The Fallible · Synthetic · Study Bible
Samson and Delilah
Judges 16:4–14 — Samson and Delilah. 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.
4Some time later, Samson fell in love with a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah.
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·hî ’a·ḥă·rê- ḵên way·ye·’ĕ·haḇ ’iš·šāh bə·na·ḥal śō·rêq ū·šə·māh də·lî·lāh
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-it-came-to-pass after thus, and-he-loved a-woman in-the-wadi of-Sorek, and-her-name Delilah.
Where the English smooths the original
Delilah was not, as Milton represents, his wife. Josephus ( Antt. v. 8, § 11) says that she was one who played the harlot among the Philistines, and the fathers all speak of her in similar terms.Ellicott is correcting Milton's Samson Agonistes, not Scripture; the text itself calls her neither wife nor harlot, and the “fathers” he appeals to are reading Josephus.
Samson had been more than once brought into mischief and danger by the love of women, yet he would not take warning, but is again taken in the same snare, and this third time is fatal.Henry's entry in this brief is a single block covering the whole of 16:4-17, so it comments on the arc, not on this verse in isolation.
Soreḳ denotes a choice kind of vine ( Genesis 49:11 , Isaiah 5:2 , Jeremiah 2:21 ), which may have given its name to the valley.
He fell in love with a woman in the valley of Sorek, named Delilah (i.e., the weak or pining one), to whose snares he eventually succumbed.
5The lords of the Philistines went to her and said, “Entice him and find out the source of his great strength and how we can overpower him to tie him up and subdue him. Then each one of us will give you eleven hundred shekels of silver.”
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
sar·nê p̄ə·liš·tîm way·ya·‘ă·lū ’ê·le·hā way·yō·mə·rū lāh pat·tî ’ō·w·ṯōw ū·rə·’î bam·meh ḡā·ḏō·wl kō·ḥōw ū·ḇam·meh nū·ḵal lōw wa·’ă·sar·nu·hū lə·‘an·nō·ṯōw ’îš wa·’ă·naḥ·nū nit·tan- lāḵ ’e·lep̄ ū·mê·’āh kā·sep̄
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-they-went-up the-lords of-the-Philistines unto-her and-said to-her: “Seduce-thou him, and-see in-what his-strength is-great, and-in-what we-may-prevail against-him; and-we-will-bind-him to-humble-him. And-we — each-man — will-give to-thee a-thousand and-a-hundred of-silver.”
Where the English smooths the original
The Philistine princes thought that Samson's supernatural strength arose from something external, which he wore or carried about with him as an amulet.
In Jdg 14:15 the Philistines work upon the woman’s fear; now they appeal to the cupidity of the courtezan.Cambridge's “courtezan” is an inference about Delilah's character, not a statement of the Hebrew; the contrast with Judges 14:15 — fear then, money now — is the sourced observation.
The greatness of the bribe offered to Delilah, 5,500 shekels of silver, nearly two talents ( Exodus 38:24 , note), shows the importance attached to Samson's capture.
6So Delilah said to Samson, “Please tell me the source of your great strength and how you can be tied up and subdued.”
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
də·lî·lāh wat·tō·mer ’el- šim·šō·wn nā hag·gî·ḏāh- lî bam·meh ḡā·ḏō·wl kō·ḥă·ḵā ū·ḇam·meh ṯê·’ā·sêr lə·‘an·nō·w·ṯe·ḵā
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-she-said, Delilah, unto Samson: “Declare, I-pray-thee, to-me — in-what thy-strength is-great, and-in-what thou-mayest-be-bound, to-humble-thee.”
Where the English smooths the original
For it is scarcely credible that she put this question so openly to Samson, which would have discovered that she had some design against him.
But his fault was not stupidity—it was sensual infatuation; and in the ruin and shame which this sensual weakness brought upon him, and the way in which, step by step, it led him to forfeit the great gift of God, lies the chief moral of the story.
She seems to ask merely out of curiosity, to understand the state of a person whom she so highly values.Poole is describing how the question would have sounded to Samson, not endorsing her motive.
7Samson told her, “If they tie me up with seven fresh bowstrings that have not been dried, I will become as weak as any other man.”
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
šim·šō·wn way·yō·mer ’ê·le·hā ’im- ya·’as·ru·nî bə·šiḇ·‘āh la·ḥîm yə·ṯā·rîm ’ă·šer lō- ḥō·rå̄·ḇū wə·ḥā·lî·ṯî wə·hā·yî·ṯî kə·’a·ḥaḏ hā·’ā·ḏām
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-he-said unto-her, Samson: “If they-bind-me with-seven moist sinew-cords which have-not been-dried, then-I-shall-become-weak and-be as-one-of the-mankind.”
