The very first Sunday School series I taught upon becoming a youth pastor was through the book of Judges, and ever since then if you are one of my students, a parent of a student, or anyone else who has simply been in the right (wrong?) place at the right time, you’ve heard my rant about Samson. Samson is not a hero. He is not a redemptive character. He is at the end of Israel’s tailspin into lawlessness and utter immorality after they conquered the promised land.
You can imagine my chagrin, then, when I saw this trailer at the movies this last week:
So what is the big deal?
The Shape of the Book of Judges
The overarching narrative of the book of Judges is a downward spiral of the people of Israel as they become more and more like the people they were supposed to drive out of the promised land. The pattern that repeats itself throughout the book is:
- The people sin
- They are oppressed
- They cry out to God
- He raises up a judge to save them
- They experience a season of rest
- Repeat
And there is a phrase that shows up a couple times at the end of the book to summarize what the author is trying to convey. The phrase is: “There was no king in that day, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” This isn’t a value neutral statement, especially since it is invoked after some really awful events (Judges 17:6, 21:25). The ‘rightness’ here is not right at all.
We might hear echoes of Genesis 3 in this phrase, where the fruit was a delight to the eyes of Eve and Adam, or perhaps when Absalom took poor advice in 2 Samuel 17 because it seemed right in his eyes. Proverbs 3 encourages us not to be wise in our own eyes. The Biblical narrative doesn’t really have many positive examples of our “own eyes” being remarkably trustworthy.
The first few judges are good, and do good. Then there is a combination of a good judge (Deborah) and her less than great counterpart (Barak). But Barak’s only real problem is his reluctance to step up and lead the Israelite army. But after them, the book transitions into bad judges. Gideon (another judge we ought not to turn into a hero) is perpetually and consistently reluctant to follow through with what God asks him to do. Jephthah makes a rash vow, trying to manipulate God into giving him victory (which he had no need to do), and as a result may or may not have had to sacrifice his daughter. And then we have Samson.
My problem with Samson
Samson does a series of terrible things. He breaks his lifelong Nazarite vow by scooping out honey from a dead lion and eating it (which may not sound like a big deal, but this shows a disregard and abandonment of his calling as a part of the priestly class – an essential part of Israel’s self identity). He burns down the crops of a village because his wife was given to his best man instead of him. He is rash and self focused. Samson’s mistakes come far before the Delilah story that many of us are familiar with. Unlike prior Judges, Samson acts out of his own interests. He is chosen to save God’s people from oppression, but his actions are all about him.
But, you may point out, God uses all kinds of broken people to accomplish what He wants. Absolutely, and the comfort we can take when reading the downward spiral of Judges is that God accomplishes what He wants often despite the flawed people he chooses to use.
John Goldingay puts it this way:
Samson is behaving in a fashion that denies his vocation. It is a theme running through his story. Investigating the lion’s carcass points to it, because being dedicated to God means avoiding contact with dead things; Samson ignores that principle. Here, too, [in selecting a Philistine wife] however, God simply makes this contribute to the fulfilling of that purpose. God will use Samson whether he does the right thing or the wrong thing. 1
Samson isn’t a David type – a man after God’s own heart who still made mistakes. Samson isn’t even a Cyrus – a non Israelite who didn’t know God but God used anyway. Samson is more like the wicked kings of Israel and Judah’s decline. God uses Samson in the end to defeat the Philistines, but his cycle, unlike the other Judge cycles (besides Jephthah), doesn’t even end with a time of rest.
And in case we miss it, twice in Judges 14 the author says that the woman Samson wants to marry is “right in my eyes.”
What’s the point?
The reason this trailer, and other references to Samson, irk me so much is that they miss the point of the Samson story. To glory in Samson’s violence, or to make it the focus of his narrative, is to miss the big picture of Judges: that the people of God increasingly became like (and then worse than) the people who lived in the land before them. Samson’s story isn’t a redemptive story. His is a story in which God will use him despite his terribleness. And most of what he does is terrible. The story gives a picture of a God who is persistent in keeping His promise to His people – even when His people are the worst (like Samson). And when we try and make Samson’s story into a hero story, we do it in the name of trying to show how God works through flawed characters. But in the end I think we end up doing the opposite: glossing over human flaws and frailty in order to still have larger than life humans we can aspire to be. Which then causes us to lose sight of the reason God had to act in the book of Judges in the first place.
The book of Judges has a really important story to tell, of humanity’s capacity for evil when we all do what is right in our own eyes. And we will miss that story when we rip Samson’s story out of its context and make him into an action star who shouldn’t have told Delilah the secret of his hair. I have only a trailer to work off of, and so perhaps the people over at Pure Flix will put that important nuance into their movie. But I am not sure that anyone could pull off the nuance of that story out of its context, and that trailer doesn’t give me a lot of hope.
P.S. For an excellent resource on the Book of Judges, check out the Bible Project’s page, or watch the video below.
Leave a Reply