Commentaria in Judices
14. Nor Could They for Three Days Solve the Proposition
15. AND WHEN THE SEVENTH DAY WAS COME.—These Philistine companions of Samson seem to have sent in Samson’s wife on the first day to find out from him the solution of the enigma, and meanwhile themselves also thought, hoping that they would find its solution; but when for three days by thinking they had not found it, they again pressed the wife with threats to draw the solution from Samson: and as Samson refused to do it, at last on the seventh and last day they assailed the wife with all their might, to fish the matter out from Samson; and if she did not, they threatened to burn her with the house. The wife did the demands of her fellow citizens, weeping for seven days, and at last on the seventh day, mixing all with tears and lamentations, she overcame Samson’s mind, as is said HAVE YOU INVITED US TO THE WEDDING TO STRIP US?—Of our linen garments and coats, which Samson will take, unless we solve his enigma. For “to strip,” the Septuagint and Vatablus render, to make us poor; the Chaldee, that you may possess us, that is that you may hunt for and seize our garments.
17. SO FOR SEVEN DAYS OF THE FEAST SHE WEPT BEFORE HIM: AND AT LAST ON THE SEVENTH DAY, AS SHE WAS TROUBLESOME TO HIM, HE TOLD IT.—I explained this verse at verse 15, to which add another more solid explanation, namely “for seven days,” that is, during the seven days, proposed for this contest, namely on the seventh day before it ended, she wept before him assiduously: hence Samson, at last overcome, on the same seventh day before sunset, told her the whole matter. For it was not in the first days of this seven, but on the last and seventh, that the Philistines pressed her with threats of fire to fish out the solution of the enigma from Samson; for before the day seventh they hoped, by thinking, to find its solution; and when the seventh day came, on which the forfeit proposed was to be paid if they did not explain the enigma before evening, despairing of its solution they urged the wife to extort it by every means and manner from Samson. For this is what was said a little before, verse 15: “And when the seventh day was come, they said to the wife,” etc. “For seven days,” then, “she wept,” that is at the end of seven days, or on the seventh and last day she wept. For when a space of time is named, no part of which is designated, its fullness or completion is signified, as I said in the Canons of the preface. The same our Gaspar Sanchez teaches on Habacuc, p. 1202, letter B; and Vatablus: For seven days, he says, that is, until the seventh day; for she had begun to weep on the fourth day. See here how insidious are the tears of a woman. Truly Cato: “Fear not the words of an angry wife; she lays snares with tears, while the woman weeps.”
AND SHE PRESENTLY TOLD IT TO HER COUNTRYMEN.—See here how the wife betrays her husband Samson. Truly Menander: “A woman,” he says, “even when she says the best and sweetest things, is to be feared most of all.” And Antiphanes: “He said he trusted a woman in this one thing, that when she was dead she would not come to life again; in all other things, as long as she lives, he trusted her in nothing.” R. Jose, disciple of the celebrated Antigonus, in Pirke Avoth chap. i: “Hold not much talk,” he says, “with a woman: not even, as the Rabbis said, with thine own wife, how much less with another’s? Hence also the wise said: As often as a man has more talk with a woman, he brings evil upon himself, and is hindered from the study of the law, and at last goes down to hell.”
18. WHAT IS SWEETER THAN HONEY, AND WHAT IS STRONGER THAN A LION?
“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,” this is the solution, that thou in the mouth of a devouring and strong lion hast found a honeycomb: “For what is sweeter than honey, and what is stronger than a lion?” St. Ambrose, epist. 24, which in the old edition is 70, adds from Josephus that Samson then at once subjoined: “What is more perfidious than a woman?”
Allegorically, St. Paulinus, epist. 4, applies all this to Christ elegantly and in many ways. First, “Christ,” he says, “is himself the lion to us, in whose dead mouth we find the food of honey. For what is sweeter than the word of God? And what stronger than the right hand of God? Or in whose dead mouth is the honeycomb and the bees, but in whose word is the good of our salvation and the gathering of the Gentiles?”
Secondly: “Of whom (the Gentiles) many have rather placed the figure in this lion, because the people of the Gentiles, who believed, was a body of fierceness before, now is Christ’s, in which the Apostles, like bees from the dew of heaven and the flowers of divine graces, have stored the honeys of wisdom, and so the food has gone forth from the mouth of the eater, because the nations, before wild, receiving the word of God with a believing heart, have brought forth the fruit of salvation.”
Thirdly: “But those who rather set Christ before themselves in the same lion take Samson as a figure of the Jews, namely that he slew that lion as if Christ for the Jews, assigning this also mystically to the preparation, that at that very time when he sought the wished-for marriage he performed the slaughter of the powerful beast: because, namely, the marriage which is compacted in Christ and the Church could not be confirmed unless the lion of the tribe of Juda were slain. For the same Lord is both that Lion who conquered and the lion’s whelp, lulled to sleep of his own will, and raised again by himself; of whom it is written: Who shall rouse him up? For voluntarily sacrificing for us to the Father the victim of his own body, the same, the High Priest for ever, as he himself testifies, took up his life again by the same power by which he laid it down.”