Where the English smooths the original
The number seven is that of a divine act, answering to the divine power which Samson possessed.
The number seven is used as the sacred number implying perfectness; and it is one of the signs that even thus early Samson is playing about on the confines of his secret.
but as he had forsaken God, so God had now forsaken him, and deprived him of common prudencePoole's judgment that Samson's folly is itself a judicial abandonment is interpretation; the narrator offers no such comment until v. 20.
8So the lords of the Philistines brought her seven fresh bowstrings that had not been dried, and she tied him up with them.
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
sar·nê p̄ə·liš·tîm way·ya·‘ă·lū- lāh šiḇ·‘āh la·ḥîm yə·ṯā·rîm ’ă·šer lō- ḥō·rā·ḇū wat·ta·’as·rê·hū bā·hem
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-they-brought-up to-her the-lords of-the-Philistines seven moist sinew-cords which had-not been-dried, and-she-bound-him with-them.
Where the English smooths the original
What Samson proposed in jest, Delîlah carried out in earnest.
He was there, no doubt, that he might be at hand and overpower the fettered giant as soon as it became apparent that his strength was gone.
she bound him with them—probably in a sportive manner, to try whether he was jesting or in earnest.JFB's “sportive manner” is a reconstruction of the mood; the verse states only that she bound him.
9While the men were hidden in her room, she called out, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” But he snapped the bowstrings like a strand of yarn seared by a flame. So the source of his strength remained unknown.
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
wə·hā·’ō·rêḇ yō·šêḇ lāh ba·ḥe·ḏer wat·tō·mer ’ê·lāw šim·šō·wn pə·liš·tîm ‘ā·le·ḵā way·nat·têq ’eṯ- hay·ṯā·rîm ka·’ă·šer pə·ṯîl- han·nə·‘ō·reṯ yin·nā·ṯêq ba·hă·rî·ḥōw ’êš kō·ḥōw wə·lō nō·w·ḏa‘
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-the-ambusher was-sitting for-her in-the-inner-chamber. And-she-said unto-him: “Philistines upon-thee, Samson!” And-he-snapped the-sinew-cords as a-thread-of-tow snaps when-it-smells fire. And-not was-known his-strength.
Where the English smooths the original
Literally, and the spy sat in the room for her, i.e., to help her. It is doubtful whether there was more than one spy, who could be easily concealed.
The word for liers in wait is in the singular number, but is to be taken collectivelyPulpit directly contradicts Ellicott's reading of the same word; the brief preserves both, and the Hebrew form is genuinely singular.
so his strength was not known; by Delilah, nor by the Philistines; that is, where it lay, so as that it might be weakened; for otherwise it was known by the easy breaking of the withs.
It appears the Philistines were rather desirous of taking him alive than killing him.An inference from the plot's restraint, not from any statement in the text.
10Then Delilah said to Samson, “You have mocked me and lied to me! Now please tell me how you can be tied up.”
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
də·lî·lāh wat·tō·mer ’el- šim·šō·wn hin·nêh hê·ṯal·tā bî wat·tə·ḏab·bêr ’ê·lay kə·zā·ḇîm ‘at·tāh nā hag·gî·ḏāh- lî bam·meh tê·’ā·sêr
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-she-said, Delilah, unto Samson: “Behold! Thou-hast-mocked me and-spoken unto-me lies. Now, declare, I-pray-thee, to-me — in-what thou-mayest-be-bound.”
Where the English smooths the original
To avoid exciting suspicion, she must have allowed some time to elapse before making this renewed attempt.
Though her deceit threatened his life, yet his affection so blinded him, that he could not beware.Geneva's gloss names the thing our sola-reading has to hold: the text never says Samson was deceived about the danger, only that he kept answering.
She would represent her desire to know as due only to loving curiosity.A reconstruction of her manner; the verse records only her words.
11He replied, “If they tie me up with new ropes that have never been used, I will become as weak as any other man.”
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
way·yō·mer ’ê·le·hā ’im- ’ā·sō·wr ya·’as·rū·nî ḥă·ḏā·šîm ba·‘ă·ḇō·ṯîm ’ă·šer lō- na·‘ă·śāh ḇā·hem mə·lā·ḵāh wə·ḥā·lî·ṯî wə·hā·yî·ṯî kə·’a·ḥaḏ hā·’ā·ḏām
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-he-said unto-her: “If binding they-bind-me with-new twisted-ropes upon-which no work has-been-done, then-I-shall-become-weak and-be as-one-of the-mankind.”
