Origins 📜
Chapter 21, “Son of God? The Suspicious Story of Samson’s Birth” from the book From Gods to God , by Yair Zakovitch and Avigdor Shinan, discusses the birth and possible links to Greek mythology in the Samson story.
They discuss the possibility that the original story, perhaps cleaned-up a bit by the final editors of the Hebrew scriptures, may have said that an Angel of the Lord had sex with Samson’s mother – making Samson the Son of a Heavenly Being. To quote:
The story’s intentions begin to emerge when we notice details that are provided at the end of the second meeting between the woman and the angel: “And the angel of God came to the woman again. She was sitting in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her” ( Judges 13:9). This time the meeting takes place not only without the husband but also outside the town, that is, with no witnesses, in the field — a place perfect for trouble.
Further, the authors suspect that the name Samson may be related to the word for ‘sun’, which would suggest that the story originally arose from pagan origins. To quote:
The storyteller, it seems, wanted to avoid providing any interpretation of the name in order to sidestep the inherent relationship between shimshon, “Samson,” and shemesh, “sun,” a relationship that reflects some sort of pagan, mythological belief.
The authors opine that the original (pre-biblical) story may have been related to other stories in the Old Testament about Giants:
It becomes clear that the story of Samson’s birth, as formulated in the book of Judges, was aimed at uprooting an ancient tradition that told how Samson was the son of a divine being and human woman, a tradition like that of the sons of god and daughters of men with which we dealt in chapter 2. And just as that story ended with the birth of giants, so, too, does the Bible allude to Samson’s exceptional physical dimensions in the story about his ripping out the gates of Gaza and carrying them to the top of the mountain that is near Hebron ( Judges 16:1–3).
The authors of “From Gods to God” note the similarities with Greek mythology:
This reconstructed tradition, according to which Samson was a giant born of a divine father and mortal mother, has parallels in the cultures that surrounded the ancient Israelites. Of particular interest to us is the story of the birth of Heracles. According to Greek myth, Heracles’s father was Zeus, the supreme god of the pantheon. Zeus comes to Thebes when Heracles’s mother, Alceme, is by the river and, disguised as her husband, Amphitryon (who is away at war), has intercourse with her. A short while later the triumphant Amphitryon returns home, only to wonder at his wife’s belief that she has already slept with him that day, and he, too, has relations with her. From these two consecutive couplings Alceme gives birth to twins, who were very different one from the other: the larger Heracles resembled his father, Zeus, in height, appearance, and ability, while his brother, the son of Amphitryon, was of human proportions. At Zeus’s bidding, Amphitryon was persuaded to raise Heracles as his son.
Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible by Philippe Wajdenbaum (2011). Israel Finkelstein has also argued for a Greek source behind Samson and other Old Testament stories (“The Philistines in the Bible: a late-monarchic perspective,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 27), although he attributes it to the Mycenaeans (Philistines) whereas Wajdenbaum would regard most of the Old Testament as a Hellenistic work.
━━━━━━━━
More on Origins 📜
Samson is most often compared to Herakles. What is interesting here is that the Herakles tradition itself may have been influenced by West Semitic myths. The interpretatio graeca of the Tyrian god Melqart recognized him as Herakles (as in the bilingual second century BCE inscription from Malta, cf. also Herodotus, Historiae 2.44), but the Herakles cycle itself contains features that can be traced to the Phoenicians. The eleventh labor of Herakles, for instance, has him travel to the Hesperides in the distant West, with Erytheia being the name of the island off Spain where the Phoenicians established a trading colony (Tartessos, biblical Tarshish). There Herakles encounters a garden with golden apples guarded by the dragon Ladon, which shares features with the Litan/Leviathan myth, the garden of jeweled trees at the extremity of the world in the Gilgamesh Epic, and Eden tradition in Genesis and Ezekiel. The biblical reference to Melqart in 1 Kings 18:27 is also reminiscent of the Herakles myth: “Has he wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is sleeping and must be awakened?” The festival for the awakening of Melqart (mentioned by Josephus) was possibly part of a dying-resurrection tradition akin to Baal-Hadad and the twelfth labor concerned Herakles’ journey to the underworld and back.
