Judges14chapter 14

Judges 14:1-2

Timnath stands in Judah's town list at Joshua 15:57 and is handed to Dan at Joshua 19:43, so the woman Samson wants lives inside his own tribe's paper border and under Philistine rule. He goes down to it and comes back up, which fixes the hill country round Zorah above the coastal plain where the town sits. His first recorded words in Scripture are get her for me to wife, and the ground he gives for the request is what his eye had done.

Judges 14:3-4

The parents object on the ground of the uncircumcised Philistines, which is the same term of reproach Jonathan uses at 1 Samuel 14:6 and David at 1 Samuel 17:26. Samson's answer reads in the Hebrew she is right in mine eyes, and right in his own eyes is the sentence this book closes with at 17:6 and 21:25. Verse 4 says the parents knew not that it was of the Lord, and readers divide over what that covers: Matthew Henry takes the marriage rule as dispensed with where the aim was to strike the oppressor, while Albert Barnes reads God as turning misconduct he foresaw into an occasion rather than approving the match. The dominion named here is the forty years of 13:1, and 13:5 had said Samson would begin to deliver rather than finish.

Judges 14:5-6

The lion meets him among the vineyards, and Numbers 6:3-4 bars a Nazarite from the vine tree and from everything made of it, which is why commentators weigh the location while the text records nothing about what he ate or drank there. This is the second of four times the Spirit of the Lord comes on Samson, after 13:25 and before 14:19 and 15:14, and those four are the greater part of the seven such comings in the book. The wording came mightily is stronger than what is said of Othniel at 3:10 and of Gideon at 6:34, and what follows it here is a killing. He had nothing in his hand, and he told neither parent.

Judges 14:7-9

Numbers 6:6 keeps a Nazarite from coming at any dead body, and 6:7 holds the ban even for his father and his mother. Samson turns aside to the carcase, takes the honey out of it in his hands, eats as he walks, and gives the rest to his parents without telling them where it came from. That silence is the second in four verses, since verse 6 also ends on what he kept from them, and the two silences together are what make the riddle possible. Adam Clarke reads the interval of verse 8 as about a year, the usual space between betrothal and wedding, by which time the flesh would be gone and the dry bones left for the bees.

Judges 14:10-11

The word rendered feast here is mishteh, built on the verb to drink, and it is the ordinary word for the banquet at Genesis 21:8 and Esther 1:3. Numbers 6:3 bars a Nazarite from wine and from strong drink, and this verse puts him at the drinking feast the young men kept, while saying nothing about what he took. The thirty companions are read two ways: Albert Barnes takes their number as a mark of the standing of Samson's family, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take them for a watch set on a stranger by the bride's people.

Judges 14:12-14

The word for riddle is chidah, the same word used of the hard questions the queen of Sheba brings to Solomon at 1 Kings 10:1 and of the dark saying Ezekiel is told to speak at Ezekiel 17:2. The stake is thirty linen garments and thirty changes of raiment against the same, so a wedding game carries the price of a small fortune on each side. Adam Clarke observes that the riddle offers no rule of interpretation to anyone who was not there, since the road to the answer runs through a lion nobody saw and honey nobody was told about. Three of the seven days are spent by the end of verse 14.

Judges 14:15-17

The threat is the death the Philistines carry out at 15:6, where they come up and burn her and her father with fire, so the fire she betrays her husband to escape reaches her one chapter later. She weeps the seven days and he tells her on the last of them because she lay sore upon him, and the same pressure runs again at 16:16, where Delilah pressed him daily until his soul was vexed unto death. His answer at verse 16 sets his parents and his wife on one footing, since he had told neither.

Judges 14:18

What is sweeter than honey: They answer in the same two-line shape the riddle was put in, and their answer names the honey and the lion while leaving the carcase out, which is as far as the wife's information could carry them. The hour is given because it matters: before the sun went down is the last of the seven days, and the wager stood until then. The proverb Samson throws back is read two ways, with Adam Clarke taking plowed with my heifer for a charge of infidelity and tracing the same turn of phrase in Greek and Latin writers, while Keil and Delitzsch read it as the narrower charge that they worked his wife to get at him.

Judges 14:19-20

he went down to Ashkelon: Ashkelon is one of the five Philistine cities named at Joshua 13:3, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown put it about twenty-four miles from Timnath, so the thirty men whose clothes pay the wager are not the thirty who won it. This is the third of the four comings of the Spirit on Samson, and as at verse 6 what follows is a killing rather than deliverance in the ordinary sense. He goes up to his father's house, and while he is away the bride is given to the friend of the bridegroom, the man who had stood beside him through the feast. That is the debt chapter 15 opens on.