Lion's Honey (5 page)

They are on their way. Samson, his father and his mother have set out from Zorah towards the woman from Timnah, on trails that wind through dry brambles and late-summer fields of dusty stubble.

Long-legged Samson walks in broad strides, drawn towards Timnah by a powerful force. Ordinary mortals would find it hard to keep pace with him. His parents doubtless need to stop now and again and catch their breath; here, for example, on a hilltop at the southwest crest of the Zorah ridge, overlooking the valley of Nahal Sorek, they stand, take a breath, wipe their sweaty faces. In those days the area was thickly wooded – ‘as plentiful as sycamores in the Shephelah plain’
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was once a simile for abundance – but today the trees are sparse, the hills
exposed. The sycamores have been replaced by pines, planted by the Jewish National Fund, which in the thick air of a Levantine sirocco look almost grey. Below, in the plain, lies the city of Beit Shemesh, with its roads and rooftops and industrial zones, and the flat drainage basins of the surrounding streams, sparkling like mirrors, and something flaming red-orange in the distance – maybe a tree has caught fire in the searing
hamsin
wind, or maybe it’s just burning garbage – and Samson’s back disappears over the saddle of the ridge, into the valley, down to Timnah.

And here, at the entrance to the vineyards of Timnah, a roaring lion appears before him, one of those that were indigenous to the Land of Israel in those days, but have since become extinct. The divine spirit then descends upon Samson: quick as a wink he tears the lion apart ‘as one might tear a kid asunder’. He does so with his bare hands, ‘but he did not tell his father and mother what he had done’.

Two things cry out here for interpretation: how is it possible that his parents didn’t witness the battle? This puzzle can be solved with perfectly
simple explanations: he was walking faster than they were; he knew a shortcut but they were on the main road; or maybe, while his parents walked through the vineyards of Timnah, he circumvented them so as not to transgress the Nazirite prohibition against any contact with grapes.
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The second question is more difficult: he is walking along with his parents, tears a lion limb from limb with his bare hands, and says nothing. Why is he silent? Out of modesty? Or perhaps he considers the event insignificant? Hard to believe, not only because the feat itself is so extraordinary, but because it will quickly become apparent that Samson keeps replaying it in his mind, and even boasting about it.

Then maybe he is silent because he senses that the episode with the lion doesn’t ‘connect’ with his relationship to his parents, or with his relations with human beings in general? In other words, it’s possible that Samson senses that the battle with the lion is some sort of sign, part of a secret code in which he communicates with that ‘divine spirit’ within him; a sort of sign-language through which
God reconfirms the special bond between them, and instructs him to stay the course and trust the impulses that guide him, even when they contradict his parents’ wishes.

Because what he has done to the lion is so vastly beyond any human scale, is it possible that Samson is simply
wary
of involving his parents, so as not to give them further proof of just how different he is, and alien to them? For someone like him understands too well that every additional piece of evidence will distance his parents from him a little more, and each of these progressive acts of distancing – even as they are vital signs of his uniqueness – are deeply painful, cutting him off bit by bit, culminating in utter exile.

And it’s also a possibility that what he has discovered about
himself
, while battling the lion, has frightened him: the hidden superhuman power that has burst out and revealed itself to him for the first time has, perhaps, also shocked him and created a partition between Samson and his new, larger-than-life self that does not fully belong to the human race.

And perhaps someone seen by his parents as a stranger when he was still in the womb, who even then was deprived of full parental approval, is fated to be forever a little suspicious of himself. Wary of a strange and inscrutable aspect of his being, an aspect that is – exactly like the angel who brought his parents the news – ‘miraculous’, mysterious and unknowable, and therefore a continuing source of wonder and doubt. And it’s possible to go a step further, and gather that someone who is thus sentenced to self-doubt is likely to be uncertain not only about whether he is the legitimate child of his parents: there also remains that faint, lingering doubt as to whether he is a ‘legitimate’ member of the human family altogether, whether he is ‘like other people’, and this corrosive uncertainty is something he can never shed. There will always be a stranger inside him, a hidden, hostile passenger – perhaps even a fifth column, a saboteur.