Where the English smooths the original
Here, again, Samson distantly touches on the consecration which is the secret of his strength.
the word signifies thick ropes, which, according to Kimchi and Ben Melech, were trebled, or made of three cords twisted together
Ropes - literally, twisted things ; hence cords or ropes
12So Delilah took new ropes, tied him up with them, and called out, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” But while the men were hidden in her room, he snapped the ropes off his arms like they were threads.
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Hebrew — tap a word ↓
də·lî·lāh wat·tiq·qaḥ ḥă·ḏā·šîm ‘ă·ḇō·ṯîm wat·ta·’as·rê·hū ḇā·hem wat·tō·mer ’ê·lāw šim·šō·wn pə·liš·tîm ‘ā·le·ḵā wə·hā·’ō·rêḇ yō·šêḇ be·ḥā·ḏer way·nat·tə·qêm mê·‘al zə·rō·‘ō·ṯāw ka·ḥūṭ
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-she-took, Delilah, new twisted-ropes and-bound-him with-them, and-she-said unto-him: “Philistines upon-thee, Samson!” — and-the-ambusher was-sitting in-the-inner-chamber — and-he-snapped-them from-upon his-arms like-a-thread.
Where the English smooths the original
Each time she had persuaded the lords that Samson had divulged his secret, and that she would deliver him into the hands of the men whom they sent.
and he brake them from off his arms like a thread; as easily as a thread of linen can be snapped asunder.
The Hebrew intimates that they were twisted, and of a thick, strong description.
13Then Delilah said to Samson, “You have mocked me and lied to me all along! Tell me how you can be tied up.” He told her, “If you weave the seven braids of my head into the web of a loom and tighten it with a pin, I will become as weak as any other man.”
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
də·lî·lāh wat·tō·mer ’el- šim·šō·wn hê·ṯal·tā bî wat·tə·ḏab·bêr ’ê·lay kə·zā·ḇîm ‘aḏ- hên·nāh hag·gî·ḏāh lî bam·meh tê·’ā·sêr way·yō·mer ’ê·le·hā ’im- ta·’ar·ḡî ’eṯ- še·ḇa‘ maḥ·lə·p̄ō·wṯ rō·šî ‘im- ham·mas·sā·ḵeṯ
Literal — word-for-word from the original
And-she-said, Delilah, unto Samson: “Until now thou-hast-mocked me and-spoken unto-me lies. Declare to-me — in-what thou-mayest-be-bound.” And-he-said unto-her: “If thou-weavest the-seven braids of-my-head with-the-web —”
Where the English smooths the original
With almost incredible levity and folly, Samson here goes to the very verge of the true secret, and suffers his sacred hair to be woven in a harlot’s loom.Ellicott's “harlot” is inference from Josephus, not from Judges; his point about the third answer approaching the true secret stands independently of it.
The sentences needed to complete Jdg 16:13 and to provide the proper beginning of Jdg 16:14 have accidentally fallen out.A text-critical conjecture, well supported by the Greek versions and by the mechanics of homoioteleuton, but a conjecture: the Masoretic text as received simply breaks off.
while Delilah sat squatting at her loom, Samson lay stretched on the floor, with his head reclining on her lap—a position very common in the East.
It is impossible if we give place to our wicked affections, for eventually we will be destroyed.
14So while he slept, Delilah took the seven braids of his hair and wove them into the web. Then she tightened it with a pin and called to him, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” But he awoke from his sleep and pulled out the pin with the loom and the web.
Berean Standard Bible · CC0
Hebrew — tap a word ↓
wat·tiṯ·qa‘ bay·yā·ṯêḏ wat·tō·mer ’ê·lāw šim·šō·wn pə·liš·tîm ‘ā·le·ḵā way·yî·qaṣ miš·šə·nā·ṯōw way·yis·sa‘ ’eṯ- hay·ṯaḏ hā·’e·reḡ wə·’eṯ- ham·mas·sā·ḵeṯ
Literal — word-for-word from the original
“— and-she-drove-it-tight with-the-pin. And-she-said unto-him: “Philistines upon-thee, Samson!” And-he-awoke from-his-sleep and-tore-up the-pin-of-the-loom and-the-web.
Where the English smooths the original
But Samson, when he awoke, tore up the pin from its socket, and went away with the loom and the pin fastened to his hair.
The general sense is clear: Samson pulled up the whole framework, warp and all, out of the ground by the hair of his head.
This is the same word as was applied in ver. 3 to his plucking up the gateposts.
the comb or press itself which was fastened to the loom, so that it could only be torn out by force.K&D reaches this by argument against Bertheau and against the Greek reconstruction; Barnes, Gill and Pulpit each propose different apparatus. The technical sense is genuinely unsettled.
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.
