into his childish, almost infantile self, disarmed of the violence, madness, and passion that have confounded and ruined his life. This is, of course, also the moment when his fate is sealed, for Delilah is clutching his hair and the razor, and the Philistines outside are already relishing their victory. In another moment his eyes will be plucked out and his power extinguished. Soon he will be thrown into prison and his days will be ended. Yet it is now, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he finds repose. Here, in the very heart of the cruel perfidy that he has surely expected all along, he is finally granted perfect peace, a release from himself and the stormy drama of his life.
* * *
In those days, apparently the end of the twelfth and beginning of the eleventh centuries BCE, there was not yet a king in Israel, nor any central authority. The neighbouring nations of Midian, Canaan, Moab, Amon, and Philistia took advantage of the weak Hebrew tribes and launched campaigns of conquest and pillage against them. Every so often there would arise, in one tribe or another, a person who would know how to lead his tribe, sometimes several joined together, into retaliatory battle. If he won, he would become the leader and judge, and be called shofet. Such were Gideon and Jephthah, Ehud the son of Gerah, Shamgar the son of Anat, and Deborah, the wife of Lapidot. Thus the Israelites swung cyclically between periods of oppression and redemption that corresponded, as recounted in the Book of Judges, to their sins and their atonement. First they would worship idols, then God would muster the murderous neighbours as punishment. They would cry out to Him in their affliction, and He would elect from among them a person who would save them.
In the midst of this turbulence lived a man and woman of the tribe of Dan. They lived in Zorah in the Judean lowlands, an especially violent region, as in those days it was the boundary between Israel and the Philistines. For the Israelites, it was the first line of defence against the Philistines; for the Philistines, it was the essential first step in any attempt to conquer the Judean hill country. The man was called Manoah, but the woman’s name is not known. It is said of her only that she was ‘barren and had borne no children’, which is enough to suggest that, along with the hardships of the frontier, their marriage had also been filled with pain.
But anyone familiar with the semiotics of biblical storytelling also knows that the very mention of a barren woman almost always foreshadows a momentous birth. And indeed, one day – during one of those periods when ‘the Israelites again did what was offensive to the Lord’ – when the woman is alone, without her husband, an angel of God appears before her and tells her: ‘You are barren and have borne no children; but you shall conceive and bear a son.’ And immediately he gives her a list of instructions and warnings, and also good news: ‘Now be careful not to drink wine or other intoxicant, or to eat anything unclean; for you are going to conceive and bear a son; let no razor touch his head, for the boy is to be a Nazirite to God from the womb on. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines.’
She goes to her husband and says, ‘A man of God came to me.’ And the reader’s ears prick up, because the woman does not use the same word as that of the biblical narrator – ‘an angel of God appeared to the woman’ – but rather ‘came to me’, a charged phrase rich with double meaning, which more than once in the Bible refers to the act of copulation itself.
The husband’s ears probably prick up too, and his wife quickly describes the stranger. ‘He looked like an angel of God, very frightening,’ she explains. ‘I did not ask him where he was from, nor did he tell me his name.’ And between her words one can hear, it seems, a note of apology – so frightening was the man’s appearance that she didn’t have the nerve to ask where has was from, or even his name.
And the husband, Manoah, how does he respond, and what does his silence say? Maybe he furrows his brow in puzzlement, trying to fish out a question from the confusion so suddenly thrust upon him by his wife, but she doesn’t wait for him to ask, and quickly, anxiously, continues to pile on new information: The man of God told me ‘you shall conceive’, and promised I would have a son and commanded that I not drink wine or liquor, or eat anything unclean, because the boy would be a Nazirite from the womb until his dying day …
There, she has told him everything. She has freed herself from the burden of the encounter and the extraordinary news, yet the text does not tell us a thing about any emotion that flows between them, nor of any smile or tender glance. And this should come as no surprise, since as a rule the Bible rarely records the feelings of its heroes. The Bible is a history of actions and events, and leaves to us, to each and every reader, the task of speculation, an exciting task but one that carries the risks of exaggeration and fantasy. Nevertheless, let us dare to do, in the pages that follow, what many generations of readers before us have done, men and women who have read the spare biblical text according to their faith, the conventions of their age, and their own personal inclinations, and attached meanings and conclusions (and sometimes wishes and delusions) to every word and syllable.1
And so, with necessary caution, but also with the pleasure of guesswork and imagination, let us try to fix in our mind’s eye the encounter between the man and his wife, she speaking and he listening, she going on at length and he not saying a word. And there is no knowing what is welling under that silence, excitement and joy perhaps, or maybe anger at the wife who converses so freely with a strange man; and we may also wonder whether she, as she speaks, looks him straight in the eye or averts her gaze downward, away from the husband to whom, for some reason, an angel did not appear. And even if only a small part of what we have pictured actually took place, there is no doubt that the news they have received will shake them both to the core, will stir up his deepest feelings about her longtime barrenness and startling pregnancy, and maybe also hers about him, about the weakness and impotence that, it would seem, are hinted at in this brief scene.
And we, peeking in, are so captivated by this highly charged family moment that we almost fail to notice that what the wife reports to her husband is not quite the same as what she had been told. Two central details are missing: she does not mention that a razor must not touch the head of their unborn son, nor does she tell her husband that this son ‘shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines’.
Why does she omit these crucial details?
One might argue that in her excitement and confusion she simply forgot the matter of the razor. She was doubtless quite agitated; and perhaps assumed that Manoah would be aware that, if the boy was to be a Nazirite, the well-known restrictions would apply, including the prohibition against the cutting of hair. But how to explain the second omission? How can it be that a woman withholds – even conceals – from her husband such significant information regarding their future son, news that would surely give him satisfaction and pride, and perhaps a measure of compensation for all those bitter, barren years?
To comprehend this, to understand her, we need to go back and read the story through her eyes. Recall that the biblical text does not even reveal her name. The word ‘barren’ is all that is said of her, and is even redoubled: ‘barren and had borne no children.’ And this emphasis suggests that she had been waiting long years for a child who never arrived. She has probably given up on the possibility that she will one day have a child. And it is quite likely that the ‘title’ ’akara, ‘the barren one’, has been conferred upon her by others, in the family, in the tribe, in all of Zorah. And who knows, maybe even her husband, in moments of anger, flung at her now and then the searing epithet ’akara, and between them, too, the word became her name, the barb that stings her every time she thinks about herself and her fate.
And now, this same ‘childless one who has not given birth’ is suddenly graced by the appearance of an angel who brings her the news that she will bear a child. Yet at this very instant, as her dream is fulfilled and her joy is boundless, the angel adds: ‘For the boy is to be a Nazirite to God from the womb on. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines.’
And
