Commentaria in Judices
5. THERE APPEARED A YOUNG LION, RAGING AND ROARING.—For lion’s whelps are fiercer than the full-grown, both because they are hungrier with barking stomach, and because youth makes them more petulant, spirited and fierce. So Pliny, book VIII, chap. xvi: “The lion,” he says, “has its chief nobility when the mane clothes its neck and shoulders. For this comes with age in those conceived by the lion.”
6. AND THE SPIRIT (the Septuagint: leaped) OF THE LORD UPON SAMSON,—animating and strengthening him to attack and kill the lion. Hence St. Ambrose, epist. 94: “A fierce lion from the forest met him, fiercer with wild freedom. No companion, no weapon was supplied to his hands: shame forbade yielding, and conscious virtue gave confidence. Then, as it rushed upon him, he embraced it in his arms and killed it, and, the beast being lifeless in the knot of his arms, cast it beyond the embankment upon the woodland shoots, and left it. The place was fertile in pasture, with grassy turf, planted with vines.”
Hence it is plain that the strength and powers of Samson were not natural, but supernaturally given him by God: hence also they depended on his hair, God so ordaining, as we shall hear in the next chapter.
See the Apostle, 2 Cor. vi, 14, where he dissuades many from these marriages with unbelievers. Hence St. Juliana answered nobly to a wealthy Gentile seeking her as wife: “Thy marriage is a fellowship with the dead, and a sepulchre set before the eyes.” Wherefore the Church has annulled marriages of disparity of worship, and decreed them null.
Tropologically, the lion is an arduous matter, such as a grievous temptation, which like Samson, invoking the Spirit of God, we ought to attack courageously and overcome: kill this lion of terror, and being killed it will vex thee no more; and so it will come about that what before seemed a lion unconquerable will now appear a feeble ant. For such is the demon to the spirited. Whence by Job, chap. iv, verse 10 and 11, according to the Septuagint, it is called myrmicoleon, that is ant-lion: for if you fear it, it will rage like a lion; but if you despise it, it will be weaker than an ant. Hence Solomon says, Prov. xxii, 13: “The slothful man saith: There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the midst of the streets.” On the contrary Crateus said festively to Alexander the Great: “Well done, Alexander, fight with a lion for a kingdom.” Let everyone think the same said to him by God, when he fights with the demon for the kingdom of heaven. Often, says Seneca, not the things themselves frighten us, but the shadows and phantoms of things, namely the excessive apprehension and weighing of difficulty. Wherefore these terrors of the imagination are to be attacked with blind eyes as it were, as the lioness does, of whom Pliny, book VIII, chap. xvi: “When the lioness with young,” he says, “fights for her cubs, she is said to fix the keenness of her eyes on the ground, that she may not be afraid of the hunting spears.”
AND SOUGHT AN OCCASION AGAINST THE PHILISTINES,—for Samson made this dilemma: The Philistines will either give me the Philistine wife whom I seek, or they will refuse: if they refuse, I shall seize the occasion of attacking them, because by refusing the wife they afflict me with disgrace. If they give her, they will have to be kinder.
Moreover this was the first act of Samson’s fortitude, by which he made a prelude to the greater, and struck terror into the Philistines: for he who had torn the lion, the strongest of animals, whom would he not tear? Pliny and others relate that the spirits and strength of a lion are broken if one throws a cloak or other garment over his eyes and face. For his ardour and force consist in the eyes, which if covered with a veil, he thinks himself blinded and captured, and so allows himself to be taken and struck; and in this way some have overcome and slain lions. But Samson did nothing of the kind here, but attacking unarmed, without sword or club, a lion seeing and keen-eyed, he took him with his hand alone and tore him, to show that he was stronger than lions, and was to rush upon the Philistines more than a lion.
AND HE WOULD NOT TELL THIS TO HIS FATHER AND MOTHER,—both from modesty, and because, by God’s design and instinct, from this lion slain, and the honey found in its mouth, he was to make the riddle which he was to propose to the Philistines, the solution of which they would easily have found if they had heard from his parents what he had found. Samson teaches here that he who wishes to keep a secret should tell it to no one, not even to his dearest friend or parent, and say with Isaias, chap. xxiv, verse 16: “My secret to myself.” Aristotle, asked “what was the most difficult of all,” answered: “To keep silent when one ought not to speak.” For one would more easily hold a burning coal in his mouth than any secret, as Socrates once said, whom Tully imitated in jest, book II On the Orator. Samson’s silence therefore is greatly to be praised and imitated, in the slaying of the lion and the showing of the new honey.
8. AND BEHOLD THERE WAS A SWARM OF BEES IN THE MOUTH OF THE LION, AND A HONEYCOMB.—In Chaldee, in the body; better our translator with the Septuagint and others, in the mouth. For bees are wont to delight in the mouths of animals whether living or dead; yet so that while some sat in the mouth, others sat on the body of the lion, or flew round it.