Editorial
Front Page - Friday, June 19, 2009
I Swear...
Life as a puzzle: Part 3
Vic Fleming
This series of columns begin with the admission that I never had a hankering to be like Samson, the Biblical word game guy. Even though he slew 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Even though he was Israel’s ruler for 20 years, during the time when “judges” ruled the land.
As last week’s column ended, Samson had been captured by the Philistines, after being betrayed for about the
zillionth time in his life. So, he is blind and pushing a big rock-like wheel around to grind grain in a Philistine prison.
No doubt, the leader of the Philistines is having daily debates with his advisors on whether it’s wise to let this man, who is charged with well over 1,000 counts of homicide, continue to live. He has learned has he not, that cutting Samson’s hair rendered him weak?
Yet, there Samson is, day after day, pushing that mill stone and no barber in sight! Or, as the text reads, “But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved.” Duh!
You know the rest of the story. The Philistine elite gather in a bacchanalian victory party: 3,000 men and women. In the movie, it appears as though they’ve gathered for the specific purpose of publicly harassing Samson.
“And when their hearts were merry, they said, ‘Call Samson, and let him entertain us.’ So they called Samson out of the prison, and he performed for them.” And, for some unstated reason, they “made him stand between the pillars.”
With the help of his attendant, Samson gets a firm stance and a good grip on these pillars “on which the house rests.” He then prays that he might be strengthened one more time, “so that with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes.”
Even at this crucial moment, Samson seems a tad egotistical, no? He, of course, is about to condemn the Philistines’ leader to a horrible spot in the history books for not having summarily executed him days or weeks earlier.
When I heard Victor Mature cry, “Let me die with the Philistines!” and then saw him rip those pillars from their spot—well, I don’t recall exactly what I thought (that was 50 years ago). But I can still see it now, the shocked faces of those nice-looking Philistine people as they come crashing down in Samson’s final feat of mass destruction.
“So those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life. … He had judged Israel twenty years.” Thus, a puzzling life comes to a bloody end.
Samson was multiply betrayed through his own life by those closest to him. His main accomplishment seems to have been the mass slaying of others, under justification of their being the enemy or of their having done some harm to him.
Even though he is proclaimed a hero in the Christian Bible, I have to wonder if Samson ever solved the puzzle that his own life seems to have been.
Next week: The 40-year high school reunion. Mine, not Samson’s.
I SWEAR
© 2009 Vic Fleming
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