Judges 16
Dear RTB’ers,
I am thankful for John’s comment yesterday (as always!), but I think he misunderstood me. I didn’t say that I did not believe the stories or the numbers written in Judges 14-15 (30, 300, 1000). Yes, our God, “the Creator of the entire universe” can do anything He wants. But how He does what He wants is often a mystery to me.
Samson had great strength and a certain level of invincibility, not unlike so many of our “superheroes” today. My issue comes from non-believers reading these stories and rejecting the possibility that these events could have happened as written. Taken to that logical extreme, they would easily reject Jesus’ Resurrection, the central event on which our faith hangs. But I don’t have my own explanations as to how these events unfolded. I suggested yesterday that conservative scholars probably had reasonable explanations for these events and these numbers. I did not disavow the possibility; I simply meant that I could not explain to a non-believer how Samson could have done what he did. But God can do what He chooses to do.
I have no problem with Samson slaying 30 men from Ashkelon, especially given my sense of his invincibility. The same goes for the thousand slain with the jawbone of a donkey. But the 300 paired foxes and the torches on their tales. My earthly mind has a problem envisioning that. However, the God who created those foxes could have tamed them to house-pet level and let the story run as written. The number 300 was not a problem for me, but even two foxes tied together and torching the grain field is difficult for me to comprehend. But as I said yesterday, our task is not to fully understand every sentence, but to use what we read to God’s glory.
Today I have no problem with Samson taking down the pillars and having some 3,000 Philistines killed. But for me, there’s a warning in this story about moral decisions, about temptation and the seeming attractiveness of sinful pleasures, of disobedience and my mis-use of the gifts with which God has gifted me. A phrase comes to me from my childhood Catholic catechism instruction, “to avoid the near-occasion of sin”. Samson could have benefited greatly from this simple childhood wisdom!
Blessings!
See also: March 17 (2023) / Judges 13-16