Judges has followed Samson through a wife at Timnah and a harlot at Gaza without once using אָהַב (ʼâhab, H157). Here it does. K&D reads the shift as collapse — Samson “fell in love with a woman in the valley of Sorek, named Delilah (i.e., the weak or pining one), to whose snares he eventually succumbed.” Matthew Henry, whose entry in this brief covers the whole arc 16:4-17 at once, sees the pattern rather than the woman: “Samson had been more than once brought into mischief and danger by the love of women, yet he would not take warning.” The commentators cannot agree what she was. Ellicott denies both Milton's wife and any certainty of Philistine blood; Poole lays out conjugal love and lustful love side by side and finally leans, on four grounds, to the harlot; Gill reports Ben Gersom and Abarbinel for a Philistine, and the Jewish tradition that she became a proselyte, adding dryly that “if she did, there is very little evidence of her being a sincere one.” ⚙ What the Hebrew actually gives is three data: a verb of love, a place, and a name. The place is נַחַל שֹׂרֵק — Cambridge: “Soreḳ denotes a choice kind of vine ( Genesis 49:11 , Isaiah 5:2 , Jeremiah 2:21 ), which may have given its name to the valley.” The Nazirite whose mother was forbidden wine before his birth (Judges 13:4) now lives in Vine Valley. The narrator does not moralize; he places him there and moves on.
The סַרְנֵי (çeren, H5633 — Strong's root sense “an axle”) arrive with a commission and a price. Barnes weighs the price: “The greatness of the bribe offered to Delilah, 5,500 shekels of silver, nearly two talents ( Exodus 38:24 , note), shows the importance attached to Samson's capture.” Cambridge names the change of method since Judges 14: “In Jdg 14:15 the Philistines work upon the woman’s fear; now they appeal to the cupidity of the courtezan.” Their working theory is stated exactly by K&D: “The Philistine princes thought that Samson's supernatural strength arose from something external, which he wore or carried about with him as an amulet” — and K&D, alone among these voices, concedes that the superstition was not wholly wrong, since “this gift of divine grace was really bound up with the possession of a corporeal pledge.” Ellicott, JFB and Pulpit all record the same amulet theory.
⚙ The tell is verbal. The lords say לְעַנֹּתוֹ, “to humble him”; one verse later Delilah says לְעַנּוֹתֶךָ, “to humble thee,” to his face. She changes a pronoun and nothing else. Benson finds it nearly impossible: “it is scarcely credible that she put this question so openly to Samson.” Ellicott can only account for it by supposing “she was professing to treat the whole matter as a jest”; Poole records how it would have sounded — “She seems to ask merely out of curiosity.” The text refuses to say. It simply lets us hear the contract recited in the room where it is to be executed.
Twice Samson answers with a recipe, and both recipes are nonsense. Gill states the physics plainly on the first: wet cords “are the less fit to bind with, and the drier the better.” Poole states the morals: “Samson is guilty both of the sin of lying, though he dress up the lie in such circumstances as might make it most probable; and of great folly, in encouraging her inquiries, which he should at first have checked” — and then draws the theological conclusion that “as he had forsaken God, so God had now forsaken him, and deprived him of common prudence.” ⚙ That is judgment language the narrator does not use until v. 20; we flag it as Poole's reading, not the text's.
But the lies are not random. Both K&D and Ellicott catch what is happening inside them. K&D: “The number seven is that of a divine act, answering to the divine power which Samson possessed.” Ellicott, on the same number: “it is one of the signs that even thus early Samson is playing about on the confines of his secret.” At v. 11 Ellicott presses it further — “Here, again, Samson distantly touches on the consecration which is the secret of his strength” — because the new ropes are specified as ones on which מְלָאכָה, work, had never been done: an unused thing, a consecrated thing, the very category to which he himself belongs. ⚙ Each false answer is made out of true material. He is circling his vow with his own mouth, moving closer each time, and the narrator lets the seven of v. 7 become the seven braids of v. 13.
Around him the mechanism is already assembled. K&D on the hidden man: “He was there, no doubt, that he might be at hand and overpower the fettered giant as soon as it became apparent that his strength was gone.” Pulpit on the repeated failures: “Each time she had persuaded the lords that Samson had divulged his secret, and that she would deliver him into the hands of the men whom they sent.” Cambridge names the asymmetry that dooms him in one line: “What Samson proposed in jest, Delîlah carried out in earnest.”
The third answer crosses a line the first two did not. Ellicott: “With almost incredible levity and folly, Samson here goes to the very verge of the true secret, and suffers his sacred hair to be woven in a harlot’s loom,” and he quotes St. Ambrose to the same effect — Tertio de mysterio deprompsit jam lapsuro propior. Now the hair itself is in play, מַחְלְפוֹת (machlâphâh, H4253 — “a ringlet of hair, as gliding over each other”), a word Ellicott notes “occurs here only” outside of v. 19.
