Judges16chapter 16

Judges 16:1-3

Gaza is the far southern city of the Philistine coast, and Joshua 11:22 had named it as one of three towns where the Anakim were left standing after the conquest. The chapter opens the way chapter 14 opened, with what Samson saw, and those two sightings frame everything up to verse 21. He carries the gate, both posts and the bar uphill toward Hebron, which stands roughly forty miles inland and some three thousand feet above the sea, and the text records the load and the distance without giving the errand.

Judges 16:4-5

in the valley of Sorek: Delilah is the only woman in the Samson account given a name, since his mother, the woman of Timnath and the woman of verse 1 all go unnamed. This is the first time the text says Samson loved anyone, and it says nothing of her loving him. The word the lords give her, entice, is the word used against the woman of Timnath at 14:15, where the lever was fire rather than money. Eleven hundred pieces of silver apiece is the fee, and the same sum turns up once more in Scripture, at Judges 17:2-3, as the money Micah took from his mother.

Judges 16:6-9

Four attempts run to one shape: she asks, he answers, men wait in the chamber, and she cries that the Philistines are upon him. Seven runs through the chapter and lands on his head at the end, seven withs here and seven locks at verses 13 and 19. His answers move inward by stages, from green withs to new ropes to the hair woven into a loom and at last to the hair itself, so the fourth answer is reached by three steps he took himself.

Judges 16:10-12

New ropes that never were occupied is exactly what the men of Judah used at 15:13, where they bound him with two new cords, and 15:14 says the cords became as flax that was burnt with fire. He is handing Delilah the record of his own deliverances as a game. The liers in wait are in the chamber for this attempt as for the first, so the third answer is given with armed men in the room and the second trap already sprung.

Judges 16:13-14

The seven locks are named here, and the hair enters the bargaining while the vow behind it stays hidden. The Hebrew of verse 13 stops at the web and gives no instruction about the pin, so the King James reader meets an act at verse 14 that verse 13 never proposed. The Septuagint carries a longer reading that supplies the missing clause, and it is the largest textual difference in the chapter. Adam Clarke sets the longer reading out in full, and Keil and Delitzsch treat the shorter Hebrew as usable as it stands.

Judges 16:15-17

Her complaint answers the one made at 14:16, thou dost but hate me, and lovest me not, and the pressure is the same, since 14:17 says the woman of Timnath wept before him the seven days of the feast. What the text gives as the reason he spoke is that his soul was vexed unto death, and it names no other. Verse 17 is the one place Samson says Nazarite of himself, since at 13:5 the word came from the angel to his mother, and he recites the terms of the vow correctly in the act of giving them away.

Judges 16:18-19

The lords come up themselves this time and bring the money with them, which the three earlier attempts never mention. She calls for a man to do the shaving while Samson sleeps on her knees, so the act that ends the vow is done by a hired hand and he is asleep for it. The word afflict has run through the whole bargain, from the lords at verse 5 to her request at verse 6, and verse 19 says she began to afflict him, which is the errand finished.

Judges 16:20

He rises and shakes himself as at other times, and the sentence the chapters have been moving toward is that he did not know. The Spirit of the LORD comes or moves on a man seven times in Judges, at 3:10, 6:34, 11:29, 13:25, 14:6, 14:19 and 15:14, and four of the seven are Samson, so the departure falls on the most gifted man in the book. Keil and Delitzsch read the hair as the badge of the vow rather than the seat of the power, and other readers have put the strength in the hair itself; the verse states a departure and leaves the mechanism alone. Hebrews 11:32 names Samson among the faithful and leaves this verse standing where it is.

Judges 16:21-22

His eyes go first, and they are the organ the account has tracked from the start: 14:1 says he saw a woman, 14:3 has him answer that she pleaseth me well where the Hebrew reads that she was right in his eyes, and 16:1 says he saw an harlot in Gaza. That pairing of right and eyes is the book's own closing sentence at 17:6 and 21:25. Grinding at the mill was the work of slaves and of women, as Exodus 11:5 and Isaiah 47:2 show, and he is set to it in the town whose gate he once carried away. Verse 22 turns on the word howbeit and reports the hair growing without saying what will come of it.

Judges 16:23-24

to offer a great sacrifice: Dagon is named in three places in Scripture, here, in 1 Samuel 5 where the image falls twice before the ark and breaks at the threshold, and at 1 Chronicles 10:10 where Saul's head is fastened in his temple. The Philistines say our god hath delivered, which is the sentence Judges keeps using of the LORD giving enemies into Israel's hand at 3:10, 7:9 and 11:32. Albert Barnes derives the name from dag, a fish, and reads the broken image of 1 Samuel 5:4 alongside the fish figures found at Khorsabad; others derive it from dagan, corn, and make him a god of grain. Verse 24 gives the crowd's own account of the prisoner, the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.

Judges 16:25-27

A lad leads him by the hand, which is how a blind man moved, and the request to feel the pillars sounds like a tired man asking for something to lean on. Verse 27 counts the house full below and about three thousand on the roof, so the building had a roof used as a gallery and a span carried from the middle. A Philistine temple dug at Tell Qasile has two central pillar bases set close enough for one man to reach both, which matches the arrangement the verse describes; the report is Amihai Mazar, Excavations at Tell Qasile. The text says nothing about what the lad understood.

Judges 16:28-30

This is the second recorded prayer of Samson, and the first was at 15:18, when he asked for water after the slaughter at Lehi. He stacks three names of God into one sentence and asks to be avenged for his two eyes, which is the reason he gives and the only one the verse records. Verse 30 counts the dead and says those he slew at his death were more than those he slew in his life, and the book passes no judgment on the act. Augustine took the question up in The City of God, book one, chapter twenty-one, and Hebrews 11:32 lists Samson with Gideon, Barak and Jephthah without settling it.

Judges 16:31

between Zorah and Eshtaol: Zorah and Eshtaol is where 13:2 placed Manoah and where 13:25 says the Spirit of the LORD began to move him, so he is buried between the two towns he began between. The brethren and all the house of his father come down for the body, and this is the first the narrative says of any family beyond his parents. His term is given twice, at 15:20 and here, and both times it is twenty years, which makes him the one judge whose years are counted before his death and again after it. The land had rest formula that closed 3:11, 3:30 and 5:31 never comes back, and it does not come back for him.