part 3
*Samson's riddle.* -- According to old and new criticism, by Budde and others, there is a glaring contradiction between the real or original Samson, the boisterous village hero of whom many stories were told, and the religious Samson, the judge of Israel, who was dedicated to God as a Nazarite "from the womb to the day of his death". It is admitted, however, that there is a peculiar unity in the text of the story as it has come down to us in the Book of Judges, notwithstanding the apparent incongruity of making Samson a Nazarite. The Nazarites are mentioned as early as the prophecies of Amos, having been allowed to drink wine in the laxity of morals then prevailing. Samson is not only the earliest Nazarite known, but he is a Nazarite indeed, inasmuch as his vow was not terminable after a certain period, as in the ritual of the Book of Numbers, but was imposed upon him from the womb to the day of his death. In that respect he has no compeer until John the Baptist. At the same time, he is the typical village hero, adored for his strength, boldness, cunning, and wit, and gratified by numerous amours. Budde remarks that many must have known a modern counterpart in village life. Two instances in literature occur to one as containing the elements of a modern Samson legend, -- the Oetzthal hero in Madame von Hillern's *Geier Wally*, and the hero or *jigit* of the village on the Terek in Tolstoy's early work, *The Cossacks*. Budde, who would eliminate altogether the Nazarite vow from the real Samson legend, is surprised that the hero does not eat and drink to excess: "Excess, or at least enormous capacity, in eating and in drinking strong liquors, is amongst the things that may almost be taken for granted. It is strange enough that this trait is not strikingly displayed in Samson. Who knows, whether from the store of legends that circulated regarding him, there may not have dropped out this or that portion dealing with the subject in question?" (Art. "Samson", in Hasting's, *Dict. of the Bible.* Edin. 1902.) Josephus appears to have entertained a similar suspicion; for, in his paraphrase of Delilah's attempts to bind Samson, he makes on of the attempts to be made upon him when he was drunk with wine. But it is impossible to take out the Nazarite vow from the story as we find it; that thread is woven inextricably into the tapestry; and it may be assumed that Samson's unshorn head was meant to symoblise his constancy to the vow -- or, at all events, to the letter of it. My view (which I submit with deference to the professed Biblical critics) is, that the method of the literary artist, who composed the existing story, is consistently ironical and witty. Anyone, who has had his attention directed to the point, will have found that the instances of Biblical wit are more numerous that might be supposed from the solemnity of commentators. Why should not this ancient literature have had its sallies of wit and humour as well as another? The Hebrew grammars, remark that the humorous figure of paronomasia, or pun, is more indigenous to the Semitic than to any other languages.
Samson's riddle, on the surface, was a mild pleasantry, hardly worth investing with the dignity of enigma; it has even been questioned, whether it was a fair problem, considering that it was based upon one particular if not unique incident known to himself. He killed a young lion, and threw the carcase into a wood; in passing that way some time after, he turned aside to look at it, and found that a swarm of bees had built their combs inside the ribs. (This is the natural reading, which is adopted by Josephus in his paraphrase.) He ate some of the honey, and gave some of it to his father and mother; but, for some deep reason, he abstained from telling his parents that the honey had been taken from inside the skeleton of a lion. At his wedding feast some time after, he propounded a certain riddle to the thirty young men of Timnath, who were the wedding guests, and laid a wager that they would not guess the answer within a week. Being still at fault on the seventh day, they went to Samson's wife, and induced her to coax the answer from her husband. Samson answered: "Behold, I have not told my father and my mother, and shall I tell thee?" However, he told her the incident of the lion and the bees, and she told the young men of the village, who came to Samson with this confident and jubilant solution, "What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?" Samson answered oracularly, "If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle". This answer appears to have been given ironically, with his tongue in his cheek, the reservation being, that their ploughing (with a heifer) had been but shallow, that they had not got to the bottom of the matter at all. He may be assumed to have been still in his ironical mood when he proceeded to pay the forfeit, by killing thirty other Philistines of Ashkelon and stripping them of their shirts to give to the thirty Philistines of Timnath.
Leaving these evidences of ironical behaviour, let us turn to the famous riddle itself. Is it possible that it can have any deeper meaning than the incident of the bees' nest in the lion's carcase?
