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Samson Escapes Gaza
Judges 16:1–3 — Samson Escapes Gaza. Each verse below carries the full apparatus: the Berean Standard Bible, the vocalized original (tap any word), and a parsed breakdown of every term transcribed from the interlinear. Synthesized commentary, canonical threads, and the reading of Christ gather at the end, over the whole unit.
1One day Samson went to Gaza, where he saw a prostitute and went in to spend the night with her.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
šim·šō·wn way·yê·leḵ ‘az·zā·ṯāh šām ’iš·šāh way·yar- zō·w·nāh way·yā·ḇō ’ê·le·hā
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-he-went Samson Gaza-ward, and-he-saw there a-woman, a-harlot — and-he-came-in unto-her.
Where the English smooths the original
It is useless to inquire how Samson could venture there in safety, or whether he went in disguise, or what was his object in going there; to such side-questions the narrative gives us no reply.Ellicott's refusal is a discipline worth keeping: the text withholds Samson's motive, and every reconstruction offered below (conquest, reconnaissance, appetite, adventure) is conjecture.
it seems evident, on the face of the story, that this woman really was what our translators have taken her to have been, a harlot.
the Targum renders it an innkeeper, one that kept a victualling house; so Kimchi, Ben Gersom, and Ben Melech interpret itGill preserves the minority reading (Targum, Kimchi, Gersonides, Ben Melech) that zoneh means a woman who keeps a victualling house. He records it and then declines it.
As it lay at the meeting-point of the caravan-routes from Egypt and the Arabian desert, it was always an important centre; the kind of place where bad characters might be found.
2When the Gazites heard that Samson was there, they surrounded that place and lay in wait for him all night at the city gate. They were quiet throughout the night, saying, “Let us wait until dawn; then we will kill him.”
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
la·‘az·zā·ṯîm lê·mōr šim·šō·wn bā hên·nāh way·yā·sōb·bū way·ye·’er·ḇū- lōw ḵāl hal·lay·lāh hā·‘îr bə·ša·‘ar way·yiṯ·ḥā·rə·šū ḵāl hal·lay·lāh lê·mōr ‘aḏ- ’ō·wr hab·bō·qer wa·hăr·ḡə·nu·hū
Literal — word-for-word from the original
[And-it-was-told] to-the-Gazites, saying: “Samson has-come hither!” — and-they-went-around, and-they-lay-in-ambush for-him all the-night in-the-gate of-the-city; and-they-kept-themselves-silent all the-night, saying: “Until the-light of-the-morning — and-we-will-kill-him.”
Where the English smooths the original
But deeming themselves certain of their prey, the Gazites deferred the execution of their measure till the morning.
This they chose to do, rather than to seize upon him in his house and bed by night; either because they knew not certainly in what house or place he was
But as they supposed that he would not leave the harlot before daybreak, they relied upon the fact that the gate was shut, and probably feel asleep.“feel asleep” is the spelling as transmitted in this public-domain edition of Keil & Delitzsch; we quote it unaltered rather than silently correct it.
It should be rendered, They went about and lay in wait for him. Instead of attacking him directly, they took a round-about course, and set an ambush for him in the city gates
3But Samson lay there only until midnight, when he got up, took hold of the doors of the city gate and both gateposts, and pulled them out, bar and all. Then he put them on his shoulders and took them to the top of the mountain overlooking Hebron.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
šim·šō·wn way·yiš·kaḇ ‘aḏ- ḥă·ṣî hal·lay·lāh way·yā·qām ba·ḥă·ṣî hal·lay·lāh way·ye·’ĕ·ḥōz bə·ḏal·ṯō·wṯ hā·‘îr ša·‘ar- ū·ḇiš·tê ham·mə·zū·zō·wṯ way·yis·sā·‘êm hab·bə·rî·aḥ ‘im- way·yā·śem ‘al- kə·ṯê·p̄āw way·ya·‘ă·lêm ’el- rōš hā·hār ’ă·šer ‘al- pə·nê ḥeḇ·rō·wn
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-lay-down Samson until half-of the-night — and-he-rose at-half-of the-night, and-he-seized-hold on-the-doors of-the-gate-of the-city and-on-the-two-of the-doorposts, and-he-pulled-them-up with the-bar; and-he-set [them] upon his-shoulders, and-he-brought-them-up unto the-head of-the-mountain which is upon-the-face-of Hebron.