The scene is domestic and precisely observed. JFB: “while Delilah sat squatting at her loom, Samson lay stretched on the floor, with his head reclining on her lap—a position very common in the East.” Cambridge explains the horizontal ground-loom from the Beni Hasan tomb paintings, and why “it would be easy to weave the hair of a person lying asleep upon the floor into the warp.” The technical words then defeat everyone. K&D argues at length that הַיָּתֵד is “the comb or press itself which was fastened to the loom, so that it could only be torn out by force”; Barnes takes it as a pin fastening the loom down; Pulpit proposes instead that “So she struck with the shuttle” and that אֶרֶג “cannot mean the beam,” admitting frankly that “as we do not know the technical term of the art of the weaving among the Hebrews and Philistines… some obscurity necessarily attaches to this description.” Cambridge goes further and says the Hebrew of v. 14 “is ungrammatical,” and that a block of text has fallen out by homoioteleuton between the verses.
⚙ Through all of that, one verb is unambiguous, and it is the one the English hides. Samson וַיִּסַּע — nâçaʻ, H5265, whose root sense is “to pull up, especially the tent-pins.” What he pulls up is a יָתֵד, a peg. Pulpit catches the echo: “This is the same word as was applied in ver. 3 to his plucking up the gateposts.” Cambridge: “Samson pulled up the whole framework, warp and all, out of the ground by the hair of his head.” He walks out of the house wearing a loom. It is his last recorded act of strength before the telling.
⚙ The following is the tool's own fallible reading under Sola Scriptura, offered to be tested against the text, not received from it.
Read the four askings together and the passage stops being a story about a gullible man. Delilah asks the same question four times (vv. 6, 10, 13, and at last v. 15-17), and every time she uses the verb נָגַד — “properly, to front,” to set a thing out where it can be seen. Samson's three answers are not evasions picked at random; they are progressively truer. Seven — the number K&D calls “that of a divine act.” Then new ropes on which no work had been done, which is what an unused, set-apart thing is. Then the seven braids of his own consecrated head, woven into a stranger's loom. Ellicott sees this in the third answer; ⚙ we would say it is the shape of all three. He is not being tricked out of the secret so much as walking himself toward it, one honest detail at a time, in the voice of a lie.
Notice too what is never said. Not once in these eleven verses does Samson mention the LORD. He speaks of his strength the way the Philistine lords do — as a mechanism with conditions, something that could be switched off by the right rope. K&D allows that their superstition contained “a certain truth,” since the gift was pledged in his hair; but the hair was never the power, only the sign of the vow, and the vow was never his property. ⚙ The tragedy of this passage is therefore not that he lost a secret. It is that by the time he gave it away he had already come to hold it the way his enemies did: as a technique instead of a consecration. The strength that snapped cords like tow at the smell of fire was on loan the whole time, and a man cannot bargain away what was never his — he can only stop being the place where it rests.
He did not surrender the secret all at once; each lie was truer than the last, and the fourth time he had nothing left to say but the truth.
AI-generated connections. Each carries a verification badge with a recorded basis; contested links are flagged.
The Verifier scores Judges 16:18 as the closest verse in the canon to this unit, sharing דְּלִילָה (Dᵉlîylâh, H1807), סֶרֶן (çeren, H5633) and פְּלִשְׁתִּי (H6430) — the identical three-party formula of vv. 5 and 8. Delilah's name occurs in only six verses in the whole Old Testament, and four of them are in this chapter. At 16:19 the shared lexemes are עָנָה (ʻânâh, H6031) and כֹּחַ (kôach, H3581) — which is to say that the exact verb the lords used to state their purpose in v. 5, “to humble him,” is the verb the narrator uses when it finally happens, on the same noun they were hunting. ⚙ The unit we are reading is the machine idling; 16:18-20 is the machine engaging. K&D, commenting on v. 5, already points forward to 16:17 for the pledge whose loss ends the gift.
Judges 16:18 · Judges 16:19 · Judges 16:20
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H1807 Dᵉlîylâh (rare — 6 vv total, 4 of them in this chapter) at 16:18, plus H5633 çeren (20 vv) and H6430 Pᵉlishtîy; at 16:19 H6031 ʻânâh (78 vv) and H3581 kôach (121 vv), the same verb-plus-object pair as 16:5. A genuine verbal link within one continuous narrative, not a citation of one book by another
נְעֹרֶת (nᵉʻôreth, H5296, “something shaken out,” i.e. the combed waste of flax) occurs in exactly two verses of the Old Testament: Judges 16:9 and Isaiah 1:31. The Verifier confirms the shared lexeme. In Judges the tow is the foil — Samson snaps sinew-cords the way tow parts when it smells fire, Ellicott's “Literally, when it smelleth the fire.” In Isaiah the same fibre is the strong man himself: “the strong shall be as tow, and the maker of it as a spark, and they shall both burn together.” ⚙ Isaiah's oracle supplies no comment on Samson and makes no claim to. But the vocabulary is the same, and the direction is reversed: in Judges the mighty man is what fire cannot touch; in Isaiah the mighty man is what his own work sets alight. Judges 16 ends in a Philistine temple pulled down on a blinded strongman. The figure we are asked to admire in v. 9 is the one he becomes.
