son will be born to her. To her. Until this moment she knew nothing of this, of course. The angel knew about it first and told her the news. And perhaps at the moment of the telling she feels an unfamiliar twinge inside (angels know that revelations work best with concrete proof). And she is doubtless very proud that her son will be the one to save the Israelites: what mother wouldn’t be proud to produce the saviour of his people? But maybe, in a hidden corner of her heart, her happiness is less than complete.
For another recognition, painful and still repressed, is beginning to gnaw at her: she has not conceived her own private, intimate child, but rather some ‘national figure’, a Nazirite of God and the redeemer of Israel. And his uniqueness is not something that will develop slowly, over the years, so that the two can grow comfortably together into their roles – to be a saviour’s mother is also a position of responsibility – but instead this is happening now, suddenly, already, in a fixed and inexorable manner: ‘For the boy is to be a Nazirite of God from the womb on …’
She tries to understand. This child, this long-awaited child, at the moment he has been given to her, has begun to sprout within her, has already been touched, it turns out, by some other, strange entity, and this means – and here she feels a sharp, alien sting – that he will be a child who will never be hers alone.
Does she understand this immediately? There is no way of knowing. The whole episode has surely overwhelmed her, and it is perfectly possible that at this moment she is filled only with joy over the pregnancy, and pride over the special boy who will be born to her – to her, and not to all those in the village and the tribe who saw her only as ’akara, the childless one … But we may surmise that, deep down, Samson’s mother knows, with a deep womanly intuition – a knowledge that has nothing to do with any religious faith or fear of God – that what has been given to her has also been taken away in the same instant. The moment of her greatest intimacy – within herself, as a woman – has been confiscated and made into a public event, shared with strangers (including we who interpret her story after thousands of years), and for this reason, in an instinctive gesture of distancing and denial, she pushes away part of the disturbing news.
And here we are reminded of another woman of the Bible, whose fate was the same as that of Samson’s mother: Hannah, who tearfully prayed and vowed that, if a son were born to her, she would give him to God as a Nazirite, and following that vow, Samuel was born, and she was obliged to turn him over to Eli the high priest. Both these tales of extraordinary pregnancies carry with them the uncomfortable implication that God has somehow exploited the despair of these mothers, who thirsted so avidly to conceive and give birth that they were willing to accede to any ‘suggestion’ regarding the destiny of their child, even – in the language of our own day – to serve as ‘surrogate mothers’ for God’s great plans.
* * *
The wife of Manoah goes to her husband and tells him about the encounter, and we have already observed that her report sounds almost apologetic and overly detailed: ostensibly revealing all, but in fact omitting much. It is worth mentioning here that any number of commentators on the story – including poets and playwrights, painters and novelists who over the years have explored the character of Samson – have hinted that Samson was born of a liaison between his mother and the ‘man of God’. Others, notably Vladimir Jabotinsky in his wonderful novel Samson the Nazarite, went so far as to raise the possibility that Samson was the product of a romance between his mother and a flesh-and-blood Philistine.2 According to this reading, the business of the ‘man of God who came to me’ was simply a cover story that she invented in order to explain away her embarrassing pregnancy to Manoah. This hypothesis, of course, adds extra spice to the saga of Samson’s complex relations with the Philistines. But we, tempted though we are, will trust instead the version given by Samson’s mother, since we shall soon discover that, even if she spoke the whole truth, her great, fateful betrayal was not, in the end, at the expense of her husband.
For, after she announces to Manoah that they will have a son, she recites to him the second bit of the angel’s message – which, it will be recalled, she quotes with less than complete accuracy. She omits to mention the prohibition of hair-cutting; likewise the boy’s future role as national saviour. ‘The boy is to be a Nazirite of God from the womb’, she says, and concludes with a few words of her own: ‘until his dying day’.
And this is surely a strange addendum: a woman, who has just learned that she will bear a child after long years of infertility, tells her husband what will be expected of their son – and then speaks of his dying day?
Even someone who is not a parent, who has never experienced that special moment at which the expectant couple gets the good news, knows that on such an occasion there is nothing farther from their hearts and minds than the ‘dying day’ of the unborn child. And even if many anxious parents are preoccupied, even to the point of obsession, with the dangers and disasters that lie in wait for their children, they are nonetheless not inclined, on the whole, to imagine their youngster as an elderly person, decrepit, nearing the end – and certainly not as dead. To construct such a mental picture requires a strenuous, almost violent act of estrangement that would appear antithetical to the natural instincts of parenthood.
A woman who thinks and speaks out loud about the dying day of the child that is only beginning to take shape in her womb requires a remarkable measure of grim sobriety. Such a woman, at a moment like this, assumes a posture of cruel alienation – from the child, from the father who hears such words, and, no less, from herself.
What, then, has driven Manoah’s wife to add these words?
Again, let’s ‘rewind the tape’ and try to examine what exactly has happened. The angel brings the woman the news, then vanishes. She hurries to her husband, as the mixed message swirls inside her: she is, or will soon become, pregnant; but the child – how to put it? – is not completely hers, is not as other children are to their mothers. He has been deposited within her, as it were, for safekeeping, and she knows that things that are deposited must, in the end, be returned.
Something begins to weigh on her, to slow her down: who, then, is this child that grows within her? Is he wholly made of the essence, the blood and bone, of his parents? If so, why does she faintly sense that even now he is diluted by another essence, foreign and inscrutable, something puzzling and superhuman (and therefore, perhaps, inhuman too)?
Here, in a mental leap forward of several thousand years, what comes to mind is a touching newspaper interview that was once conducted with the mother of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Russian physicist and Nobel laureate. She spoke of her son with pride, of course, and with love, but at the end of the interview said, with a kind of a sigh: ‘Sometimes I feel like a chicken who has given birth to an eagle.’ And in those words could be heard a trace of astonishment. One could sense the wonder in her eyes, which distanced the son from the mother’s heart and put him in a place where she could look at him with total objectivity, as if he were a ‘phenomenon’, or an utter stranger: as if the mother herself were putting her son on a high pedestal, and looking at him from the same vantage – the same distance – that any other person might, and from this place she whispers, who are you? How much are you really mine?
And perhaps Samson’s mother too, even as she goes to bring her husband the good news, is lacerated by such questions – how much of him is mine? Is this the child I prayed for? Will I be able to give him the bountiful, natural love that for so long I have yearned to give a child of my own?
And then, when she meets her husband and speaks out loud, the words suddenly penetrate her mind with full force, and with all their complex implications. When she reaches the words ‘for he will be a Nazirite of God from the womb’, it is almost possible to feel how something inside her is blocked, stunned, frozen, and instead of quoting the angel’s words completely,
