* * *
The wife of Manoah goes to her husband and tells him about the encounter, and we have already observed that her report sounds almost apologetic and overly detailed: ostensibly revealing all, but in fact omitting much. It is worth mentioning here that any number of commentators on the story – including poets and playwrights, painters and novelists who over the years have explored the character of Samson – have hinted that Samson was born of a liaison between his mother and the ‘man of God’. Others, notably Vladimir Jabotinsky in his wonderful novel Samson the Nazarite, went so far as to raise the possibility that Samson was the product of a romance between his mother and a flesh-and-blood Philistine.2 According to this reading, the business of the ‘man of God who came to me’ was simply a cover story that she invented in order to explain away her embarrassing pregnancy to Manoah. This hypothesis, of course, adds extra spice to the saga of Samson’s complex relations with the Philistines. But we, tempted though we are, will trust instead the version given by Samson’s mother, since we shall soon discover that, even if she spoke the whole truth, her great, fateful betrayal was not, in the end, at the expense of her husband.
For, after she announces to Manoah that they will have a son, she recites to him the second bit of the angel’s message – which, it will be recalled, she quotes with less than complete accuracy. She omits to mention the prohibition of hair-cutting; likewise the boy’s future role as national saviour. ‘The boy is to be a Nazirite of God from the womb’, she says, and concludes with a few words of her own: ‘until his dying day’.
And this is surely a strange addendum: a woman, who has just learned that she will bear a child after long years of infertility, tells her husband what will be expected of their son – and then speaks of his dying day?
Even someone who is not a parent, who has never experienced that special moment at which the expectant couple gets the good news, knows that on such an occasion there is nothing farther from their hearts and minds than the ‘dying day’ of the unborn child. And even if many anxious parents are preoccupied, even to the point of obsession, with the dangers and disasters that lie in wait for their children, they are nonetheless not inclined, on the whole, to imagine their youngster as an elderly person, decrepit, nearing the end – and certainly not as dead. To construct such a mental picture requires a strenuous, almost violent act of estrangement that would appear antithetical to the natural instincts of parenthood.
A woman who thinks and speaks out loud about the dying day of the child that is only beginning to take shape in her womb requires a remarkable measure of grim sobriety. Such a woman, at a moment like this, assumes a posture of cruel alienation – from the child, from the father who hears such words, and, no less, from herself.
What, then, has driven Manoah’s wife to add these words?
Again, let’s ‘rewind the tape’ and try to examine what exactly has happened. The angel brings the woman the news, then vanishes. She hurries to her husband, as the mixed message swirls inside her: she is, or will soon become, pregnant; but the child – how to put it? – is not completely hers, is not as other children are to their mothers. He has been deposited within her, as it were, for safekeeping, and she knows that things that are deposited must, in the end, be returned.
Something begins to weigh on her, to slow her down: who, then, is this child that grows within her? Is he wholly made of the essence, the blood and bone, of his parents? If so, why does she faintly sense that even now he is diluted by another essence, foreign and inscrutable, something puzzling and superhuman (and therefore, perhaps, inhuman too)?
Here, in a mental leap forward of several thousand years, what comes to mind is a touching newspaper interview that was once conducted with the mother of Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Russian physicist and Nobel laureate. She spoke of her son with pride, of course, and with love, but at the end of the interview said, with a kind of a sigh: ‘Sometimes I feel like a chicken who has given birth to an eagle.’ And in those words could be heard a trace of astonishment. One could sense the wonder in her eyes, which distanced the son from the mother’s heart and put him in a place where she could look at him with total objectivity, as if he were a ‘phenomenon’, or an utter stranger: as if the mother herself were putting her son on a high pedestal, and looking at him from the same vantage – the same distance – that any other person might, and from this place she whispers, who are you? How much are you really mine?
And perhaps Samson’s mother too, even as she goes to bring her husband the good news, is lacerated by such questions – how much of him is mine? Is this the child I prayed for? Will I be able to give him the bountiful, natural love that for so long I have yearned to give a child of my own?
And then, when she meets her husband and speaks out loud, the words suddenly penetrate her mind with full force, and with all their complex implications. When she reaches the words ‘for he will be a Nazirite of God from the womb’, it is almost possible to feel how something inside her is blocked, stunned, frozen, and instead of quoting the angel’s words completely, she swallows them and blurts out different, unexpected ones, that perhaps took even her by surprise: ‘until his dying day’.
And if we have dwelt exhaustively upon this moment, it is because we sense that someone whose mother could look upon him, if only for a moment, from such a distance, whose mother mourned him even before his birth, will always be somewhat alienated and remote in his dealings with others. He will always lack the capacity for simple human contact that comes so naturally to most people, and will never be able to be – as Samson himself phrased it, toward the end of his life – ‘an ordinary man’.
And thus, even if Samson’s mother has been miraculously ‘cured’ of her barrenness, it would seem that she has directly passed along to her son the barrenness-as-metaphor that sets a person apart from the vital core of human existence – a unique case of ‘hereditary sterility’.
Yet it is God, and not Samson’s mother, who has decreed that he will be a Nazirite, in other words, a person who places a partition between himself and life – and indeed in the Hebrew word nazir we hear a suggestive conflation of the root ndr, meaning ‘vow’, and the word zar, ‘stranger’. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that it is also the mother’s view of her son – her intimate gaze upon the embryo she carries, and her chilling verdict – which no less than God’s command has determined the fateful course of his life until his dying day.
* * *
The strangeness conferred upon the unborn child is soon multiplied. Manoah, taken by surprise, prays to God and requests further instructions: ‘Oh, my Lord! Please let the man of God that You sent come to us again and let him instruct us how to act with the boy that is to be born.’
‘The boy that is to be born?’ Still in his mother’s womb, Samson is already classified by his father, assigned a formal, arm’s-length definition. For even if Manoah’s lips have longed for many years to pronounce the words ‘our son’, ‘my child’, ‘my boy’, he takes care to use the term used by the man of God as quoted by his wife, perhaps because he senses that he must, even now, maintain an awestruck distance from one who will soon be an exalted figure.
And Manoah perhaps guesses something more: that it will be necessary to handle this child like a precious vessel – maybe too precious – which is possibly beyond the spiritual means of its own parents; and that this will not be a child who can be raised according to one’s natural instincts alone; and God, I beg of you, kindly furnish additional instructions …
And indeed, the angel returns, but again chooses to appear before the wife as ‘she was sitting in the field and her husband Manoah was not with her’. And thus the impression is strengthened that the angel for some reason prefers to entrust the information, the secret, to the woman, and that he endeavours to meet with her when she is alone, and not merely ‘alone’, but when her husband is