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| VHS cover for "Greatest Heroes and Legends: Samson and Delilah." Image source. |
I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles," which is a collection of academic papers about children's bibles. I love this book so much.
In this post, I want to talk about a little section from the paper "Samson's Hair and Delilah's Despair: Reanimating Judges 16 for Children" by Caroline Vander Stichele. This paper analyzes several different video adaptations of the story of Samson and Delilah, comparing the way they portray Delilah.
If you're not familiar with the story from the bible, here's a basic summary. (The part with Delilah is in Judges 16, but Samson's story actually starts a few chapters earlier than that.) God gives Samson super-strength, but only as long as Samson never cuts his hair. Samson is an Israelite, and throughout this time period the Israelites are fighting against the Philistines. Samson falls in love with Delilah, and the Philistines convince her to ask Samson the secret of his strength, so they can defeat him. (Delilah might be a Philistine but the bible doesn't say this explicitly.) She does convince him to tell her- he says that if someone cuts his hair, he will no longer have super-strength. She gets someone to cut Samson's hair, and/or cuts it herself (we'll get to that), and the Philistines capture Samson and gouge his eyes out. Later, Samson prays to God to give him his strength back one last time, and he is able to knock down the pillars in a giant crowded temple, killing a lot of Philistines, along with himself.
I want to talk about this part in "Text, Image, & Otherness" on p 304-305:
Apart from these gaps in the story, an important ambiguity in the biblical text relates to who does the actual cutting of Samson's hair, Delilah herself or someone else. The NRSV [New Revised Standard Version of the bible] suggests that "a man" cut Samson's hair: "She let him fall asleep on her lap; and she called a man, and had him shave off the seven locks of his head" (Judg 16:19). The Hebrew text does indeed mention a man (ish), but the following verb is in the third-person singular feminine, indicating that Delilah herself is the one who does the shaving. Who the man is, however, remains unclear. According to [Robert] Boling, Delilah called a man to bring her a razor and maybe to help her in shaving Samson's head (1975, 250), while [Jack M.] Sasson suggests that Samson himself is the man in question and that Delilah calls him in order to check if he is indeed asleep (1988, 336-38; Exum 1996, 183).
That the man may be a barber is suggested by both the Septuagint A [ancient Greek translation of the bible] and the Vulgate [ancient Latin translation of the bible] translation, which identify the man as such (koureus and tonsor, respectively; Septuagint B has aner). As a result, the text has often been interpreted this way. This reading turns Delilah into more of a passive witness than an active executor of Samson's shaving. The interpretation of Delilah as witness is also reflected in numerous depictions of this scene and is also followed in the [Greatest Heroes] animation.
Wow, this is fascinating. The Hebrew text of the bible says Delilah called a man, but then the verb for cutting the hair is in a feminine form. So, what's going on here? Did Delilah cut Samson's hair? If so, who is the man she called? Did she call a man to cut Samson's hair? If so, why is the verb feminine?
[I'm curious to read more about this- googling it isn't turning up anything relevant- the English translations of the bible all seem to say Delilah called a man, and the man cut Samson's hair- with no indication that there's anything confusing about this verse.]
I always read this story from the NIV version of the bible, which says that Delilah called someone to shave Samson's hair, so I thought that was that. I didn't know there was anything unclear about the original text. I didn't know that the translator had to make a choice about how to make this make sense.
Honestly, if I had to guess, I would say that there's a lot we don't understand about ancient languages. Probably back when they were writing the bible, this grammar made sense, but the knowledge about what exactly this grammar means has been lost to time. Modern translators are doing their best, but the bible is written in ancient languages, and sometimes we really just don't know what they were trying to say.
Actually, I think it's misleading the way that I can open an English version of the bible and read sentences that are totally normal and understandable sentences. This does not reflect the reality that some things in the bible are confusing and unclear and the translators really don't know what they were trying to say.
But anyway, when I was reading the section about the question of who cut Samson's hair, I was thinking about how I would have viewed this when I was evangelical and had a "biblical inerrancy" mindset. I really believed the bible was completely true and without error- and therefore, this discussion about something in the bible that doesn't really make sense would have felt like an attack. I was used to thinking about biblical inerrancy in the context of arguing with atheists on the internet- ie, somebody posts a giant list of supposed "biblical contradictions", and then some Christian comes along and responds to every single one, to explain how it's not a contradiction. See, don't worry everyone, it totally is logically consistent to believe the bible is inerrant.
So, if you're a "the bible is inerrant" Christian, and some atheist on the internet says the bible has an error in this verse in Judges 16 where Delilah calls a man, but then the verb for cutting hair is feminine... Well I would have thought that this hypothetical internet atheist was being a bit ridiculous. Come on, this is such a small thing, nobody cares. It doesn't even count as an error. Clearly Delilah called a man to cut Samson's hair, and the verb is feminine even though it should be masculine, but that's just a minor grammar thing, you understand the meaning is that the man did it, and that's what's inerrant, regardless of this little grammar quirk. Why are you making such a big deal out of this? What do you got against the bible, that you spend your time arguing about feminine verb forms? Sounds like a you problem, hypothetical internet atheist.
In an inerrancy/apologetics mindset, you can't actually look at this for what it is. You have to see it as a potential error that we have to quickly gloss over before anyone notices.
I did so much of this "glossing over" when I was an evangelical. I read the bible every day, and I 100% believed it was inerrant, and therefore I was always subconsciously doing the work of reconciling the things in the bible that didn't exactly make sense. I wasn't able to even be aware of the possibility that something might be an error.
But wow, it's so DIFFERENT reading the bible when I don't have an emotional stake in it being inerrant. If this little detail about who cut Samson's hair is an error, well, that's fine, it doesn't affect my life, it doesn't completely invalidate everything I believe in. (Wow, on some level it's terrifying to read the bible if that's your mindset.)
Instead of being so terrified that some atheist from the internet is going to pop up and say this is an error in the bible, we can go beyond that and ask more questions. Why did the writer of the bible write it this way? Did they think it made sense, or did they make a mistake? Or were they copying from multiple sources that didn't exactly fit together?
Maybe there's actually an interesting reason for this weird grammar in this bible verse! Maybe we can learn something from looking at it in an honest way, rather than trying to ignore it because we can't deal with the idea that something in the bible might not make sense.
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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":
"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith"
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Related:
The Bible and the Pixar Theory
The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible
The Bible's Contradictions Matter, And It's Not a Logic Problem