in his dealings with others. He will always lack the capacity for simple human contact that comes so naturally to most people, and will never be able to be – as Samson himself phrased it, toward the end of his life – ‘an ordinary man’.
And thus, even if Samson’s mother has been miraculously ‘cured’ of her barrenness, it would seem that she has directly passed along to her son the barrenness-as-metaphor that sets a person apart from the vital core of human existence – a unique case of ‘hereditary sterility’.
Yet it is God, and not Samson’s mother, who has decreed that he will be a Nazirite, in other words, a person who places a partition between himself and life – and indeed in the Hebrew word nazir we hear a suggestive conflation of the root ndr, meaning ‘vow’, and the word zar, ‘stranger’. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that it is also the mother’s view of her son – her intimate gaze upon the embryo she carries, and her chilling verdict – which no less than God’s command has determined the fateful course of his life until his dying day.
* * *
The strangeness conferred upon the unborn child is soon multiplied. Manoah, taken by surprise, prays to God and requests further instructions: ‘Oh, my Lord! Please let the man of God that You sent come to us again and let him instruct us how to act with the boy that is to be born.’
‘The boy that is to be born?’ Still in his mother’s womb, Samson is already classified by his father, assigned a formal, arm’s-length definition. For even if Manoah’s lips have longed for many years to pronounce the words ‘our son’, ‘my child’, ‘my boy’, he takes care to use the term used by the man of God as quoted by his wife, perhaps because he senses that he must, even now, maintain an awestruck distance from one who will soon be an exalted figure.
And Manoah perhaps guesses something more: that it will be necessary to handle this child like a precious vessel – maybe too precious – which is possibly beyond the spiritual means of its own parents; and that this will not be a child who can be raised according to one’s natural instincts alone; and God, I beg of you, kindly furnish additional instructions …
And indeed, the angel returns, but again chooses to appear before the wife as ‘she was sitting in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her’. And thus the impression is strengthened that the angel for some reason prefers to entrust the information, the secret, to the woman, and that he endeavours to meet with her when she is alone, and not merely ‘alone’, but when her husband is not with her. But she – perhaps for fear of gossip, or out of loyalty to her husband and a sense of their shared destiny – wants Manoah to be present at the meeting. This time, the narrator goes into a bit of detail: ‘The woman ran in haste to tell her husband.’ And we can imagine her strong legs racing through the stalks of corn, her arms pumping, slicing the air, the thoughts flying through her head, as she reaches Manoah and tells him that the same man, ‘the man who came to me before’, has appeared to her once again.
Vayakom vayelech Manoah aharei ishto: ‘Manoah rose and followed his wife.’
The ring and resonance of these words convey the slow, heavy movements of Manoah, whose name means ‘rest’ and, in more recent Hebrew, also means ‘late’, in the sense of ‘deceased’. Thus, in five words that stand in amusing contrast to ‘the woman ran in haste to tell her husband’, the narrator sketched a sluggard of sorts who drags after his quick, energetic wife. Indeed Manoah was chastised by the rabbinic authors of the Talmud, who labelled him an am ha’aretz, an ignoramus, for transgressing a cardinal rule of gender: ‘A man does not walk behind a woman on the road, even his own wife – and, even if he finds himself on a bridge with her, she should be beside him, and whoever walks behind a woman when crossing a river will have no share in the world to come.’3
So Manoah follows his wife, meets the stranger, attempts to size him up. Although he had earlier explicitly requested that the Almighty bring back the ‘man of God’, Manoah may not yet be free of a nagging suspicion about the fellow whom his wife met alone in the field – twice – after which she knew immediately that she was to bear a child. ‘Are you the man who spoke to my wife?’ he demands, and the reader can imagine, beyond the words, the dejected look he directs at the angel, and hear the mixture of mistrust and jealousy and the irritable humility of a man who cannot help but recognise his own inferiority.
Note that Manoah does not ask ‘Are you the man who came to my wife?’ Perhaps something restrains him from using that blunt word, whose utterance in such a charged setting – two men, one possibly pregnant woman – could well push the three into out-and-out confrontation. Yet at the same time, Manoah calls the stranger a ‘man’ and not ‘the man of God’, and juxtaposes the words ‘man’ and ‘wife’, coupling the two in an intimate cocoon while he stands outside, thus exposing further his suspicions and the jealousy that flickers behind his question.4
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