"Lion's Honey: the Myth of Samson"
David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman
Canongate, £12.99
Unitarians don't, perhaps, go to the well of Jewish tradition as often as we might. If we incline to the Universalist end of our faith tradition, we are keener to explore the Buddhist, Sufi or Taoist traditions, whilst for those who cling to Christology may be pardoned for feeling that they have more than enough on their hands preserving the spiritual insight of the four gospel evangelists from the red-cheeked certainties of their namesakes of nowadays. One way or the other, the Old Testament stories get passed by – as was brought home to me when, as a lay preacher, I built a service at least in part around the story of Saul's encounter with the Witch (or Wise Woman) of Endor – and one of those present told me he'd never heard it before in his life!
That is enough reason for us to welcome this book, a wonderful meditation in words on the Samson story by the Israeli novelist David Grossman. Grossman is deeply grounded both in the Jewish way of dealing with scripture – phrase by phrase, verse by verse, giving as much weight to the words the writer of Judges 13-16 (in this case) chose not to use as to the ones that he did. If the mills of God grind smaller than a Jew taking his faith's scripture seriously, they grind small indeed.
But there is another reason. This is one of those extraordinary books, it seems to me, that actually gain in translation. Canongate have prefaced Grossman's essay with the relevant chapters in the King James Bible, complete with italics and LORD written like that… which in turn reminds at least this reader of how different in tone that translation is from the Hebrew original, which was written in what to-day we might almost call a journalistic style, owing nothing to the elevated sentences of classical Greek or Latin, and which displays a matter-of-factness about matters sexual which has caused 'stuff' for Christians for as long as there have been Christians. But not for Jews – for example, Samson, blinded, in Gaza "did grind in the prison house" (Judges 16:21) – and that verb has at least as much of a sexual connotation in Hebrew as it does in English, nor does Grossman forget to refer to the Talmudic tradition that Samson was used as a sex slave! And as for Delilah's wiles, well suffice it to notice that Grossman considers that "erotic amusements are a matter of taste".
Grossman's central argument – and very compellingly does he make it, too – is that Samson is an outsider. The circumstances of his birth eerily parallel those of Jesus – a barren mother, and an angelic visitation – which is probably why I wasn't taught them in (Anglican) Sunday School. From the start, he is marked as a Nazirite, subject to ritual taboos – not only must he abstain from wine, he can't even enter a vineyard. This, for Grossman, is far more important than his being numbered among the 'Judges' of ancient Israel – very ancient in this case, the historical events on which the story is based probably ante-date the (Homeric) siege of Troy. They are certainly far older than the creation of Temple Judaism under Solomon, let alone the exile of the Jews in Babylon. Grossman pays little attention to Samson's 'judgeship' – as does the original text – rightly, I think, since a 'judge' was effectively a tribal leader who rose to that position through leadership in time of war, and one thing Samson does not do is to lead an army. Indeed, when it comes to attacking the Philistines, he doesn't even have a sidekick. He always does it his way, and he does it alone.
Grossman is well aware that, in his words, "the Bible, of course, presents the story of Samson as a 'drama of fate' and less as a 'drama of character'. Nevertheless, the way the story's actors, Samson in particular, are drawn cannot help but lead the contemporary reader – armed with the qualities and sensibilities of our own time – to the collision and interaction of 'fate' and 'personality'. Moreover, as the story develops, it turns out that it may, in fact, be Samson's personality that prevents him from realising the destiny for which he is meant."
This is an important insight – we have no choice but to read this story, or any other, "with the qualities and sensibilities of our own time" – which means, for Grossman the Israeli, that there is an uncomfortable parallel between Samson bringing down the pillars of the Philistine temple and the Palestinian suicide bombers he lives with every day.
Samson is a loner, whose life is one of isolation punctuated by risk-taking – the riddling bet at his wedding feast, the rejection of his wife followed by repeated sexual adventures conducted through hazardous solo trips into Philistine cities – a pattern of behaviour easily recognised by mental health professionals among their dysfunctional clients over three thousand years later. Of this, Grossman says "why do human beings compulsively repeat destructive experiences, re-creating in the course of their lives the dysfunctional relationships and the self-defeating situations that arouse their worst, most toxic feelings?
"Is this not – among other reasons – because it is precisely there, at the epicentre of humiliation and alienation and misunderstanding, that a person feels the most 'himself' as he 'really is', in other words as he was at the origin of his life, at the very beginning?" Samson was a Nazirite from birth – he didn't have to 'earn his spurs' through action, whether in a ritual context or otherwise – and the namelessness of his mother may be seen as the writer of Judges poetically signalling that she was too traumatised by the angel to love her son as a mother should.
If I have a cavil at this essay, it is that Grossman does not consider the implications of the fact that the story wasn't written down for maybe six hundred years (or even more). Judges is very much a 'scissors and paste' book, written by more than one author, and particularly unreliable when it comes to numbers – for example, Grossman takes the number of foxes (300) that Samson tied together by the tail literally, whereas it is far more likely to have had a secret, ritualistic significance now lost. More generally, I suspect that the story as it was written down, during or after the Israelites' "captivity" in Babylon, is a conflation of more than one original oral legend – but that of course is very much by the by if we are considering its spiritual and emotional resonance, whether to contemporary Jews in or out of Israel, or to ourselves, our Unitarian practice and comprehension of the interaction of fate and personality we call our spiritual journey.