Lion's Honey. David Grossman,

air, the thoughts flying through her head, as she reaches Manoah and tells him that the same man, ‘the man who came to me before’, has appeared to her once again.

      Vayakom vayelech Manoah aharei ishto: ‘Manoah rose and followed his wife.’

      The ring and resonance of these words convey the slow, heavy movements of Manoah, whose name means ‘rest’ and, in more recent Hebrew, also means ‘late’, in the sense of ‘deceased’. Thus, in five words that stand in amusing contrast to ‘the woman ran in haste to tell her husband’, the narrator sketched a sluggard of sorts who drags after his quick, energetic wife. Indeed Manoah was chastised by the rabbinic authors of the Talmud, who labelled him an am ha’aretz, an ignoramus, for transgressing a cardinal rule of gender: ‘A man does not walk behind a woman on the road, even his own wife – and, even if he finds himself on a bridge with her, she should be beside him, and whoever walks behind a woman when crossing a river will have no share in the world to come.’3

      So Manoah follows his wife, meets the stranger, attempts to size him up. Although he had earlier explicitly requested that the Almighty bring back the ‘man of God’, Manoah may not yet be free of a nagging suspicion about the fellow whom his wife met alone in the field – twice – after which she knew immediately that she was to bear a child. ‘Are you the man who spoke to my wife?’ he demands, and the reader can imagine, beyond the words, the dejected look he directs at the angel, and hear the mixture of mistrust and jealousy and the irritable humility of a man who cannot help but recognise his own inferiority.

      Note that Manoah does not ask ‘Are you the man who came to my wife?’ Perhaps something restrains him from using that blunt word, whose utterance in such a charged setting – two men, one possibly pregnant woman – could well push the three into out-and-out confrontation. Yet at the same time, Manoah calls the stranger a ‘man’ and not ‘the man of God’, and juxtaposes the words ‘man’ and ‘wife’, coupling the two in an intimate cocoon while he stands outside, thus exposing further his suspicions and the jealousy that flickers behind his question.4