What I suspect in Samson's riddle is *an ambiguity in the terms in which it was stated*. To those who heard it, it might mean either what it means as printed in the text, or it might mean something else as an equivoque. Of course, no single text can reproduce an equivocal effect of spoken words, depending upon paronomasia. There is a good example in 'Hamlet', III. 2. 262: *Ophelia*: "Still better and worse". *Hamlet*: "So you *must take* your husband". This is the reading of the first quarto; but it is clear that "must take" is to be pronounced ambiguously, from the fact that the second quarto prints it: "So you mistake your husbands", which is necessary to the innuendo, and is in the folio and in most later texts, although "must take" is the natural *ductus idearum* from the previous reference to the Marriage Service. The equivoque in Samson's riddle is of the same kind. It may mean what the text makes it to mean, or it may mean exactly the converse, without changing the order and works; thus:
An eater came forth out of meat,
Strength came forth out of sweetness; -- namely, Samson's strength from hachish. To understand how the *spoken* Hebrew words might be heart to bear either sense, according as they were apprehended by the ear, one must observe that the preposition "out of", which governs the meaning by being placed in front of one or other of the two nouns, is the sound *m*' (contraction of *min*), and that the same sound happens to begin the other nouns also: *m' ahachal* *yatsah* *maachal*
out of the-eater came forth meat *m' gaz* *yatsah* *mathok*
out of the strong came forth sweetness. There appears to be no way of prefixing the prepositional *m'* to the last noun of each line except by reduplicating the *m* which is already there, as if by stammering over it -- *m' maachal, m' mathok*, which might be merely a slight stammer, or might mean respectively, "*out of* meat", and "*out of* sweetness". Again, *to get rid* of the preposition from before the first word of the first line, one must read (as the LXX had actually done) *mah achal*, the first syllable being a distinct word, the interrogative pronoun, ..., *quid*, which would be used to introduce the riddle as a query, "What is this?" to get rid of the preposition from before the first word in the second line, one has to substitute for *gaz*, which is the adjective "strong", its abstract noun *magohz* = "strength", a substitution which is recommended as balancing *mathok* "sweetness", in abstract form. The concealed reading would then be: *mah* *achal* *yatsah* *m' maachal*
What is this? An eater came forth out of meat, *magohz* *yatsah* *m' mathok*
strength came forth out of sweetness Thus, to the ear, the riddle may really contain that deeper problem which ought to be in it if it is to stand for the riddle or secret of Samson's own strength. The superficial meaning, which Samson's wife jumped at and conveyed to the young Philistines of Timnath, is that food (honey) came forth out of the eater, (lion), sweetness out of the strong one. The deep meaning is just the converse -- that the eater "came forth out of" meat, strength out of sweetness. Thus we arrive at some kind of "food", (not drink) which made one an eater, or a devourer, like a lion; a sweet food from which came strength. It is pointed out that the antithesis of the second line, between "sweet" and "strong", is not a good one; and the Syriac version has gone so far as to change "strong" into "bitter" for the sake of the antithesis to "sweet". But the author certainly wanted to introduce the idea of strength, even if it were no full antithesis to sweetness; and his reason, doubtless, was, that he was thinking of Samson himself, and of the secret of his strength, which was a cryptic "sweetness". From various points of view, we arrive at the conclusion, that the honey from the carcase of a lion was not the honey of bees, but an allegory of that strong kind of honey which causes Jonathan's eyes to be enlightened, namely the resin of the hemp-plant. It was "sweeter than honey, stronger than a lion", as the men of Timnath are the unconscious means of suggesting, by the mood and figure of the answer.
We are now able to follow the ironical purpose of the author in its entirety, in making Samson a Nazarite and yet a boisterous, free-living village hero of the most admired type. The stimulant, which the hero used, was not drink, it was food; thus it was outside the purview of the Nazarite vow, which specified many things , but did not specify hachish: "wine and strong drink, vinegar of wine and vinegar of strong drink, liquor of grapes, grapes moist or dried, everything that is made of the vine from the kernels even to the husk". Samson could be made to pose cleverly as a Nazarite, and yet have his fling all the same. Budde's desideratum of strong drink, to complete the equipment of Samson as a village hero, is supplied by a subterfuge. It appears that the Jewish sense of humour ran strongly in that direction.