He arrives in Timnah, and again meets the Philistine woman, and no doubt quietly looks her up and down, to confirm that she is to his taste (and also pays close attention to his parents’ reactions to her). And again the narrator emphasises, after this encounter too, that ‘she pleased Samson’, she was ‘right’ for him. Meanwhile the reader, who knows that this new love is nothing other than a divinely selected pretext for striking back at the Philistines, contemplates the sad disparity between Samson’s romantic impulses and what God intends to make of them.

When Samson, ‘after a while’, comes back to marry the woman, he returns to see ‘the remains of the lion’. He doesn’t merely return, but ‘turned aside to see the remains’ – in other words, he has detoured from his path to his future wife in order to look once more at the dead lion.

It’s not difficult, of course, to empathise with him, to understand his need to go back and relish the hour of glory that remains sealed secretly inside him. But one can also imagine that he goes there because, as the days have passed (and ‘days’ here might well mean
a whole year), even he himself has begun to doubt whether indeed this great thing actually happened to him, or whether it was only a dream. Or does he simply feel a need to return to the place where he scored his grand victory, in order to reconfirm his manliness before he goes to the woman?

And then, as he stands before the dead lion, he sees ‘in the lion’s skeleton a swarm of bees and honey, and scooped it into his palms’.
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Samson, a grown man – nowhere in the text is he described as a giant – stands in wonder at the sight. Before his eyes, bees buzz around the skeleton. Honey has accumulated inside the lion. Samson extends his hand – without fear of the bees – and scoops honey into his mouth, and it touches the reader’s heart as he reaches out so simply, innocently, spontaneously: he sees, he wants, he takes … And just as he killed the lion with his bare hands, so too does he scoop out the honey from inside it, not with a ladle or into a jar, but with his
hands
, and then ‘ate it as he went along. When he rejoined his father and mother, he gave them some and they ate it; but he did not
tell them that he had scooped the honey out of a lion’s skeleton.’

Take a look at him: a he-man with a little licking boy inside. (How astonishing and poignant, this gulf between enormous physical strength and an immature, childlike soul.) He walks and eats, walks and licks, till he gets home to mum and dad, and gives them the honey, ‘and they ate it’, apparently straight from the palms of his hands. What a marvellous, sensual scene!

But would it be too much to imagine that Samson, walking and licking the honey, begins to discern something entirely new? Something that will be woven into the fabric of his life from now on, which breaks through as Samson heads home, a private revelation of sorts that is bound up with the sight of the lion’s skeleton and the taste of the honey, and also the linkage of these sensations with the feelings aroused in him by the woman to whom he is going …

For it is likely that when Samson saw this remarkable sight, the honey in the lion, he was pierced by a new, almost prophetic intuition, something born
inside him as he absorbed the immense symbolic significance of such a powerful image. Something connected in an altogether new way with perception, with a way of looking at reality, indeed something akin to a world-view.

He looks at the lion and the honey pooling inside it. Certainly he is strongly affected: after all, this image will figure in the riddle he will soon pose at his wedding party. He sees the extraordinary scene that he himself created: it was he who killed the lion. Because of him the bees built their hive there and made their honey, the sweet honey that now fills his mouth … and as his senses blend one into the other, is it not probable that he becomes spontaneously excited over something that is a powerful sight, oddly beautiful, utterly unique, and that also radiates a sense of deep, hidden, symbolic meaning?

How to define such a moment? We have already called it ‘revelation’. But may we cautiously add that this is also the moment at which Samson, the consummate strongman, suddenly discovers the way in which an
artist
looks at the world?

And if it seems peculiar, at this stage of the story, to describe Samson as an artist, it is from this moment onward, from his encounter with the lion’s honey, that he will display a clear tendency to mould reality – whatever reality he may come in contact with – and stamp it with his own unique signature, and, one might add, his
style
.

