The Story

In the days when the Philistines ruled over Israel, a man named Manoah had a wife who had no children. One day the angel of the LORD appeared to her with wonderful news: she would have a son, special to God from the very first day of his life. The angel said, "no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb" — his hair must never be cut, as a sign that he belonged to God. The baby was named Samson, and the LORD blessed him as he grew.

When Samson was a young man, God's Spirit began to stir in him, and his strength was like nobody else's. Walking through some vineyards, a young lion rushed out at him — and "the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him", and Samson tore the lion apart with his bare hands, as easily as if it had been a little goat. At his wedding feast he made a riddle about it, but the Philistines cheated to win the answer, and there was trouble and fighting. Another time, Samson picked up the jawbone of a donkey — and with that one bone he struck down a thousand men! Then, tired and thirsty, he called on the LORD, and God gave him water from a hollow place. Once he even carried off the very doors of the city gate of Gaza, posts and all, up to the top of a hill.

But Samson did not guard God's gift. He fell in love with a woman named Delilah, and the lords of the Philistines offered her silver to learn the secret of his strength. Three times she asked, and three times he teased her with false answers — and broke free every time. But she pressed him day after day, until he told her all his heart: "if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man". While he slept, she had his seven locks shaved off. Then she cried that the Philistines were upon him, and he woke, thinking he would shake himself free as before — but the saddest words in the story say "he wist not that the LORD was departed from him". The Philistines took him, put out his eyes, and set him to grind corn in prison.

But Samson's hair began to grow again. One day the Philistines held a great feast to their idol Dagon and brought blind Samson out to make sport of him. A lad led him to the two middle pillars that held up the house, and there Samson prayed his last prayer: "remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God". God heard him. He bowed against the pillars with all his might, and the house came crashing down on the lords and all the people — and so, the Bible says, "the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life". Samson's strength was never in his muscles or his hair; it was God's gift — and God heard His servant when he prayed at the end.