Canter Bridge

Samson’s rage against the Philistines comes across as righteous, though there is hardly a white hat to be found in this entire story. Samson himself hardly wears one. Nor does anyone who figures in the rent-a-priest tale that follows hold up well under the lens of Deuteronomistic ideals.

The book of Judges is punctuated by a recurring assessment that ‘In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes’. On the one hand, this could be read as a technical description of decentralized self-rule. But it seems likely that there is more here than the evolution of Israelite political structures in the time before monarchy took hold. The phrase ‘what was right in their own eyes’ casts a dark light on the moral and spiritual chaos in which Israel found itself enveloped.

From this angle, the Mosaic warnings about the perils that would await following the land’s conquest, on the other side of the Jordan, appear prescient.

That Samson can appear as a heroic judge—this womanizing, iron-pumping, loud-mouth of a border-town prowler—goes far to explain the day. Micah, the rent-a-liturgist poster boy, prompts a dismal assessment as well, perhaps more for the matter-of-fact way that he and those around him stumble about violating every eventual Deuteronomic principle with stunning nonchalance than for any other of the narrative’s details.

The vignettes and the extended stories that appear here are, from time to time, masterful little works of literature. They must have had an independent life prior to being gathered into the epic (first) history of Israel of which they now form a part. The compiler has used them, inter alia, to build the case that the land cries out for a king. One gathers on repeated readings that the historian’s viewpoint does not so much advocate a change of political structure—to monarchy instead of populist anarchy—as it does the coming of a righteous king who will reign according to Deuteronomic standards.

It may be an exaggeration to say that the biblical historian longs for righteousness in the land and discerns that a righteous king is the only hope for arriving at that end. But such an assessment would exaggerate only a little.

We cheer Samson bringing down the Dagon-ite temple on top of himself and its cruel celebrants. If gouged-out eyes meant he could no longer look on the turning of the tables that destroyed them, he could at least lie under the rubble with them and mingle his last groans with theirs.

Yet this is faint praise, a mildly satisfying obituary appearing in the leading daily of a country where chaos reigns because a righteous king does not.