Samson: an interpretive reading, or "Delilah, my desiyah."

I was reading about Samson.

His legendary strength.

He had a kind of appetite for women, one could I infer, with two distinct instances of his sexual appetite being a weakness before his enemies.

First, he was with a harlot.  He had heard about her, and traveled to see her, to be with her for some hours or an evening or what-not, and that was used to unravel him as an attempt was made on his life, them thinking(his enemies) that in his physical passion, he would be an easy kill.

Second.  Delilah.  My desiyah, Delilah.

Three times she set him up for destruction.

He was seemingly unafraid or either convinced of her sincerity; perhaps even, in the height of love, he wasn't thinking clearly.  He mislead her, though, several times, and she says he brought a rebuke on her by telling her that.

Three times she set him up.

Was it apathy or appetite?

Consider too, he may have been physically passed-out drunk after his love-making(a horrid thing to say, I know, but consider on...), for he was deeply sleeping enough not to notice someone cutting his hair.

Come seven of the clock, the evening watch, New York time, when he's laying down--the dirty Philistines.

What is the lesson?  Is it more of the evil that men do?  Is it a rebuke against physical love?

Why, all that and more, my chads and chets.

Consider that Samson had enemies to start with.  To have enemies, one needs to be somehow in opposition to someone, in some form or fashion.  And consider his ill judge of character and sexual appetites, implied.

He was not perfect, but he was our imperfect chudburger.  This is a Christ motif, not that Samson was Christ, but that he was as the Gentiles later forgiven by Christ--his sins, its not a morality play, but reminds us that we can find God's favor after the pillage, we need not embarrass the Gospel here--God was with Samson, but as Ecclesiastes says, "men had their schemes".

The next chapter adds context as the book of Judges builds, and it becomes clear that city-states are not behaving well towards one another, with pockets of Levitical priests here and there, and people trying to take over other towns, and marauding invaders, towns unable to defend themselves alone, without help.

Samson was a "Nazirite" the thing says, and this is emblematic of Christ, if only by geography, a foreshadow of the Scribes and Pharisees coming after the Messiah.  And consider it was the same sort of sinless chosen people supposedly that came after Samson.

I have to a mystic reading as well, a Neville Goddard reading in which personal psychology comes into play.  Its such that Samson was ceding his own power to those other people, that in his wants, he essentially gave the woman not only his strength, but any invulnerability he might had: his strength and his toughness.

Here we can lens addiction in this story, that his compulsions caused him to draw near, closer and closer to destruction, regardless of who else was right and wrong in the story; it was that he willingly, under compulsion, went for what was most destructive for him, like William Faulkner's mention of characters who's "heart works against its own interests".

Such as is the way, in the modern American parlance, that we have to come to some kind of reasonable, rational terms with all the things we love, from the addictive to the hobbies and leisure.  All that.  Some even say love for one's own spouse and children must be moderated, that if one holds a relative too dear, God becomes jealous.  Its what I've been told by some people, that the God said to be jealous, wants to be number one in your heart and mind, and he will dismiss with dispatch anything else that you may hold dear.

Those were the dismal words of people that had lost prior a spouse or child, and struggled to make sense of it, to put that loss in reasonable, rational terms, in a world in which they knew that the devil was trying to worm in any way possible, and with story of the Old Testament Yahweh simply striking people dead.

My rebuttal is that we don't know the plan; we each only have our own little sliver of God's plan.  And oft times we don't know from one minute to the next and we never ever will know the entirety of our role in the God's plan.

God is wondrous, and his plan is sort of the modern mystery, in the sense that Paul used the word mystery.  The working of the Gospel, as Paul and the Apostles revealed the Gospel around the Near East was the mystery of their time that they were at odds to explain and expound.

I think of Paul at Mars Hill, when so many of the philosophers told him that they wanted to hear more about the Gospel.