Samson the Man-Child: Failing to Come of Age in the Deuteronomistic History

Abstract

In recent decades, biblical scholars have shown convincingly that a key feature of the narrative depiction of Samson is the hero's liminality, his status as a character caught betwixt and two different worlds or states of being. Most often the discussion of Samson's liminality draws attention to his perpetual location at the border between nature and culture or the worlds of men and women-freely crossing these borders, but never staying long on one side or the other. This article shows that a central aspect of Samson's liminality has yet to be illuminated: the failure of this man-child ever definitively to cross the threshold into adulthood. The character's impressive strength, rhetorical eloquence, and long hair are telling marks of manhood in ancient Israelite literature, as recent work on masculinity in the Hebrew Bible has recognized. However, alongside these manly traits Samson simultaneously demonstrates characteristics associated with boyish immaturity that point to a failure to transition to manhood. The article identifies the indicators of Samson's immaturity through a close reading of the Samson cycle informed by the depiction of boyhood in the Hebrew Bible and by socialscientific research on male maturation. It then offers suggestions inspired by folklore studies on the possible purpose of tales of arrested development such as this one and its potential Sitz im Leben in an ancient Israelite context at the time of its original composition. The study concludes with a discussion of the literary function of Samson's failure to come of age in Judges and the larger Deuteronomistic history.(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Few biblical characters capture the imagination more than Samson. Bibbcal scholars in particular seem unable to resist the urge to reexamine and reanalyze this most fascinating and confounding figure. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of articles and monographs on Samson, but few have illuminated the bibbcal text more than Gregory Mobley's Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East} For Mobley, the most significant feature of the narrative depiction of Samson is not his famous hair or renowned strength but rather his liminality: his status as a character caught betwixt and two different worlds or states of being. The liminal hero Samson straddles borders, at once occupying the ground on both sides and moving unabated and carefree between them.2Mobley's study is noteworthy for its thoroughgoing application of the concept of liminality to Samson's character, but Samson's transcending of social, political, and even gender borders did not escape earlier readers. For instance, Hermann Gunkel drew attention to Samson's perpetual location at the border of nature and culture-a wild marked as much by animalistic traits (beastly ferocity, untamed hair) as by the trappings of human society.3 Susan Niditch also anticipated certain features of Mobley's argument by showing that Samson straddles both the border between nature and culture and that between man and woman. Samson, the once masculine and mighty warrior, is effectively feminized by the Philistines when they capture him (Judg 16:21-25), but later this feminization is overturned by his reassertion of manly might in his final act of vengeance ( 16:29-30) .4This emphasis on liminality common to recent scholarly readings of the Samson cycle provides a useful lens for interpretation. However, the concept has yet to be applied to one of the most significant facets of Samson's character. Among the many borders that Samson is unable to cross permanently is that separating boyhood and manhood. Samson, in other words, is a perpetual man-child.At first glance, it may seem odd to posit that Samson's depiction in the text of Judges is anything less than hyper-masculine. Samson is not just any man; he seems to be an Ubermensch: the embodiment of idealized machismo. In some ways, this is true. …