And even if Samson is not an artist in any traditional or classical sense, it is possible that at this moment, facing the remains of the lion, he senses that there is a clue hidden here for him. A clue that leads to a new and unfamiliar dimension of reality, or at least a new way of seeing it that is more than just passive observation, but contains the powers of creation and renewal – triggered in him, perhaps, by the humming of life inside the skeleton – and through which he can mitigate, without sacrificing his singularity, the strange loneliness into which he was born.

He goes on his way, honey dripping from his palms, heads home to mum and dad, a giant child, hiding secrets, feeding them from his hands, ‘but he
did not tell them that he had scooped the honey out of a lion’s skeleton’. In other words, even now he does not tell them how he tore the lion apart, or where he got the honey. And no less amazing: they don’t ask him a thing. Maybe they are afraid to ask. Afraid of an answer that might expose the yawning chasm between them.

Because they keep silent, he does too. Maybe he hopes that something will become clear to them, without words or even a hint on his part. That they will guess (the way kids always hope their parents will find them out): they’ll float some theory, say, regarding the source of the honey, or they’ll make a joke about the unusual scent of this sticky stuff, and along the way, with sudden, sharp intuition, they will also guess something about Samson himself, about their son’s true self, which has been hidden or withheld from them.

With all that, despite the heavy silence, or maybe because of it, there is also something mischievous, full of
joie de vivre
and even humour, to be found in this family moment, which has no
parallel anywhere in the Bible: They say nothing, do not ask, he doesn’t tell, and nevertheless it is so appealing to imagine Samson waving his hands high, and his parents, doubtless smaller than he is, jumping at him with mouths wide open and tongues hanging out, and Samson howling with glee, playing with his parents, touching them and dancing for them and laughing with them like any normal person, with the honey dripping, flowing down a cheek, sliding to the chin, being licked up, as the laughter swells to the point of tears …

With these drops of honey he is telling them something that apparently he can tell them no other way. And – incidentally – it was so urgent for him to tell them this that he forgot where he was going: he had, we recall, been on his way to Timnah! What had happened to him, that all of a sudden he turned around and headed home, to father and mother? Did he suddenly forget he was on his way to take a wife? (And here, of course, the words of Gersonides again ring true: Samson was ‘like a bell that strikes this way and that’.)

And in this spontaneous, almost instinctive action, we can clearly see the extent to which he oscillates between the desire to leave his parents and build a life as a mature adult, and his yearning to be with them, to win their approval again and again. The umbilical cord that connects them will continue to stretch and contract throughout the entire story. And maybe precisely because that cord, from the beginning, had joined Samson and his mother in so unorthodox a fashion, the bond was never susceptible to being cut in a natural way. And already here we wonder – is this not the ambivalence that will prevent Samson, throughout his life, from ever falling in love with a woman who can truly sever that umbilical cord and tie him to herself in a natural manner, as man is tied to wife?

But this question will be asked in due time. Meanwhile, Samson is still with them, with his parents, and they are eating the honey from his cupped hands. And as we said, for Samson it is perhaps the very honey that was scooped from inside the lion, this ‘lionised’ honey, which makes concrete
what he never knew how to put into words, what he always yearned to explain to his parents: that they should understand that he – despite the destiny that was decreed in the womb, which cut him off from them and appropriated his life for some hidden divine purpose, and notwithstanding his huge muscles and incomparable strength – he still very much needs their understanding, their love, their repeated approval. ‘Here, look,’ he is saying in effect to them, as they suckle his fingers, ‘look what I have inside, under all these muscles, muscles like a lion’s, and under this mane I am forbidden to cut; and under this mission, too, which has been imposed upon me, this regal fate to which I have been sentenced. Look inside me. Just once, look deep inside me, and you will finally see that “out of the strong came something sweet”.’

And his father and mother continue to lick the honey from his hands, but now, as the playfulness and laughter start to fade, the old uneasiness begins to gnaw at them. They can’t look straight at him because he, it would seem, was never quite right with
them. Of course they sense his need and desire to be close to them – a simple, homey, familial closeness – and they, too, want to be with him, and sense his love for them, and wish, like every parent, to love their child with all their hearts; but there is always that barrier. Something that gets in the way. Something that doubtless makes him someone worthy of pride, but not fully understood. Important, but not quite loved.