heavier blow! But such a deed, apparently, would not have satisfied his deep impulse, his ‘artistic’ need to draw upon something private and singular in everything he does.
Let us again read the story he’s telling us here, written in letters of foxes and fire. He ties the foxes in pairs. He fixes a flaming torch between them. We can feel what happens to the foxes at this moment, the crazed running as they try to break free of the other fox, their twin, whom they think is the one that is burning them. All of a sudden each is transformed into a dual being, all afire, that cannot be saved from itself. Each fox tries to escape in a different direction but drags his double, his opposite, his nemesis, along with him.
This is apparently what bursts from the depths of Samson’s soul as his hidden ‘artistic signature’, which he heaves with all his strength at the world. His doubleness, the fire raging within him, the powerful urges that tear him to shreds, the pairs of conflicting forces warring inside him always:monasticism and lust, the super-muscled frame and artistic-spiritual heart; the murderous cruelty that erupts from him, versus the poet within; the recognition that he may only be the tool of a ‘divine providence’ that utilises him as it sees fit, alongside powerful flickerings of free will and the urge for personal expression. On top of which is his determination to keep his secret to himself, together with the blatant and desperate need to reveal himself to one other intimate soul.
Is it any wonder that he requires no fewer than three hundred foxes to express all this?
The foxes, living torches, run around in the fields, sowing fiery devastation, destroying all the gathered crops (this was, recall, ‘the season of the wheat harvest’), and they also die in the process, as a prophecy of sorts thrown out by Samson, though he cannot now interpret it: ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’
* * *
The Philistines take revenge upon the person whom they believe brought this disaster upon them, namely the woman from Timnah. They go there and burn her and her father. Fire for fire. Samson pays them back and ‘smote them leg as well as thigh, a great smiting’. Thus from one minute to the next this strange war of one man against a whole nation becomes increasingly problematic. For here is a man destined from his mother’s womb ‘to deliver Israel’, but it turns out that this ‘deliverance’ never deviates from the massive destruction of Philistines.
Here it is essential to recall what may have been forgotten in the heat of the narrative: that Samson was a Judge . A national leader who judged his people for twenty years. A strange judge, to be sure: when did he have the slightest contact with his own people? When did he deal with their issues or sit to adjudicate between them? After all, as anyone who has read the story knows, Samson’s life and works are always directed outside, toward the Philistines, with whom he falls in love and shares a banquet table, upon whomhe takes revenge and makes war (and thus he often seems to the reader to be a character more ‘Philistine’ than Jewish).
Nevertheless, his tale earned a place in the Bible, where it is told at length and in detail; and if at times the Jewish tradition has read Samson pejoratively – owing to his aggressiveness, his roguish behaviour and skirt-chasing – he is also inscribed in the Jewish consciousness as a national hero and a symbol. Perhaps this is because, despite everything, in the deep structures of his personality – his loneliness and isolation, his strong need to preserve his separateness and mystery, yet also his limitless desire to mix and assimilate with gentiles – Samson expresses and implies qualities that are ‘Jewish’ indeed.
And this too, of course: Jews throughout the ages took pride in the tales of his heroism and yearned for the physical strength, bravery, and manliness that he represented. They esteemed, no