The Phoenicians established colonies and trading outposts throughout the Mediterranean and even in Greece itself and the likely locus of the mixing of Greek and Semitic ideas in the development of the Herakles cycle was Cyprus where Melqart had a prominent cult in Kition. The orientalization of Greek religion likely occurred by the 8th century BCE when Tyrian trade was at its zenith and Greece was in contact with the Assyrian empire. Aphrodite is generally thought to derive from the cult of Astarte; she is born from the foam of the waters of Paphos, Cyprus (where Aphrodite had a major cult center), and her consort Adonis (from Phoenician אדנ “lord”) was from Lebanon and the story of his death was an etiological myth explaining the reddish color of the Nahr Ibrahim river in Lebanon. The Samson stories are usually thought to be pretty late, dating to the Achaemenid or early Hellenistic periods. Babylonian destruction of the coastal Philistine cities was near total in 605 BCE and after Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Tyre was concluded, the Phoenicians gradually expanded into former Philistia and settled the land. Archaeological evidence shows clearly the existence of Phoenician, not Philistine, material culture in layers dating to the Persian period. Nehemiah 13:23-24 shows that there was considerable cultural exchange between the Jews of the Yehud and the Phoenician colony of Ashdod, with children of mixed marriages growing up bilingual speaking “half in the language of Ashdod”.
Later relations became more adversarial; Joel 4:4-6, dating to the fourth century BCE, describes the slave trade of Jews by Phoenician pirates operating out of Tyre, Sidon, and the coast of Philistia, who sold their captives to the Greeks (cf. Ezekiel 27:13; later the Hasmoneans would take over coastal piracy according to Josephus and Joannes Zonaras). If the Samson stories were composed during this period, then they may reflect attitudes and ideas from that time. Ashkelon was home to temples to Astarte, Derketo (Atargatis), and probably Herakles. The Samson stories thus may have reflected back certain Phoenician legends then-current in Philistia. There was another Greek hero however with close ties to Philistia: Perseus, who rescued Andromeda from the sea monster at Joppa. The story of Jonah, which was set in Joppa and involves a large fish swallowing the prophet, may have some vague relation to this.
Kugel explains that the Philistines are understood to have originated across the Mediterranean, and perhaps to have been among the “Sea Peoples” described in Egyptian history as having invaded the Egyptian and perhaps Canaanite coast. He suggests that the Samson story, focused as it is on the Philistines and thematically different from most of the Bible and more similar to Aegean mythology, is an adaption by the Israelites of a Philistines legend of Aegean origin
See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09018328.2017.1376519?journalCode=sold20
In the past scholars have suspected that Greek legends about Heracles and other Greek narratives may have influenced the emergence of the Samson narratives in Judges 13-16. Usually Philistine mediation of these Heracles legends to the Israelites in the pre-monarchic era was suggested. However, the author suggests that the Heracles legends arose in the sixth century BCE and later, so the biblical author could have encountered Greek stories only in the Persian or Hellenistic eras. The Samson narratives then would be a late redaction into the Deuteronomistic History. The author believes that the large number of similarities indicates not simply familiarity with general folkloristic motifs, but rather that the author of the Samson narratives was familiar with the Heracles legends.
https://brill.com/view/journals/vt/37/1-4/article-p63_7.xml
Samson as Israelite Folktale
Scholars have long been searching for the historical-critical origin of the Samson narrative, and near the end of the nineteenth century, scholars began to make connections between Samson and the Sun (Mobley, Samson, 6). Theorists were inspired by cuneiform literature and compared Samson, Gilgamesh, and Herakles, or Hercules, speculating that each hero represented a fallen solar deity. The sun was a powerful force in the lives of ancient peoples, and the Semites were no exception . The ancient song of Deborah refers to sun, כטת השמש בגברתו “like the going out of the sun its/his force,” and is accompanied by other ancient personifications of the sun (Palmer, The Samson Saga, 59-60). Many attributes of solar deities are also shared by Samson, such as being judge of the land and having “valiant strength,” and Samson does not fit the role of divinely appointed Judge of Israel as easily as his fellow Judges do.
Also, Samson is to have lived between Tzorah and Eshtaol, where Zakovitch writes that “the town of Beit Šemeš was located,” though the name is avoided in the Samson narrative. Zakovitch also suggests that redaction took place in Judg 14:18, where the word for sun is החרסה, instead of the expected שמש. He also suggests redaction concerning Samson’s birth resulting from sexual relations between his mother and the angel.
