Samson and Self-Destroying Evil

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Samson and Self-Destroying Evil

Introduction

In a recent excellent book on the problem of evil, Marilyn Adams defines horrendous evils as “evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant

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’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good” to the sufferer.[1] A large part of her book is given over to considering whether there are benefits to such unwilling innocent sufferers that could possibly redeem the suffering and turn the sufferer’s life into a good for the sufferer. Many reflective people looking at cases of horrendous evil feel strongly that there is nothing, there could be nothing, which defeats the evil in such cases. No benefit is brought about by the suffering which could not be gotten without the suffering and which is worth the suffering. The efforts of theodicy to find such benefits strike them as shallow at best and obscene at worst. It must follow on such a view that a person whose life manifests horrendous evil is a person whose life was not a good for him; such a person would have been better off if he had died at birth or had never lived. Job gives voice to this sort of attitude when he curses the day he was born and complains with bitter passion, “Why did I not die from the womb? Why did I not emerge from the womb and perish?” (Job 3:11).

I think it is indisputable that sometimes the suffering a person endures breaks that person past healing. Sometimes a person’s life is irremediably ruined, in the sense that it can no longer be made whole; its initial promise can no longer be fulfilled. The paradigm of such a person in the Greek world is Oedipus. Sophocles has Oedipus claim to be among the worst of the afflicted[2], and it’s not hard to see why. By the time he appears in Oedipus at Colonus, he is a homeless, blind beggar, disfigured, bedeviled by fear, tormented by self-loathing, and shunned with horror by all who meet him. What is broken and ruined in Oedipus couldn’t conceivably be restored to wholeness. Surely this is horrendous evil if anything is.

And yet Sophocles’s Oedipus is pitiably anxious to make clear that his dreadful acts were in some important sense involuntary. “There is more of suffering than of violence in my deeds,” he tells the Chorus.[3] It’s not hard to see why this claim matters to him. Job suffers horrendously, but at least he suffers as a victim, not as a perpetrator. He is broken and his life is wrecked, but the responsibility for the horror does not lie with him; and so there remains this much beauty in him and in his life: he is innocent. It is also possible, however, to be broken and ruined and to know that one has brought the horror on oneself.[4]

Another version of the problem of evil

There is therefore another version of the problem of evil that also bears consideration, namely, that which focuses on the horrendous suffering of the lives of perpetrators, rather than victims, of great evil. This version of the problem has been largely left to one side, I think, because we tend to react without pity to the perpetrators. We take them to get what they deserve. And yet imagine that Goebbels failed to kill himself, after his wife had killed their six children and herself at his instigation; imagine that in the final fall of Berlin he had finally seen himself just as we see him today. It is not hard to put Job’s lines in Goebbel’s mouth: it would have been so much better for him if God had let him die at birth. And if that line is true, as it seems at first glance to be, then the problem of evil can surely also be raised about the horrendous evil of being a perpetrator, as well as a victim. Even if it were true that the suffering of the perpetrator were deserved, if both the evil and the deserved suffering could have been prevented, if the perpetrator would have been much better off dying young rather than living to perpetrate the evil, then why wouldn’t an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God provide for the death of the perpetrator before he does the evil?

The case of the perpetrators of horrendous evil is thus the hardest case for theodicy. If it can be shown that even a person whose own culpable acts have broken him and left him in horrendous suffering can have a life which is a good for him, then there is an a fortiori argument to other less disturbing cases. So, for these reasons, I want to explore one case of horrendous evil in which it is the sufferer’s own doing that his life was wrecked as it is. I want to look carefully at the story of Samson.

It should be said here that I am not the first person to think that the case of Samson shows us the problem of evil in a particularly disconcerting form but that it also gives us deep insights useful for theodicy. Milton thought so, too, and wrote a play incorporating his understanding of the story of Samson. It is clear that Milton saw his own case as analogous to Samson’s in many respects, and rightly so. When the Puritans fell from power, Milton, who had given so much of himself to their cause, was left blind, impoverished, and imperilled by his enemies. And he was a failure at what he himself saw as his vocation to poetry. Up to that time, his great gifts for literature had been prodigally spent on political pamphlets, and his announced plan to produce a great English epic poem looked more like bombast than promise.[5] So Milton’s interest in the story of Samson was not abstract, but personal and anguished. He thought about the horrendous evil of Samson’s life out of the ruin of his own life. And the thought is very good. In considering the biblical story of Samson, then, I will also be guided by Milton’s understanding of it.[6]