The story of Samson is not far removed in time, or in manner of telling, from that of Saul and Jonathan; so that, if I am right in my interpretation of the nature of the taboo which Jonathan broke, the period at the end of Judges and the beginning of the Kings was one in which the hachish-question had become actual. thus it becomes probable that the strength of Samson had the same source in stimulants as the prowess of Jonathan upon a particular occasion. It is also remarkable that Samson's "strength" collapses, just as Saul's courage fails him; and that the failure in both cases is described by the same phrase:- in the case of Samson the words are, "the Lord had departed from him", in the case of Saul the narrative reads, "God is departed from me, and answereth me no more, neither by prophets nor by dreams". The material sense of both I take to be, that the stimulant had lost its power over them, it being a property of hachish to produce hebetude in those who have used it habitually over a long time. Samson's recovery of his strength is, of course, for the sake of dramatic catastrophe.
*The apologue of "Nebuchadnezzar" in Daniel*. The beginning of these inquiries upon indications of hachish in the Bible was a suggestion made to me by the late R.A. Neil, of Cambridge, that the "grass" which Nebuchadnezzar was given to eat may have been grass in the colloquial Arabic sense of hachish, the word by which Indian hemp is now so commonly known being the same as the ordinary Arabic word for grass or green herbage in general (*hachach*). In seeking to follow up this idea one finds much to corroborate it in the details of the story of "morality" which is told of Nebuchadnezzar. The story begins with an account of dreams and visions of the night, in which the central object, the tree reaching to heaven and spreading to the ends of the earth, is highly characteristic of the elusive and infinite demensions in the subjective perceptions of hachish intoxication (Compare Bayard Taylor, *The Lands of the Saracens*; the pyramid of Gizen came before him, with its sides resting against the vault of the sky).
Daniel, being asked to interpret the dream, declares that the tree is the mighty Nebuchadnezzar himself, and the fate of the felled tree his fate: "They shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven." This fate, it appears, was on account of his sins and iniquities. But, as the root of the tree was to be left in the earth, so there was a power of recovery in the degraded prince, and he was to return to his kingdom after seven years. It happened as Daniel had said: "Nebuchadnezzar was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws. And at the end of the days, I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me." One might provide much amusement by recalling some of the many literal attempts, ancient and modern, to explain the nature of Nebuchadnezzar's debasement. The double sense of the word "grass", which may be assumed to have existed in the ancient Semitic languages or dialects as in modern Arabic, is a key to the whole enigma. There appears to be a cryptic reference to hachish not only in the recurring phrase "They shall give thee grass to eat, as oxen", but also in the significant introduction of "dew" with equal reiteration, "they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven." The allegory is easily extended to, "let a beast's heart be given unto him", "let his portion be with the beasts of the field", and, "his body was wet with the dew of heaven". But the most significant detail of all is that which follows the last quoted phrase: "until his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws". This is again the grotesque exaggeration and metamorphosis of one's own features etc. caused by the hachish subjectivity, which is unlike anything else in morbid imaginings. There have been real instances among Oriental rulers of hachish degradation such as "Nebuchadnezzar's"; an example was rumoured when Upper Burma was occupied by the British some five-and-twenty years ago. The apologue of Daniel, told of one under a great historical name, is meant to be general, and has had a sufficiently wide application, doubtless, in ancient times as well as in modern.
Lastly, and still in the same Chaldaean atmosphere, we find in the first chapter of Ezekiel a phantasmagoria of composite creatures, of wheels, and of brilliant play of colours, which is strongly suggestive of the subjective visual perceptions of hachish, and is unintelligible from any other point of view, human or divine. This is the chapter of Ezekiel that gave so much trouble to the ancient canonists, and is said to have made them hesitate about including the book. Ezekiel was included in the Canon, but with the instruction that no one in the Synagogue was to attempt to comment upon Chapter I, or, according to another version, that the opening chapter was not to be read by or to persons under a certain age. The subjective sensations stimulated by hachish are those of sight and hearing. It would be easy to quote examples of fantastic composite form, and of wondrous colours, which have been seen by experiments. I must content myself with the generality of Theophile Gautier (cited by Moreau, *l.c.*, from feuilleton in *La Presse*), that, if he were to write down all that he saw, he should be writing the Apocalypse over again (*recommencer l'Apocalypse*). If this contains an innuendo against the Apocalypse of John, I do not agree with it, in asmuch as I believe that no part of Scripture is more rational in its method, or more calmly inspired in its motives. But, as regards the apocalypse introductory to the prophecies of Ezekiel, one need not hesitate to assign it to the source indicated by the witty Frenchman.
Okay, that was a lot of reading I know but I did not want to leave anything out.
THP
Edited by - TheHighPriest on 13 March 2001 8:14:48