Judges: Chapter 15

 

Strong as a lion
wily as a fox
the multitudes within
flaring out 
to burn the spaces between

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Samson continues on his trajectory, a figure of ever-growing extremes. In this chapter, he acts completely alone, freed even from the human framework of his parents. Now he is a rogue, closest to his animal familiars. If in the previous chapter, his doppelganger was the lion he tore apart, here he expresses himself through the medium of the 300 foxes he uses as weapons. The lion embodies his inhuman strength; the foxes his strange, playful intelligence. Yet in both cases,  the animals also embody the contradictory tensions that defined him even before birth: the powerful lion is filled with sweet honey; the wiley foxes burn with uncontainable fire.

Just as the lion is torn into two, the foxes also are riven in two directions. Samson connects them in pairs, and the fire flares out  between the tails, destruction coming from two forces pulling in opposite directions. 

Like Whitman, Samson is "vast" and "contains multatutes." The story is dense with intertextuality. If Samson's annunciation echoes the story of Sarah and Isaac, and his descent to Timnah alludes to Judah's journey, here his story recalls Jacob's, as he is offered one sister in place of another. Yet unlike Jacob, who must accept the logic of replacement after stepping into his own brother's shoes, Samson insists on the specific choice of "what is right in his own eyes." In some ways, he is closer to Jacob's twin, Esau, utterly overwhelmed by his own appetites. Esau exchanges his birthright for a bowl of soup; while Samson is willing to exchange his life for water. Like the twinned foxes. Samson holds both primordial twins within him. 

The fire that has haunted this text since Ephraim threatened to burn down Jephthah's house around him here burns fully, destroying everything around it. Samson's twinned foxes destroy the fields and vineyards and olive groves. The Philistines respond by avenging themselves on Samson's faithless wife, "burning the house down" on her and her father. For nothing did she betray Samson to avoid the companions' threat to "burn down the house around her," The fire, like Checkov's gun, was burning already, and only waiting to be unleashed. 

Samson sought marriage to the woman in Timnah as a pretext to battle the Philistines. Now the political reality of ruler and ruled becomes instead tit-for-tat, with each side promising to do to the other as was done to them.

Yet despite this intensely personal and unstable relationship, we are told that Samson "judged" Israel. Even though Judah gives him over to the Philistenes as a lone-wolf vigilante, somewhere, somehow, Samson achieves a level of leadership. ]