Where the English smooths the original
Instead of forcing the doors open, he tore the posts up, as it were, by the roots, with the barred doors attached to them.
Samson pulled up the whole framework of the gate, doors, posts and bar, and carried it off in one piece.Cambridge, having reconstructed the gate honestly, then floats Cheyne's conjecture that “Hebron” is a scribal error for Sharuhen and Stahn's that the whole story was invented to explain a place-name. We record the mechanism and flag the conjecture; see the apparatus.
We hope it was with a pious resolution not to return to his sin, that he rose under a fear of the danger he was in.Note the hedge: Henry writes “we hope,” not “we know.” The text supplies no motive for the rising, and Henry does not pretend otherwise.
This was an emblem of Christ's resurrection, of whom Samson was a type, who being encompassed in a sepulchre, and sealed and watched by soldiers, broke through the bars of death and the grave, and carried off the doors in triumphThe unit's central ✦ typological claim, and it is Gill's, not ours. He states it as settled; we tier it below as typological and widely-held rather than as anything the Hebrew text itself asserts.
The verse-by-verse work is done. What follows gathers the whole unit. All three layers below are machine-generated (⚙). Weigh them; they have no authority.
AI synthesis — woven from the public-domain voices above and the original text; generated and fallible.
The unit opens with three Hebrew verbs and no motive: he went, he saw, he came in unto her. Ellicott's warning governs everything after it — the reasons offered for the visit are supplied by readers, not by the narrator: JFB suggests disguise and calls it “a perilous exposure of his life in one of the enemy's strongholds”; Poole and Gill suppose a new attempt upon the Philistines; Pulpit canvasses conquest, assault, wild adventure or civil business and settles on none. Gill adds that this was “highly probable … a long time after his last encounter with them,” which is inference, not text. ⚙ What the Hebrew does give is the shape of a relapse: וַיַּרְא (râʼâh) with a woman as its object is the exact move that began the Timnah disaster in 14:1, and Benson names the mechanism — “by giving way to look upon her was insnared.” Against all of this stands one sentence of K&D that most readers pass over: it is not said here, as it was said in 14:4, that this was of the LORD.
The verse arrives damaged. Ellicott, Cambridge, Pulpit and K&D agree that a verb has fallen out before “to the Gazites,” and that the LXX, Targum and the other versions all read it; every English Bible here, BSB included, is quietly restoring a text. Cambridge presses a second difficulty that is not textual corruption but sense — the Philistines are said to lie in wait all night at a gate which at night would be shut — and proposes reading “all the day” for the first clause. ⚙ We keep the Masoretic reading and note that the strangeness is the story: the ambush is set at a door that does not need guarding, by men who have decided to hear nothing. The verb the narrator chooses for their vigil is וַיִּתְחָרְשׁוּ, a Hitpael of chârash — Gill reports the old reading, “they made as if they were deaf and dumb”; K&D find in it “the subordinate idea of giving themselves up to careless repose” and conclude that the watchmen slept. Poole and JFB supply the reasoning: they deferred the killing to the morning because they could not be sure which house he was in and because a night attack would throw their own city into confusion. Their strategy was sound and their security was fatal.
At ḥătsî hallaylāh the whole scene inverts. He does not force the doors: Barnes says he tore the posts up “as it were, by the roots,” and the verb וַיִּסָּעֵם (nâçaʻ) is, as both Barnes and Cambridge record, the technical word for pulling up tent-pins — compare Isaiah 33:20. Cambridge reconstructs the gate itself (two leaves on socket-pins, a bar let into the posts on either side) and concludes he carried the whole framework off in one piece. Ellicott supplies the cultural grammar of the act: carrying off an enemy's gate “would be understood in the East as a very peculiar insult,” and he cites Almansor making the Christians of Compostella bear the church doors to Cordova. Benson and Poole, in nearly identical words, deny that this was ostentation and call it evidence of strength offered for the encouragement of Israel and the contempt of Philistia. On the distance the sources genuinely split: Benson, Poole and Gill assume the twenty-odd miles to Hebron itself; Cambridge says at least forty; K&D, Pulpit, Barnes and JFB all argue for the isolated hill el-Montar southeast of Gaza, from which the mountains of Hebron — not the city — are visible, and Van de Velde's line, quoted by both JFB and K&D, concedes that even that shorter climb through deep sand “was a feat which only a Samson could perform.”