Isaiah 1:31
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H5296 nᵉʻôreth — a hapax-adjacent word occurring in only 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible (in 2 vv). The lexical link is certain; the reversal of the figure is ⚙ synthesis, and Isaiah does not cite Judges
אֶרֶג (ʼereg, H708, “a weaving”) appears in only two verses: Judges 16:14 and Job 7:6, “My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope.” The Verifier confirms the shared lexeme. Cambridge reaches for the Job verse by instinct when glossing the word here — “Instead of beam render loom ( ’ereg , Job 7:6 ).” ⚙ The two uses share more than a noun. Job's loom measures a life running out faster than the shuttle can throw; Samson tears the loom out of the ground and walks off with it, three verses before his own days are spent. The book's strongest man drags the instrument of Job's lament behind him by the hair of his head and does not notice what he is carrying.
Job 7:6
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H708 ʼereg (in 2 vv) — the only two occurrences in the canon; Cambridge independently cites Job 7:6 to establish the word's meaning here. The link is lexical and certain; the reading of the two looms together is ⚙
The adjective לַח (lach, H3892, “fresh, moist, green”) is rare: six verses. The Verifier lists three of them — Numbers 6:3, Genesis 30:37, Ezekiel 17:24 and 20:47 — as sharing the lexeme with this unit. Numbers 6:3 is the Nazirite statute itself: the Nazirite “shall eat neither moist grapes, nor dried.” Judges 16:7 and 16:8: seven moist bowstrings, “that have not been dried.” ⚙ The pairing moist/dried is the same collocation in both places. We do not claim the author of Judges is quoting Numbers 6; no citation formula exists, and the words are common enough in a technical description of cordage. But the coincidence is exact and the context is a Nazirite inventing a false condition for the loss of a Nazirite's strength. In Genesis 30:37 the same adjective describes the fresh-cut rods Jacob used to work a deception on Laban; in Ezekiel 17:24 and 20:47 the green tree that will burn with the dry.
Numbers 6:3 · Genesis 30:37 · Ezekiel 20:47
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexeme H3892 lach (in 6 vv) with Numbers 6:3, Genesis 30:37, Ezekiel 17:24 and 20:47 — a real and rare verbal overlap. Deliberately tiered structural rather than verbal: the shared word is an ordinary adjective in a technical context, and no quotation or citation is claimed. The irony is ⚙
Two uncommon words in this unit meet again in one verse of 1 Kings. הָתַל (hâthal, H2048, “to deride”), Delilah's charge in vv. 10 and 13 — “thou hast mocked me” — occurs in nine verses; יָקַץ (yâqats, H3364, “to awake”), Samson's rousing in v. 14, in eleven. The Verifier finds both at 1 Kings 18:27, where Elijah mocks the prophets of Baal: “peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.” ⚙ The correspondence is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly. In Judges the man is mocked and truly wakes and truly is strong; in 1 Kings the god is mocked and never wakes at all. Between them stands the question the Philistine lords are actually asking with their money — whether Samson's power is an amulet, a technique, a thing that can be bought and switched off, which is to say whether it is Baal's kind of power or the LORD's. Judges 16 answers by taking it away and then giving it back.
1 Kings 18:27
basis: Verifier: two shared Hebrew lexemes in a single verse — H2048 hâthal (in 9 vv) and H3364 yâqats (in 11 vv), both uncommon. Tiered structural rather than verbal by deliberate under-claim: 1 Kings makes no reference to Samson, and the juxtaposition of mocking-and-waking is ⚙ synthesis
The Verifier links this unit to Judges 15:10 and 15:12 through אָסַר (ʼâçar, H631, “to yoke or hitch”), together with Samson's name and the Philistines. Ellicott, Cambridge and K&D all cross-reference 15:13-14 when explaining the “new ropes” of 16:11. In chapter 15 three thousand men of Judah bind Samson with two new cords and hand him over, and the cords “became as flax that was burnt with fire.” In chapter 16 one woman binds him with cords, and the cords snap like tow at the smell of fire. ⚙ The pattern is the same and the meaning inverted: in 15 he consents to be bound by his own people in order to be delivered into Philistine hands and destroy them; in 16 he consents to be bound by a Philistine's hire without knowing it, and the play-acting becomes the real thing on the fourth try. The book is showing the same gesture emptied of purpose.
