Toil and Trouble
For behold, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and no razor shall come upon his head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb; and he will begin to save Israel from the hands of the Philistines. Judges 13:5 NASB
From the womb – Is the story of Samson just a tragic romance? Well, if you buy the Sunday school version (expurgated of the sexual content, of course), you might think that poor Sampson was just a dupe in the hands of Delilah. He was so love-struck that he allowed her to do whatever she wanted, revealing the secret of his strength in one of the Bible’s famous betrayals. If this is your idea of the story, then you missed a crucial fact right at the beginning. God declares that Samson will be a Nazarite “from the womb,” min-ha•ba•ten. “The phrases ‘from the womb’ and ‘fruit of the beṭen’ are idiomatic, expressing ‘from birth’ on the one hand and ‘issue from the body’ or ‘children’ on the other.”[1]
Why does this matter? Well, a Nazarite vow was a voluntary commitment to a higher degree of sanctity (cf. Numbers 6:1-21). Typically, such a vow lasts thirty days. It involved abstinence from alcohol or anything from grapes, not cutting the hair, and not engaging in any act that causes ritual impurity, like contact with a corpse. As you can immediately see, Samson’s Nazarite status was a clear exception to the rule. About the only thing he did to maintain his vow was not cut his hair, but, of course, that also happened. Most importantly, he did not volunteer.
Why does this matter? Listen to Erica Brown: “[Samson] was consecrated as a nazarite for life, indicating that his whole life was a battlefield of human temptation against human virtue.”[2] Did you get that? His whole life! No choice. No opt-out clause. Nothing but one struggle after another, one confrontation after another with the requirements of the vow—and without making any decision to accept this fate. Samson’s story isn’t a tragic romance. It’s a tragic life—initiated by God! Samson fought against this destiny. No wonder it’s so full of bad decisions.
Not many are chosen “from the womb.” Most people encounter God along the way and make willful decisions, but some are essentially chosen before they are born. Imagine what a trying life that would be. We think it would be so nice to have God elect us before we make even a single choice in life, but what that really means is that our lives are, in some respect, not ours at all. We would be the victims of divine initiative. Samson is quite uncomfortable with that inevitability. Yeshua isn’t. Frankly, I’m not sure how that would have worked out for me. Probably God knew I couldn’t do it, but then He must have had some suspicion that Samson couldn’t do it either. At any rate, the real story of Samson is a tragedy from the very beginning: man against divine edict. Maybe that’s what we really learn from this woeful tale. Being an instrument of God comes with a price even the strongest of men find it difficult to pay.
Topical Index: strength, destiny, choice, Samson, min-ha•ba•ten, Judges 13:5
[1] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 236 בטן. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 103). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Erica Brown, Leadership in the Wilderness: Authority and Anarchy in the Book of Numbers (2013, Maggid), p. 60.