⚙ Read under Scripture alone, this unit is not a hero story and not a cautionary tale; it is a demonstration that the gift is not the grace. The narrator withholds every consolation. There is no “the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him” here, and K&D put their finger on the silence: unlike 14:4, it is not stated that this was of the LORD. Poole says the strength “was not in itself a grace, but a gift,” a thing tied to the ordering of his body under the Nazirite rule rather than to the disposition of his mind — and the text bears him out, because the same shoulders that carried a harlot's night carry a city's gate. Hebrews 11:32 names Samson among the faithful without commending Gaza, and Matthew Henry's honest “we hope it was with a pious resolution” is as far as the evidence reaches.
⚙ The Hebrew, though, is doing something the English cannot show. Samson rises at ḥătsî hallaylāh, the hour at which the LORD went out through Egypt (Exodus 12:29), and what he takes in his hands are mezûzôt, the doorposts that in Exodus 12 stood marked with blood between a household and the destroyer and in Deuteronomy 6:9 were to carry the words of God. In Egypt the doorposts sheltered Israel while judgment passed by outside; at Gaza a Philistine city's doorposts are torn out of the ground entirely and made to ascend a mountain facing Hebron. ⚙ We offer this as a reading to be tested, not as a claim the narrator makes: the deliverer is compromised, the deliverance is real, and the God who is never mentioned in these three verses is the only explanation the chapter finally allows. The single line set beside this reading is our own summary sentence — synthesis, not Scripture.
The gift on his shoulders was never the same thing as the grace in his heart.
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
The gentilic לַעַזָּתִים (ʻAzzâthîy, H5841) occurs in only two verses in the whole Hebrew Bible. The other is Joshua 13:3, in the roll of land that remained to be possessed when Joshua was old — the Gazites heading the list of the five Philistine lords Israel never dispossessed. K&D, commenting on this very verse, send the reader to Joshua 13:3 for Gaza. Pulpit adds that Gaza fell inside Judah's allotment at Joshua 15:47. ⚙ So the men who lie in wait for Samson are named with the canon's own technical term for unfinished conquest: one Israelite alone in a city his tribe was given and never took, carrying its gate away as a private trophy rather than possessing it.
Joshua 13:3
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H5841 ʻAzzâthîy, which occurs in only 2 verses in the canon (Joshua 13:3 and Judges 16:2) — a genuinely rare shared lexeme, though not a quotation in either direction
Two of this verse's nouns belong to the night of the Passover. חֲצִי הַלַּיְלָה (chêtsîy H2677 + layil H3915) is the exact phrase of Exodus 12:29, when at midnight the LORD struck Egypt; and מְזוּזוֹת (mᵉzûwzâh H4201, a noun in only 17 verses) is the doorpost of Exodus 12:22–23, struck with blood so that the destroyer would not enter, and of Deuteronomy 6:9, inscribed with the words of God. The Verifier confirms both pairs by shared lexeme and tiers both structural. ⚙ The reuse is real and the reversal is pointed: in Egypt the doorposts kept judgment outside a house at midnight; at Gaza the doorposts themselves are uprooted at midnight and carried off. We claim a shared vocabulary and a shared hour, and no more — the narrator draws no line between the two nights, and neither will we.
Exodus 12:29 · Exodus 12:22 · Deuteronomy 6:9
basis: Verifier pair Judges 16:3 ↔ Exodus 12:29: shared H2677 chêtsîy (103 vv), H3915 layil (223 vv); Verifier pair Judges 16:3 ↔ Exodus 12:22: shared H4201 mᵉzûwzâh (17 vv), H8147 shᵉnayim (646 vv). Real verbal overlap within a shared motif; no quotation is claimed in either direction. Deuteronomy 6:9 is cited for the same lexeme H4201 but was not run through the Verifier.
