An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 47: Samson: Big, Dumb, and Horny. Plus dismembered prostitutes (Judges 16-21)

Judges 16-21

Samson: Big, Dumb, and Horny. Plus dismembered prostitutes.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Judges 16

“And Delilah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee.”

Samson has some real trouble with women. Not only with the problems with his Philistine wife in the last few chapters, but here he nearly gets into trouble when he visits a prostitute in Gaza, and also famously Delilah.

In Gaza, the Gazans try to shut his in but he simply pulls the city gate of its hinges and walks out (and there’s a nice Doré engraving of this). But then he falls for Delilah, and the Philistines ask her to winkle out the secret of his strength. This is very similar to his un-named Philistine wife getting the answer to the riddle in Chapter 14; you’d think he’d learn. Three times he tells her something spurious, three times the Philistines capture him and try the spurious method and three times he escapes. He really is pretty stupid if by now he hasn’t figured out that Delilah is leaking the information to the Philistines.

Finally he gets fed up with her nagging (“And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death”) and tells her the truth – that his strength is because he is a Nazarite and he has never cut his hair. Delilah shaves his head while he sleeps, and the Philistines capture him, blind him, and imprison him. Whilst in prison his hair starts to grow back, and when the Philistines bring him up to torment him for sport, he takes hold of a handy pillar and pulls down the temple of Dagon, killing everyone in it, including himself.

I know this is a pretty famous bible story, but if analysed to much it’s actually pretty stupid, Samson coming over as a big dumb randy lump.

Judges 17

“And Micah said unto him, Whence comest thou? And he said unto him, I am a Levite of Bethlehemjudah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place.”

This is a very short, very odd and very badly written chapter. A man named Micah seems to have stolen some money from his mother, but then returns it to her. She says she was going to use it build some kind of graven image, which Micah does – it appears that he’s setting up some kind of temple, but one counter to the laws of Moses. Then a wandering Levite happens by and Micah employs him as a resident priest, hoping thereby to gain the blessings of God.

That’s it for this chapter, but as with some of the Samson chapter it really plays fast and loose with pronoun attributions, as well as suddenly throwing us in media res with the issue with the money.

Judges 18

“And these went into Micah's house, and fetched the carved image, the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image. Then said the priest unto them, What do ye?”

The people of Dan have no, or not enough, space to live (the meaning is hard to glean), and they send spies out into other lands. Five men discover two things – that the city of Laish is unguarded and peaceful, and the private temple of Micah. They convince the Levite to come with them, as it would be better to be a priest of an entire tribe than a single man, and they steal the silverware fro Micah’s temple and drive Micah away by weight of numbers. Then they conquer the city of Laish and set up their new temple and their new city of Dan. I like that everyone here is morally grey, and no-one, not Micah, the Danites nor the Levite (who might be called Jonathon, it’s not entirely clear) comes off particularly well, and in setting up a rival temple (whether to Yahweh or some other god is again unclear) this can only lead to trouble.

Judges 19

“And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the side of mount Ephraim, who took to him a concubine out of Bethlehemjudah.”

This chapter ends with the words “consider it, take advice and speak your minds.” And so I shall speak my mind. This chapter is terrible. It’s written like a child’s story “and then I got up and then I had breakfast which was Frosties and then I brushed my teeth and I wented to school” and so on. Secondly, it blatantly rips off one of the nastiest bits of the story of Lot, and lastly, nobody has any names making it very confusing.

So, a Levite takes a concubine who runs off to her father’s house. The Levite goes to the house of his father-in-law who welcomes him and, for some reason, keeps him there for several days by repeating the old trick of “well it’s getting late, you may as well stay overnight.” This looks like the father-in-law is going to play a trick on the Levite, but nothing come of this, and eventually the Levite, his concubine, and a servant who has popped out of nowhere, leave and travel to Jerusalem (a.k.a. Jebus) but, and this is an interesting point, don’t stay there because it is not under the control of Israelites. At this point, the most holy city of Jerusalem is just another city amongst many.

Eventually they reach the city of Gibeah, where they have to stay in the streets until an old man gives them shelter. Then some worshippers of Belial decide to hammer on the door and want to rape the Levite, but charmingly the old man throws out the concubine, who is gang-raped to death (!) and left on the doorstep. The Levite discovers this in the morning, but doesn’t seem too upset, more bothered that she won’t get up to leave. But later on he cuts up her corpse and sends one twelfth to each of the tribes of Israel  to … prove … some … point or other. Um.

Compare this to the Song of Deborah in the same book, which is just as bloodthirsty but much more poetically written, if you really don’t think this is a compilation of collected works. This one was like somebody read the earlier parts of the bible and tried, and failed, to recollect them, ending up with some combination of bits of other stories. And these last few chapters have been horribly misogynistic.

Judges 20

“And the men of Israel turned again upon the children of Benjamin, and smote them with the edge of the sword, as well the men of every city, as the beast, and all that came to hand: also they set on fire all the cities that they came to.”

The tribes of Israel gather after the nameless Levite has sent out one twelfth of his unfortunate concubine, demanding to know what this means. The Levite tells them the story of how the Gibeonites gang-raped the poor woman to death (leaving out the bit where he was the one the shoved her out the door…). The tribes of Israel demand justice from the Benjaminites (who own Gibeon), but the Benjaminites refuse and the whole mess descends into civil war.

The Benjaminites prevail for a while until the other Israelites use a tactic that Joshua employed before, whereby their troops run away to draw out the Benjaminite forces whilst a small commando squad enter the city and set it on fire. After this blow to morale, the Benjaminites are defeated, and the other tribes continue to crush the rest of the tribe of Benjamin elsewhere.

I’m going to take a moment to revisit Jacob’s dying prophecy on the fate of the tribes. Here we are, Genesis 49, V27 “Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.” Meh. Could mean anything. I told you prophecies are stupid.

Judges 21

“Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife.

I forgot to mention something that has been repeated for the past few chapters, that is mentioned in the last verse of this chapter and book – “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” The fact that the past few chapters have descended into civil war, lawlessness, private shrines and rape are actually part of the arc of the book, with the Israelites gradually falling away from grace due to a lack of leadership, and until now this hadn’t occurred to me. I guess the idea is setting things up for the arrival of the kings, perhaps in order to support the concept of royalty as a better alternative to the anarchy of the judges.

So this chapter reminds me of the Rape of the Sabine Women, where the early Roman settlers forcibly carry off wives from the nearby city of Sabia. The rest of the Israelites swear not to give wives from amongst their tribes to the Benjaminites, but they also feel regret that a fellow Israelite tribe should face extinction, so they first attack the city of Jabesh-Gilead, who were the only tribe not to come to the general meeting, kill everyone except for the virgin women whom they carry off and give to the Benjaminites. But despite there being four hundred of them this is not enough, so the Israelites do the same thing to Shiloh as well.

All pretty grim stuff, and sadly this kind of thing still happens today (I’m thinking of, for example, two hundred schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram), I can’t help but feel that sometimes some morons take a chapter like this as justification; maybe they should be clearly marked “This Is An Example Of A Bad Thing:”. Eh, very depressing.