Judges 15:10 · Judges 15:12
basis: Verifier: shared Hebrew lexemes H631 ʼâçar (in 63 vv), H8123 Shimshôwn (in 37 vv), H6430 Pᵉlishtîy (in 244 vv) — none of them rare enough to carry a verbal tier; the link is a repeated narrative pattern within one cycle, corroborated by Ellicott, Cambridge and K&D all citing 15:13-14 at 16:11
Five rulers each promise Delilah eleven hundred pieces of silver to open up the man who trusts her; Barnes calculates the total at 5,500 shekels, “nearly two talents,” and Cambridge notes the weighing of uncoined metal by the scales. In Matthew 26:14-16 the chief priests weigh out thirty pieces of silver to one of the twelve, and the betrayal is likewise consummated by intimacy — a kiss, as here a lap. ⚙ No shared vocabulary can be claimed: Matthew is Greek and Judges is Hebrew, so no shared Strong's number exists and none is alleged. The link is structural — deliverer, intimate, purse, handover — and we hold it at that. What the Gospels do state explicitly is that the betrayal money was itself weighed and named (Matt 26:15; Zech 11:12-13), which is the only scriptural warrant for reading a price-tag as theologically loaded at all.
Matthew 26:14-16
basis: Cross-Testament (Greek↔Hebrew): shared Strong's numbers are impossible by definition, so no verbal tier is available. Basis is a shared narrative structure — a deliverer handed over by an intimate for a weighed sum of silver — with no citation of Judges 16 anywhere in the Gospel passion narratives
Cambridge closes its note on Judges 16:13 with a suggestion drawn from the comparative-mythology scholarship of its own century: “The seven locks may have something to do with solar mythology. The Babyl. Gilgămesh had seven locks; in later Greek art Helios is usually represented with the same number.” The same school read Samson's name itself (שִׁמְשׁוֹן, Shimshôwn, H8123) as a derivative of shemesh, sun. ⚙ We record the claim because Cambridge is one of our named voices and honesty requires it, and we flag it rather than repeat it. None of the other ten commentators in this brief mentions it; the Verifier finds no lexical basis for it; Cambridge itself offers it with “may.” Against it stands the text's own account of the seven braids, which is not astral but cultic — the uncut hair of Judges 13:5, the sign of a vow. Ellicott, JFB, Pulpit and K&D all read the number as either the biblical figure of completeness or a plain detail of Nazirite grooming, and K&D's note at 16:7 — “The number seven is that of a divine act” — accounts for its recurrence in v. 7 and v. 13 without importing Gilgamesh.
Judges 16:19 · Judges 13:5
basis: Contested provenance. Cambridge's solar-mythology suggestion is a nineteenth-century comparative hypothesis, unsupported by any shared lexeme in the Verifier's output, unattested in the other ten commentators in this brief, and hedged by Cambridge itself (“may have something to do with”). The underlying lexical link is real — H4253 machlâphâh occurs only at Judges 16:13 and 16:19 — but the mythological reading built on it is not; flagged, not adopted
AI-generated reading; weigh it against the text.
Four times in this unit someone tries to bind אָסַר the strong man, and four times the reader is told what he tore, snapped, or pulled out of the ground. Then it stops working. ⚙ Our Lord's own parable turns on the same picture from the other end: “no man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house” (Mark 3:27). The Philistine lords are trying, with rope and silver and a woman's persistence, to do what only one figure in Scripture is ever said to accomplish — and their method is the amulet theory K&D names, the search for an external thing that can be taken away. Samson's strength was in fact pledged to a sign, and the sign could be cut; the Stronger Man's is not, because he is the Holy One consecrated from the womb of whom Samson was only the flawed anticipation (Judges 13:5; Luke 1:35). ⚙ The comparison of Samson to Mark's strong man is our own, and we mark it novel; the underlying reading — that a Nazirite judge given supernatural strength for Israel's deliverance prefigures a greater Deliverer — is the old one.
Mark 3:27 · Judges 13:5 · Luke 1:35
The engine of this passage is a man being asked, four times, to נָגַד — to bring out into the open the ground of his power — and stalling with three near-true lies until he yields it to the wrong person for nothing. ⚙ Set beside it the two occasions when the Son of God is put under the same pressure: “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread” (Matt 4:3), and “If thou be the Christ, tell us” (Luke 22:67). He does not evade with a false condition, and he does not surrender his consecration to a bribe. What he says of his life is the exact opposite of what happens to Samson: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). Samson's strength was taken; Christ's was given. ⚙ The pairing is our own reading and we mark it novel. The patristic habit of reading Samson's third answer as the fatal approach to the mystery is older — Ellicott quotes St. Ambrose directly on Judges 16:13: Tertio de mysterio deprompsit jam lapsuro propior.