The verb of this unit's danger is וַיֶּאֶרְבוּ (ʼârab, H693, “to lurk”). The Verifier finds the same root, with Samson's own name, at Judges 16:9 and 16:12 — the liers-in-wait Delilah keeps in the inner chamber. ⚙ The chapter is built on that repetition: at Gaza the ambush waits outside the door and he tears the door out of the ground; in Delilah's room the ambush waits inside the door and he never reaches it. Matthew Henry, reading all three verses together, draws the pastoral edge from exactly this — the faster they sleep, the more secure they feel, the greater the danger — though in his hands it is the sinner, not the Philistine, who is surrounded.
Judges 16:9 · Judges 16:12
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H693 ʼârab (in 39 vv) and H8123 Shimshôwn (in 37 vv) with Judges 16:9 and 16:12 — a real verbal repetition inside one chapter, but a common motif-word, so not tiered verbal
⚙ Hebrew idiom makes the gate the seat of a city's strength and the place of its rule, and the covenant promise to Abraham is that his seed shall possess the gate of his enemies (Genesis 22:17, using this same noun shaʻar, H8179). Ellicott records the ancient reading of the act — carrying off an enemy's gate “would be understood in the East as a very peculiar insult” — and cites the medieval parallel of the doors of Compostella borne to Cordova. ⚙ Our reading, offered as reading: Samson performs the promise in miniature and in irony. He possesses the gate and then abandons it on a hilltop; he takes the city's strength and takes no city. The Verifier confirms the shared lexeme, but shaʻar is one of the commonest nouns in the canon (302 verses), so the weight here is carried by the motif and not by the word; we tier it down accordingly.
Genesis 22:17
basis: Verifier pair Judges 16:3 ↔ Genesis 22:17: shared H8179 shaʻar (in 302 vv). A real shared lexeme but a very common one, so the recorded basis is the motif of possessing an enemy's gate; no verbal or quotation claim is made
⚙ Gill, commenting on this verse, reads the uprooted gate as an emblem of the resurrection, and the New Testament's nearest language is Christ's promise that the gates of Hades shall not prevail against his church (Matthew 16:18) and John's word that he holds the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18). This is a Greek text against a Hebrew one: no shared Strong's number exists and none can, so the link is figural, not verbal. Note also that the New Testament nowhere cites Judges 16; Samson is named once, at Hebrews 11:32, and Gaza is not mentioned. The connection is made by readers — an old and widespread body of them — and not by an apostle.
Matthew 16:18 · Revelation 1:18 · Hebrews 11:32
basis: Cross-Testament Greek↔Hebrew: shared Strong's numbers are impossible by definition, so no verbal tier is available. The basis is a figural motif (an enemy's gate carried off / gates that cannot hold) attested by Gill on this verse; widely held in Christian reading, but never asserted by the New Testament, which cites Judges 16 nowhere
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
✦ Gill states the reading without hesitation on this verse: Samson at Gaza “was an emblem of Christ's resurrection, of whom Samson was a type, who being encompassed in a sepulchre, and sealed and watched by soldiers, broke through the bars of death and the grave, and carried off the doors in triumph.” The correspondences he is trading on are in the text: a sealed and guarded enclosure, a watch that intends to kill in the morning (Matthew 27:64–66), a departure before the watch expects it, and an enemy's defences carried off as spoil (Colossians 2:15). ⚙ We hold this reading but keep its seams visible. Samson escapes; Christ does not escape but dies. Samson's night begins in sin and Christ's in obedience. The type is by contrast as much as by likeness, and the New Testament itself never makes the comparison — which is why we mark it as a reading of the church rather than a claim of Scripture.
Matthew 27:64-66 · Colossians 2:15 · Revelation 1:18
✦ The commentators are unusually candid here. Poole and Benson both insist that Samson's strength “was not in itself a grace, but a gift,” one that did not depend on the disposition of his mind but on the right ordering of his body under the Nazirite rule; Ellicott, against Pliny's catalogue of colossal strongmen, says the narrative “distinctly implied” a supernatural gift arising from his dedication to God. ⚙ That distinction is the redemptive-historical point of the unit. Israel's deliverer here is a man whose power is intact while his holiness is not, and the book of Judges is precisely the record of what that produces: real rescues and no rest. The deliverer the canon is waiting for is one in whom the gift and the grace are the same thing — whose dedication is not a haircut but a whole obedience (Hebrews 10:7), and who is therefore able to save completely (Hebrews 7:25). Hebrews 11:32 can name Samson in the roll of faith precisely because the faith there commended looks past the judge to the promise.