Zakovitch is convinced of pagan origins, stating that it is “clear that the story of Samson’s birth, as formulated in the book of Judges, was aimed at uprooting an ancient tradition that told how Samson was the son of a divine being and human woman, a tradition like that of the [Rephaim.]” The literary construction of the barren woman may be the remnant of “the mythical motif about gods having relations with women.” It is not far off that Samson was one of the famous rephaim giants, his strength alone demands such. It should be noted that Zakovitch’s point is not that the Samson narrative must have happened this way, but that the heroic tale draws from mythologies of surrounding cultures, tapping into something of a common mythos, such as the rephaim. The Jewish tradition took familiar myths, replaced notions of divine parentage with human parentage, and in doing prevented a character such as Samson from achieving divinity. For all his feats of strength he is but a human being, and his story ends in death. Perhaps the Samson we possess today is a Dtr monotheistic redaction of a popular heroic folk tale.
Mobley is thoroughly unconvinced of solar elements in the Samson narrative, calling such theories “imaginative but forced allusions to astral activity.” There have been efforts to connect “Samson’s hair as the rays of the sun; the donkey jawbone as lightning; [and] Delilah as a lunar goddess,” but Mobley emphasizes the present text, and has determined that there is not enough evidence to justify a solar myth reading. Mobley rejects solar deity association, but he acknowledges Samson sharing tradition similar to that of the next major aspect of the historical-critical approach, the comparison of Samson to Herakles.
There has been a long tradition of comparing Samson to Herakles, beginning in the Middle Ages by the Church Fathers and persisting until the late twentieth century. The speculative divine and human parentage should not only invoke the rephaim to mind, but also Herakles. Zeus, the supreme Greek god, impregnated Herakles mother, an ancient heroic motif that could have been replaced by the Hebrew motif of the barren woman whose womb is “opened” by YHWH. Othniel Margalith wrote fairly recently about the parallels between Samson and Herakles, and his work includes most of the previous theories of parallel, so it shall be the prime Herakles-Samson work examined here.
Margalith’s main argument is that Samson is a Semitic Herakles, an Iron Age I Israelite, or Danite, composition that drew from their Philistine neighbors that lived along the coast while Israel inhabited the highlands. He arrives at this conclusion by way of the Greek motifs shared in the story of Samson, and follows the theory, and interpretation of the archaeological data, that the Philistines were sea peoples originating from Mycenaean Greece, reaching the Levant ca. 1175 BCE. The Judges period is roughly 1200-1000 BCE. Mobley writes that “it is believed that the Herakles tradition goes back at least to Mycenaean times , if not earlier,” but it is impossible to reconstruct a Mycenaean Herakles tradition. Most of the allusions to Herakles have been located to the fifth century BCE and later, around the time when the Samson narrative was in the process of being developed, until the sixth century BCE and the Dtr. This seems like enough probable cause for a starting point, as research has been written on uncertain foundations before, but Mobley proposes that this uncertainty “severely weakens” the connection between Samson and Herakles.
Another of Margolith’s arguments is that Samson’s physical strength is unrivaled in the Bible. Everyone else, even the towering Saul, was “certainly a mere mortal,” but Samson was “endowed with superhuman powers,” as a result of his hair, an experience that was not like the Nazarite vow described in Numbers 6. A concept of magic and holy hair is present in Greek mythology, though no exact parallel to Samson exists. The rarity and strangeness of the riddle is also telling, as the answer to the riddle does not seem to be any natural phenomenon at all, except that in Greek mythology bees are linked to carcasses, there was a Bee-god, and a riddle in the tale of Oedipus. Mobley combats Margolith’s conclusions, stating that Shamgar from Judg 3:31 and David’s gibbôrîm are credited with feats of great strength, and that a riddle is exactly the kind of oral tradition that could escape being recorded. There is no reason why the Israelites could not come up with their own riddles or their own “superman.”
Margolith proposes that “the hero bewitched by a woman’s wiles,” the primitive weapon of slaughter, the primal unarmed killing of a lion, and an association with the city-gates all stem from similar stories in Greek mythology. On the event of Samson and the foxes specifically, he proposes that it is a legend that explains the Greek idiom behind the Greek word for fox, “torch tail.” Mobley explains these apparent connections, that the aforementioned parallels exist “in other cultural traditions, [and] are common folklore motifs that cannot be claimed as the legacy of any single culture,” and that the torch-tale parallel is “too far-fetched.” Mobley again focuses on the present text in its entirety, taking into account the differences in the present traditions, and he argues that no prior tradition of Herakles can even be located. He does conclude, however, that the similarities between Samson and Herakles suggests folklore motifs at work, and this study will next take a brief look at the perspective of folklore.