Samson in captivity

In introducing Samson Agonistes, Douglas Bush picks out Oedipus at Colonus as one of the preceding works of literature Milton’s play most resembles,[7] and it is not hard to see why he thinks so. Milton’s view of Samson is in many respects similar to Sophocles’s view of Oedipus. Like Oedipus at Colonus, Samson Agonistes begins by calling attention to the panoply of the protagonist’s sufferings, and there is considerable similarity between the two characters on this score. To begin with, like Oedipus, Samson is blind. The lament over the loss of sight that blind Milton puts in blind Samson’s mouth is heart-rending, and it reminds us not to gloss over blindness as a small evil:

“Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,

And all her various objects of delight

Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased,

Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,

They creep, yet see; I, dark…

…exiled from light,

As in the land of darkness, yet in light,

…

Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave,

Buried, not yet exempt

By privilege of death and burial

From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs…” (ll.70-105)

For Samson, there are indeed many other evils. Oedipus is at least free to wander among his countrymen with his daughters. Samson is exiled, imprisoned, and set to work at hard and demeaning labor, grinding grain like a beast for his enemies. Like Oedipus, Samson is a pariah to the communities around him. But there is an extra measure of humiliation for Samson, because he is forced to use his strength, which was meant to be employed in the liberation of his people, to give food to their enemies; and his enemies exult over him in this condition.

For both Oedipus and Samson, the pain of their condition is made more bitter by the memory of the state from which they have fallen. But for Samson the reversal in fortunes is considerably more complicated than it is for Oedipus, however tangled Oedipus’s story is.

To begin with, Samson was called to the state from which he fell. Rescuing his people from their oppressors was his vocation; it was, quite literally, what he was born for. The angel who announces Samson’s birth to the hitherto barren woman who becomes his mother tells her to avoid wine, strong spirits, and unclean food and to make sure that no razor ever comes on the child’s head, because the child to be born will be a Nazarite from the womb. This special son, the angel tells the woman, is destined to begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines.[8] Samson’s downfall is thus not just a personal catastrophe; his failure to fulfill his vocation is also a national disaster. And this disaster is Samson’s fault.

Milton sums up Samson’s state succinctly by having Samson say,

“Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, quelled,

To what can I be useful, wherein serve

My nation, and the work from Heaven imposed…?” (ll.563-565)

Samson’s relation to God

Heaven is, of course, the other problem for Samson. There is the problem of intolerable guilt, which Milton unaccountably left off the list of Samson’s troubles in the preceding lines and which I will address a little later. But there is also Samson’s relationship to God.

That there was such a relationship, that it was direct and powerful, and that Samson trusted in it as a regular part of his life is shown by the episode of the battle at Lehi. There, the story says, Samson single-handedly slaughtered a thousand of the enemy, and the Philistines were soundly defeated in the battle. But afterwards Samson was very thirsty. And so, the text says, “Samson called to Yahweh and said, ‘It was you who gave this great deliverance by the hand of your servant. And now I am dying of thirst, and I will fall into the hands of the uncircumcised’.” (15:18) And God provided water for Samson by breaking open a place in Lehi, from which water then flowed.

It is notable that Samson not only thought to call on God when he needed a drink but that he called on him in such a familiar way. There is not only no reverent address in Samson’s prayer; there is in fact no address at all. Samson simply turns to God to speak to him directly, as if invocation of the Deity, to get his attention and call him to listen, were unnecessary for Samson.

None of the other common elements of prayer are present in Samson’s speech either. There is no plea for God’s help, not even a single ‘please’. As far as that goes, Samson appears not to think it necessary even to make a petition. He asks nothing of God. He simply presents himself to God as thirsty and in want of water. The closest he comes to making a plea or a petition is to point to a danger to himself: unrelieved, the condition in which he is will lead to his being captured by his enemies. Samson points to this possible outcome as a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the idea that God could leave him thirsty. As the prayer shows, then, Samson expects that his want of water and the unquestioned unacceptability of his falling to the Philistines will be enough for God to provide, immediately and on the spot, what Samson needs. It’s equally notable that in this story God seems to agree, at least to this extent: without comment, God provides the water.

The episodes recounting Samson’s deeds and experiences also suggest some wild, strong connection between Samson and God. The story of Samson’s exploits begins in this way: “the boy grew, and Yahweh blessed him; and the spirit of Yahweh began to move him in the camp of Dan….”(13:24-25)

Subsequently, when Samson engages in some feat of great strength, the story often (but not always) says that the spirit of the Lord came on him -- or rushed into him, as the evocative Hebrew has it.[9]

But in the catastrophe at the end, the text explains, not only is Yahweh’s spirit not coming on Samson, but in fact Yahweh has departed from Samson.[10]

What would it be like to find that the God who had only to see your need to satisfy it, who rushed into you and made you triumphant, was gone from you? Among the things Samson must long for -- light, freedom, home -- the absent love of the God who rushed into him, with whose strength he was great, must prompt the most painful pining.

