The first three verses present Samson sowing "wild oats."Verses 4-21 picture him reaping a bitter harvest (cf. Gal. 6:7).
Samson allowed a woman to seduce him again. She lived in the Sorek Valley between Samson's home area of Zorah and Eshtaol and the Philistine town of Timnah. The place itself was a compromise between Israelite and Philistine territory. Her name Delilah is evidently Jewish and probably means "devotee"or "worshipper."279However she seems to have been a Philistine, possibly a temple prostitute.280Her devotion to the Philistines is obvious in the text, and her devotion to their gods may well have motivated her actions in this instance. Evidently she and her family had chosen to live among the attractive and advanced enemies of God's people.
"It is strange that Samson's three loves should have been numbered amongst his inveterate enemies, the Philistines."281
Samson posed a great threat to the Philistines. The leading lords of the Philistines initiated the plan to capture him, and they offered a reward that would have made Delilah rich (v. 5). "Eleven hundred . . . of silver"was a fortune since a person could live comfortably on "10 . . . of silver"a year (17:10).
Samson may not have possessed an abnormally muscular physique since the Philistines did not know where he got his great strength.
"The Philistine princes thought that Samson's supernatural strength arose from something external, which he wore or carried about with him as an amulet."282
Moral compromise always makes one vulnerable to temptation. We see this in Samson's case and in Delilah's in these verses. Temptation usually comes in attractive packages. The wrong companions can lead us into temptation (cf. 1 Cor. 15:33). Temptation is persistent (cf. Matt. 4). Yielding to temptation starts us on a toboggan slide. We find ourselves going faster and faster down hill, and soon we can get off only with great personal pain.
The seven fresh cords (v. 7) were probably common catgut cords that the Philistines used for bowstrings or the strings of their harps. If so, they were unclean for Samson. Perhaps Samson specified seven of these since the Israelites regarded seven as a complete number. New ropes (v. 11) had not worked previously (cf. 15:13-14), but perhaps the lords of the Philistines were unaware of this. It is difficult to explain exactly what Samson meant when he instructed Delilah to weave the locks of his hair with a web and pin (vv. 13-14). The commentators all struggle with what the writer wrote and what Delilah did. Apparently Delilah wove Samson's long hair with some kind of loom and left it fastened in this primitive machine.
". . . The words in question are to be understood as referring to something that was done to fasten Samson still more securely."283
"Ironically, the words tightened it with [=drove'] the pin' (titqa' bayyated, v. 14) are the same ones used of Jael, who drove the tent peg into Sisera's head (4:21). Though Delilah did not kill Samson in the same way, she was to become as important a heroine among the Philistines as Jael had been in Israel."284
The fact that Samson told Delilah to do something to his hair (v. 13) suggests that he was giving her a clue to his strength. She did not pick this up but kept hounding him for his secret. Finally he gave in (v. 17; cf. 14:17).
Why did Samson continue to give Delilah reasons for his strength even when she threatened him with violence by the Philistines? He may have done so because they were playing a game together and teasing each other. Samson liked riddles (14:12). He seems to have uprooted Gaza's gates in sport too. Samson thought he was playing "Here come the Philistines!"but really he was playing Russian roulette.
It is incredible that Samson would have told Delilah the secret of his strength if he had thought she really intended to betray him. Evidently Samson had so much self-confidence because of his physical strength that he thought he could control this situation. He even appears to have felt that he was stronger than God. He expected God to behave on his terms rather than submitting to God's terms, namely, his Nazirite vow. Sin, if persisted in, makes a person irrational and vulnerable. Such is its deceitfulness (cf. 1 Cor 6:18; 2 Tim. 2:22). Samson thought he was strong, but really he was weak.285
"This man is indeed all brawn and no brain."286
"The hypocrisy of Delilah, pretending to love but all the time plotting the death of her lover, can be left without comment."287
It is for this behavior that she has become an infamous figure in history. Like Judas Iscariot, Delilah betrayed a friend for money.
The reason Samson lost his strength was only secondarily that he allowed Delilah to cut his hair. The real reason was that "the Lord had departed from him"(v. 20). When God's Spirit departed from someone under the Old Covenant, the results were disastrous (cf. 1 Sam. 16:14; Ps. 51:11).
"Forty years, Samson had kept one part of his vow. He had broken all the other parts, but he had kept his hair unshaven, as a sign of his commitment to God. He had not made a very strong commitment or felt a deep faith, but he had trusted God at least in this. There was no magic in his hair. It was only a symbol of his separation to God. But if his hair was shaved, Samson's feeble dedication would crumble completely."288
"The fact that God worked through Samson need not denote approval of his lifestyle. In God's sovereignty the Holy Spirit came on men for particular tasks, and this enduing was not necessarily proportionate to one's spirituality. The Spirit's power enabled men to inspire Israel (6:34; 11:29) and to perform great feats of strength (14:6, 19; 15:14). But it was a temporary enduement, and Samson and later Saul tragically discovered that the Lord had left them. The NT experience of the permanent indwelling of the Holy Spirit was not known in OT times."289
Samson was fatally unwise in sharing his secret with Delilah. His willingness to do so seems traceable to his lack of appreciation of two things. He failed to appreciate his personal calling by God and the fact that his strength lay solely in God's power working through him as a holy instrument. These are the same failures that Israel manifested and that resulted in her experiencing a fate similar to Samson's during the period of the judges. They have caused many other servants of God to fall since Samson's day too.
Samson's spiritual blindness resulted in his becoming blind physically (v. 21). The Philistines seized him in Gaza as he had seized the Philistines' gate there (v. 3).290Since he chose to be the slave of his physical passions rather than his God, God disciplined him with physical slavery. The Philistines may have tied him to a large millstone like an ox and compelled him to pull it in a circular pattern, or he may have ground a hand mill.
"Grinding a hand mill was the hardest and lowest kind of slave labour (compare Ex. xi. 5 with xii. 29); and both Greeks and Romans sentenced their slaves to this as a punishment . . ."291
"This occupation was not only menial, it was humiliating, since it was invariably women's work . . ."292
Poor blind Samson found himself chained in the prison in Gaza where he had performed his greatest feat of strength (v. 30). Previously he had demonstrated great physical strength there, but now he was very weak physically.
