Free Lion's Honey by David Grossman

the way to Ashkelon, a distance of some forty kilometres, instead of, say, to the Philistine city of Ekron, a mere five kilometres from Timnah. Why did he prefer to travel dozens of kilometres in Philistine territory? And maybe the answer is contained within the question, and Samson felt a need to penetrate as deep as he could into Philistine existence, to rub up more and more against the foreigners, the mockers, the haters?
    He cuts down thirty innocent people, who had the bad luck to run into him in the streets of their city. He steals their clothes and brings them to the thirty companions. Just as they had cut him to the quick, he does the same to thirty strangers. He slays them and ‘skins’ them, in effect – a thoroughly vileact that attests, in its way, to Samson’s tendency to confuse, in a frightening manner, exterior and essence, the secret and the strange.
    Following the collapse of his marriage, and the blow dealt him by the world, Samson returns, like a child, to the house of his mother and father. And let us remember: he has married, he has left his parents’ home – and he returns yet again, to lick his wounds, to be consoled a bit at the parental hearth. But before long, at the time of the wheat harvest, he goes back to Timnah. Again the umbilical cord is stretched, again he attempts to separate from his parents and return to his Philistine wife.
    Clasped to his breast he carries a baby goat, a peace offering, and attempts to visit the woman, but this turns out to be impossible: her father has already given her to another man: a ‘companion’, apparently one of the mere’im from the wedding feast, the very men who had forced his wife to reveal his secret. Her father offers Samson, as was the custom in those days, her younger sister, who is, in his words, ‘more beautiful than she’, but Samson is already smouldering withanger: ‘Now the Philistines can have no claim against me for the harm I shall do them,’ he says, and goes off to exact his revenge.
    * * *
    ‘Samson went and caught three hundred foxes. He took torches and, turning the foxes tail to tail, he placed a torch between each pair of tails. He lit the torches and turned the foxes loose among the standing grain of the Philistines, setting fire to stacked grain, standing grain, vineyards, and olive trees.’
    This act of Samson’s is also terribly barbaric and cruel. But what grand, well-crafted, indeed aesthetic revenge it is!
    Just think what kind of effort a man must invest in order to catch three hundred foxes, tie them in pairs to one another, tie torches between them and then light them, and then send them out into the fields.
    But no less impressive than the physical undertaking are the planning, the idea, the inventiveness.The Bible, of course, abounds in grossly violent and brutal acts. (It would be interesting to compile a full catalogue of the types of mayhem and revenge that were commonplace in those days among Israel and its enemies, from the dismemberment of corpses and the slaughter of hundreds with a cattle prod, to the massive harvest of foreskins.) In contrast to all these, Samson takes a most original revenge that includes a manifestly artistic dimension. (In the language of modern art we would say that Samson’s exploit of the burning foxes constitutes a performance .) This is a demonstration not only of the man’s physical strength, but also of his style, which will continue to be stamped upon all his deeds, large and small, upon his every gesture and contact with the world.
    But if indeed there is, in Samson, something of the artist, this is significant not only for the content of his expression but also its form: a feat like this is hardly the product of mere whim. Much thought has been invested, with a precise intention in mind: Samson, after all, could have tied a torch to the tail of each individual fox, and dispatched it to set fireto the stacked and standing grain, and thus dealt the Philistines a far