Hebrews 11:32 · Hebrews 7:25 · Hebrews 10:7
⚙ This one is ours and we mark it novel. The gate does not stay where it falls: Samson causes it to ascend (Hifil of ʻâlâh) to the head of a mountain ʻal-pᵉnê Hebron — toward the town of Abraham's altar and Machpelah, and the place where David would first be made king (2 Samuel 2:4). The direction of travel is away from the Philistine plain and toward the ground of the promise, and the thing carried is the strength of the enemy. ⚙ We are not claiming the narrator intends this; the commentators debate only the distance and the hill, and none of them reads the destination theologically. We offer it as a reading to be tested: the trophies of Israel's enemies belong, in the end, at the feet of the covenant and of David's greater son.
2 Samuel 2:4 · Genesis 23:19 · Colossians 2:15
The biblical text is the Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain (CC0). Hebrew/Greek text, transliteration, morphology and Strong’s are transcribed from the Berean interlinear (CC0) + Strong’s lexicons (PD); the literal renderings, divergence notes, word notes and all synthesis are this tool’s own work (⚙) — fallible; verify them.
Named voices, quoted verbatim from public-domain works:
Text. Judges 16:2 as transmitted in the Masoretic text has no main verb before לַעַזָּתִים: it runs “to the Gazites, saying.” Ellicott, Cambridge, Pulpit and K&D all judge that vayyuggad, “and it was told” (compare Genesis 22:20), or else vayyōmerû, dropped out by a copyist's error, and they appeal to the LXX, the Targum and the other ancient versions, which read it. BSB's “When the Gazites heard” therefore reflects a restored text, not the consonantal Hebrew, and we have marked it as a divergence rather than passing it over.
A second difficulty in v. 2. Cambridge objects that the Philistines cannot sensibly lie in wait all night at a gate that would be shut at night, and proposes omitting the first “all the night” or reading “all the day.” We have kept the Masoretic reading and recorded the objection. K&D take the opposite route, keeping the text and inferring from the Hitpael hithchârêsh that the watch fell asleep — an inference, not a statement of the verse.
Geography. The distance Samson carried the gate is genuinely unsettled among the sources and we have not resolved it. Benson and Poole reckon Hebron above twenty miles from Gaza; Gill says twenty and cites Josephus that the hill was “over Hebron”; Cambridge says at least forty; K&D and Pulpit reckon about nine geographical miles and, with Barnes, JFB and Robinson, favour the isolated hill el-Montar about half an hour southeast of Gaza, from which the mountains of Hebron are visible though the city is not. All of this hangs on whether ʻal-pᵉnê means “overlooking” or merely “in the direction of.” The traditional identification of the gate's site at Gaza is late and local; Barnes notes that the Gaza of his day was an open town without gates or walls, and K&D that the people of Gaza themselves were unacquainted with the el-Montar tradition.
Conjectures we do not adopt. Cambridge reports Cheyne's proposal that “Hebron” is a corruption of Sharuhen (Joshua 19:6) and Stahn's that the episode was invented to explain a place-name meaning “the two gates.” These are nineteenth-century source-critical conjectures with no manuscript support and we record them only so that the reader knows they exist.
Sources. Commentary is quoted verbatim from public-domain editions; the Keil & Delitzsch excerpt on v. 2 carries the reading “feel asleep,” which we have left uncorrected. Matthew Henry's entry is a single note on 16:1–3 and is therefore attached to the verse where it bears most weight. The Geneva note on these verses reproduces the verse text with only two short glosses (“one of the five chief cities of the Philistines”; “he lodged with her”) and is cited in the commentary rather than quoted as a voice. Rabbinic material reported by Gill — the tradition in b. Sotah 10a that the doors were sixty cubits — is folklore recorded, not endorsed.
What is ⚙ and what is not. Every interlinear form, parse, Strong's gloss and lexeme frequency above is sourced. Every thread badge cites either Verifier output or its own absence of it. The Exodus 12 and Genesis 22 readings, the Hebron-as-destination reading, and the whole sola reading are machine synthesis, fallible, and offered to be tested against the text.
✦ = human, public-domain source, quoted and named. ⚙ = machine synthesis, to be verified. Flagged cross-references are left visible on purpose — the verifier working in the open. “Search the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” (Acts 17:11)