
and then suddenly, by force, being the mistress of the strong-man
leader everyone fears.  Sometimes we have that little power.  But we
always have SOME power.  Delilah had a little tiny bit of power and
used it.  We have choices we can make and we have the capacity to use
our words, our actions, our relationships, our trust, and our energy
to whatever end we find worthwhile. Sometimes, like Delilah, that’s
in survival.  When we’re lucky, and we’re surviving already, we can
use it to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms
the present themselves (#baptismalvows) Sometimes we get to resists
evil, injustice or oppression –  big or small.

The
power we have, as small and insignificant as it may seem, can take
down the strongest human or the most feared enemy.  Like Delilah
though, it takes persistence.  A little power goes a lot further when
it is used persistently, and even FURTHER when it is used with
other’s little bits of power – persistently.   Come to think of it,
especially this far into the Subversive Women sermon Series, maybe
there is something to being afraid of women.  However, it isn’t our
mystery nor our seduction.  It is that we, too, are humans who want
to survive and take care of those we love.  And if you get in our
way, we will persistently defy you and subvert you.  Thanks be to God
for people of all genders using their power for good.  Amen

Sermon
Talk Back

1. To
   get into the mindset of the story, who are other “femme fatale”
   characters, and can any of their stories be inverted by taking their
   perspective seriously?
2. What
   does conventional masculinity find frightening about femininity?
3. How
   could Sampson be so easily manipulated?
4. What
   stories can you think of when people with VERY little power used it
   to overthrow oppression?
5. Where
   is God in this story?
6. Does
   the enmity between ancient Israel and the Philistines serve to teach
   us anything today?
7. How
   can we have that much courage and persistence without having our own
   backs against the wall, fighting for our lives?  
1. And
   how can we do that while also living whole and balanced lives while
   we’re at it?
8. Where
   else might we have taken this story?

1Dennis
T. Olsen “The Book of Judges” in the New Interpreter’s Study
Bible Vol II (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1998) p. 858

2Herbert
Wolf, “Judges” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary Vol 3
(Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), p. 475