If horrendous evils can be ranked, if they are not simply incommensurable, then, taken all in all, Samson’s sufferings seem to me among the worst. However great Oedipus’s misery, it lacks the torment of being abandoned for cause by a deity once intimately, gloriously, with you.

Abandoned for cause

And it is indisputable that Samson was abandoned for cause; his fall is his fault. But what exactly is Samson culpable for?

Milton, like very many interpreters of the story, thinks that Samson’s fault consists in having told Delilah his secret.[11] But here, I think, Milton has to have it wrong.

To see that this is so, consider how we would have to read the story about Samson’s capture if Milton were right.

Delilah wants Samson to tell her the secret of his strength. Now Samson has some practice at the suffering of having his secrets betrayed by a woman he loves. Samson’s marriage to the Philistine woman at Timnath ended abruptly at the wedding when his bride treacherously revealed the secret she had wheedled out of him. And so Samson, who is as capable of drawing inferences from bitter experience as other people, doesn’t tell Delilah his secret but rather lies to her instead. The wisdom of his decision to lie is immediately apparent -- to him as well as to us -- because Delilah loses no time in betraying him by passing his lie on to the Philistines, who use what Delilah tells them to try to capture Samson.

One might suppose that Samson would react to Delilah’s betrayal in the same way that he reacted to the betrayal of the woman of Timnath, by exploding into fury, leaving her, and killing Philistines. But, in fact, nothing of the sort happens: no fury, no leaving, no attacks on the Philistines. On the contrary, we simply get a repetition of the same scenario. How are we to account for the fact that hot-tempered Samson not only doesn’t explode against her and the Philistines in league with her but instead tamely gives into Delilah’s whining and wheedling a second time and pretends again to tell her his secret?

The answer to this question lies in effect in Samson’s answer to Delilah’s first request for his secret. Why is his response to her initial request a lie? Surely, because he does not trust her not to betray him to his enemies to be put to death. So he believes that the woman he loves, with whom he is sexually intimate, can’t be trusted not to want him dead. That is a fairly stunning failure to trust, on his part.

And that is why Samson is not angry when he finds that Delilah is in league with his enemies. She doesn’t betray his trust as his bride of Timnath did -- he doesn’t give her any trust to betray. He is prepared to take her and enjoy her; he is not prepared to give any of himself to her. And so he doesn’t get angry when she tries to betray him to death. Because he has lied to her, she can’t in fact harm him; and because he hasn’t invested himself in her, he doesn’t mind when she tries to do him in. She’s like a cat one has carefully declawed; her attempts at attack may be occasions for amusement or annoyance, but they can’t cause any serious reaction.

Now, on Milton’s view, how will we have to read the story of Delilah’s fourth and final attempt to betray Samson? After three occasions on each of which it has to be obvious even to the most obtuse that Delilah has betrayed him to his enemies, on Milton’s reading of the fourth occasion Samson is so wearied by the endless importunities of the woman he is besotted with that he tells her the truth about the way in which his enemies can do him in.

But it can’t be that Samson now believes Delilah is trustworthy,[12] and it’s equally absurd to suppose that he tells Delilah his secret because he now desires to surrender to his enemies. It is true that the story says Delilah vexed him practically to death, so that in the end he told her all his heart. And he does in fact this time, for the first time, tell Delilah something which is true: he has been a Nazarite from the womb, and he has never been shaven. But the question remains whether in telling her this truth, Samson is telling her what he believes is the key to his capture by the Philistines. If he did believe it, then it is evident that he would have to think Delilah wouldn’t use the information to do him in or that he wouldn’t care much if she did.

If it isn’t sufficiently clear that neither of these states for Samson is psychologically credible, the rest of the episode shows decisively that such an interpretation of the story is wrong. If Samson had resolved to let Delilah in on the way in which the Philistines could capture him, then when the Philistines did surround him, Samson would realize he was lost. Even if he had somehow supposed that after three times of betraying him to his destruction, Delilah had somehow turned trustworthy, he would know how wrong he had been when he found the Philistines around him. Or if he had anticipated such a result but didn’t care, then he would simply surrender tamely -- or at least despairingly -- when the Philistines attack him. But none of these things happens in the narrative. On the contrary, in the story, when Delilah wakes him with the cry that the Philistines are upon him, he responds by saying, “I will go out this time as before and shake myself free.” (16:20) To suppose that Samson has this reaction after having given the manifestly treacherous Delilah what he himself believes is the key to his destruction is to make psychological gibberish of the story.