Judges16:4–14

The same scene, run to its end — Delilah and the lords, 16:18-20 verbal / quotation — confirmed

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

Tow that smells the fire — the two verses in the Bible that use the word verbal / quotation — confirmed

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

The weaver's loom — Job 7:6 and the other half of a two-verse word verbal / quotation — confirmed

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 ⚙

Fresh, moist, unfermented — the Nazirite adjective in Samson's first lie structural / thematic — confirmed

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 ⚙

Mocked and asleep — Delilah's complaint in the mouth of Elijah structural / thematic — confirmed

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

Bound and delivered up — Judges 15:10-13 and the man who let himself be tied structural / thematic — confirmed

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

Sold for silver by a familiar — a cross-Testament pattern, not a quotation structural / thematic — confirmed

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

Seven locks and the sun — a comparative claim we do not endorse flagged — verify source

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

The strong man who could not stay bound — and the Stronger who binds him novel

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 secret that was never stolen — a consecration kept novel

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

Counted among the faithful — how the New Testament itself reads this man ancient/widely-held

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