John 10:18 · Matthew 4:3 · Luke 22:67
Whatever the commentators make of Delilah, the apostolic verdict on Samson is recorded and is not ambiguous: “and what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae” (Hebrews 11:32), among those “who through faith subdued kingdoms… out of weakness were made strong.” ⚙ That last clause reads this chapter with unnerving precision: וְחָלִיתִי (châlâh, “to be rubbed or worn,” H2470) is the very word Samson keeps putting in his own mouth in vv. 7 and 11 — I shall become weak — as a lie, three times, before it comes true. Hebrews names weakness as the place strength is made, not lost. The redemptive-historical point is not that Samson was admirable here; Henry, Poole, Benson and Ellicott are unanimous that he was not. It is that the gift in him was never his to forfeit permanently, because it was God's gift to Israel through a Nazirite, and God finishes what He starts — which is why chapter 16 does not end at v. 21. ⚙ The application of Hebrews 11:34 to the specific Hebrew verb châlâh in vv. 7 and 11 is ours; Hebrews is Greek and cites no Hebrew word. That Samson belongs among the heroes of faith is the New Testament's own statement and has been read so since the apostolic age.
Hebrews 11:32 · Hebrews 11:34
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. This unit contains one of the most openly damaged passages in Judges. Cambridge holds that “The sentences needed to complete Jdg 16:13 and to provide the proper beginning of Jdg 16:14 have accidentally fallen out,” a case of homoioteleuton (the copyist's eye skipping from the first “with the warp” to the second), and reconstructs the missing lines from the Greek. Cambridge further says of v. 14 that “The Hebrew is ungrammatical and gives the impression that the pin has been intruded.” Gill quotes the Septuagint supplement in full; Ellicott notes the LXX and Vulgate additions, the LXX driving the pin “into the wall” and the Vulgate “into the ground.” K&D reaches the same conclusion by argument and supplies the missing clause conjecturally. The BSB printed here follows the Masoretic Hebrew and marks the gap with bracketed glossing at Judges 16:13 word 24 and Judges 16:14 word 0; the interlinear indices reflect the Hebrew as it stands, not the reconstruction. We have flagged this in the divergences rather than silently adopting any reconstruction.
Vocabulary that is genuinely uncertain. Four technical terms in this unit cannot be settled from the sources: יֶתֶר (v. 7, fresh gut per K&D, Ellicott, Cambridge and Pulpit; green withs or vine shoots per Gill and Josephus); מַסֶּכֶת (v. 13-14, occurring nowhere else in the Bible — K&D “probably means the woven cloth, or rather what was still upon the loom, the warp”); אֶרֶג (v. 14, “loom” per Cambridge and Barnes, “woof” per Pulpit, expressly not the weaver's beam of 1 Samuel 17:7 per Barnes, Cambridge and K&D); and יָתֵד with the verb תָּקַע (v. 14, “weaver's comb or press” per K&D, a pin fastening the loom down per Barnes and Gill, “So she struck with the shuttle” per Pulpit). Pulpit states the honest bottom line: “as we do not know the technical term of the art of the weaving among the Hebrews and Philistines, nor the precise construction of their looms, some obscurity necessarily attaches to this description.” Our literal renderings choose a reading; the divergences name the dispute.
Sources and their limits. Matthew Henry's entry in this brief is a single block covering 16:4-17, so it is quoted once and cannot be verse-specific. Poole has no entry at all for vv. 8, 10, 11 and 12; Barnes's note is repeated unchanged across vv. 5-10. Much of what these commentators report about Delilah — that she was a Philistine, a harlot, a mercenary, that Samson was drunk, that she bound him while he slept — comes from Josephus (Antiquities v. 8) and from rabbinic tradition (Gill cites b. Sotah 9b, Ben Gersom, Abarbinel, Kimchi, Ben Melech), not from the Hebrew text of Judges. Ellicott says outright that her Philistine nationality is “not at all clear—as is generally assumed.” We have kept those attributions visible rather than absorbing them into the narrative.
What is ⚙ and therefore fallible. The Sorek-as-vine-valley irony against the Nazirite vow; the reading of the three lies as progressively truer; the Numbers 6:3 lach resonance; the 1 Kings 18:27 mocking-and-waking juxtaposition; the pairing of Job 7:6's shuttle with Samson's loom; and every item in the Christ section not explicitly marked ancient/widely-held. None of these is asserted as the text's own claim, and all are offered to be tested.
✦ = 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)