Some time later, Samson went to Gaza and saw a prostitute he wanted to spend the night with. The Philistines still hated him though so when they found out about it they shut the gates of the city to trap him so they could kill him. Samson just tore the gates off the wall and carried them off when he felt like leaving. This kind of scenario was not uncommon with Samson.
Eventually he fell in love with a Philistine woman, a different Philistine woman than the one from before though. Her name was Delilah and shortly after they started sleeping together, some Philistine leaders promised to pay Delilah if she could learn Samson’s weakness.
Three times she asked him the secret of his strength and each time he lied to her, and when she tried to weaken him and called the Philistines, he broke free and killed them all. I mean all of them except her. Finally the forth time, when Samson had had a lot to drink one night (again, breaking his vow to never drink) he showed incredibly poor pattern recognition skills and told her the truth, that he was a Nazarite and that he could never cut his hair.
So, of course, Delilah cut his hair. The Philistines came to capture him, he fought back, but his strength was gone and he was taken.
The Philistines put out Samson’s eyes and threw him in jail. Later, they brought him out at a party to dance for their entertainment. Samson prayed to God and was given back his strength just long enough to push over a pillar and topple the building they were in, killing himself and all of the Philistines.
It seems to me in this reading though that Samson still didn’t learn anything about humility to God or glorifying God. His final prayer isn’t apologetic for any of his own sins or even about showing God’s power to the Philistines or helping the oppressed Israelites. Samson asks for the strength to take revenge on the Philistines for putting out his eyes. But it still works.
Man, God must have really hated Philistines.
Okay, next judge:
Micah and his mother made an ephod and a bunch of household gods. Just to round out their collection of blessings, Micah also hired an errant Levite to be their household priest. I guess an ephod is an okay thing to have now. I know idols are forbidden, and you can only worship God properly with the help of some priests at a stone altar at the temple, but maybe an ephod doesn’t count as an idol. I understand the desire for a physical object to focus your worship, but these ephods seem like bad policy, especially when it’s surrounded by other little idols.
I guess I’m not in any position to judge the practice of displaying ephods though when I go to a church with an 18 foot tall cross hanging over the stage.
So Micah’s got all his god ornaments in order and everything’s going great when some scouts from the tribe of Dan come through looking at land. The Danites still haven’t received their inheritance so they’re looking around for land to conquer. These scouts stay with Micah and they get a blessing from his priest before heading out again. With this blessing, they find some nice land just past the lands of the tribe of Ephraim.
The scouts return home and report what they saw and the Danites move out to conquer this good land. On the way, they stop by Micah’s house, take his ephod and his household gods and convince his personal priest to come with them. Micah and his neighbors go out and yell at the Danites about taking all of his stuff, but they tell him to go back home before they get angry and kill him.
The Danites conquered the land and made a city there named Dan (named after their ancestor, Dan). They used Micah’s idols the whole time they were there.
So, is this story about Micah being punished for having such a materialistic faith? Is it about the dangers of investing too much in physical idols when they might be lost? Is it just a sad story about a nice guy who got all his silver stolen by the Danites or a happy story about God providing blessings and silver for the righteous tribe of Dan? I have no idea. This one’s a little too foreign for me to make sense of I guess.
That’s okay though, it doesn’t all have to resonate perfectly. There’s so much different stuff in here that I’m pretty comfortable chalking one up to our cultural differences every once in a while.
That seems to be happening a lot in this book though.
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