Fourthly: “This whelp of the lion is the Son of God, and the same is the Lion, because equal to the Father, wherefore, as it seems to me, it fits this lion better. Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness. From whom if not from our Saviour, whose word is life, and who both chewed and taught us this food, and so from the eater food goes forth, because this Lion of the tribe of Juda, victor for us, snatching us from the mouth of the adverse lion, therefore hunts that he may save, takes that he may release, breaks that he may make firm, chews that he may make whole, eating in us that by which we are corrupted. Wherefore let us wish to become the prey of this lion, that we may not be the prey of the enemy lion; let us become the food of God, that we may not be the food of the serpent; let Christ eat us, that the devil may not devour.”
Anagogically: “For Christ eating in us, that is consumed by which it is consumed; for Christ is life, and we cannot put off this mortal unless we be swallowed up, because Christ devours our death.”
Tropologically: “For we cannot be Christ’s food unless we do his will, that in turn he also may become food to us, in which we ever live if we live according to his precepts. So out of the strong comes forth sweetness, when the bitterness of our malice is changed by him into the sweetness of goodness, and we proceed as sweet food from his word, who by eating us consumed our sin, and restored us to life. He alone is powerful, sweetly powerful, who delivered the poor from the avaricious powerful one, who, destroying the fierceness of my body through the mystery of his piety unto the death of his own body, there eats the food of life, where the hunger of death withered the wretched, who changed for me offence into grace, sin into justice, infirmity into virtue, death into life, confusion into glory, exile into a kingdom, because we heard: Earth thou art, and into earth thou shalt go; now we hear: Our conversation is in heaven.”
WHAT IS SWEETER THAN HONEY?—I answer, sugar; but sugar in that age and in many following was unknown to the ancients. Hence in Scripture no mention of it is made. I have read the whole of Holy Scripture, and nowhere have I found the word sugar; indeed the first who make mention of sugar were Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, who nevertheless only remember the canes of sugar, but do not touch on the method of liquefying it by fire, and of boiling it down in a wonderful way to whiteness, thickness and exquisite sweetness: so from Matthiolus and Cardan, our Coimbra writers on the Meteors, book VII, chap. x. Hear Pliny, book XII, chap. viii: “Sugar also Arabia bears, but India more praised. It is honey collected in reeds, like a gum, white, brittle to the teeth. The largest piece is the size of a hazel nut, for the use of medicine only.” So Pliny, who has no more on sugar.
Mystically: “What is sweeter than honey?” Hear Wisdom: “My spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb,” Ecclus. chap. xxiv. WHAT IS STRONGER THAN A LION?—Hear Zorobabel: “Wine is strong, the king is stronger, women are stronger, but above all things truth beareth the victory,” 3 Esdras chap. iv, verse 10. Truth, therefore, is stronger than a lion, and so the strongest of all things. I gave the tropology at verses 13 and 14, to which add that honey is found in the mouths of lions when in the mouth of the proud, in which before was the stench of arrogance and blasphemy, afterwards of the penitent and humble is found the sweetness of the praise and grace of God.
WHO SAID TO THEM: IF YOU HAD NOT PLOUGHED WITH MY HEIFER, YOU HAD NOT FOUND OUT MY RIDDLE (enigma).—Some understand by ploughing the fornication of the Philistines with Samson’s wife, who was likewise a Philistine; for “heifer” denotes that she was petulant, forward and wanton. But no mention of fornication is made here, but rather of threats, by which the Philistines forced her to extract from Samson the solution of the enigma. I say therefore: charash signifies to devise, to track out, and also to plough: thus to plough is put here for to track out, to search, to probe, because as by ploughing the covered earth is opened, so by probing the truth of a hidden thing is opened and found. The sense is therefore, as if to say: Unless you had fraudulently, through my perfidious wife, extracted the solution of my enigma, you would never have found it by your own wit. Moreover he calls his wife a heifer on account of her youthful lightness, imprudence and inconstancy, by which she by her perfidy laid on her husband Samson this burden of paying thirty linen garments, and preferred her Philistines, though neither kinsmen nor relatives, to him. Simonides once painted ten forms of woman, says Serarius. For he said some were like sows, others like foxes, others like dogs, some like earth, some like the sea, some like ashes and the pack-ass, the weasel, the maned horse, the ape, and finally the bees also, and these alone, as Phocylides also did, he praised. But our Samson shows that some are even heifers, wanton, talkative, faithless, impatient of the yoke, and troublesome and harmful to their wedded lord.
Mystically, St. Ambrose, book II On the Holy Spirit, in the preface, teaches that by Samson’s wife, that is by the Church gathered from the Gentiles, is to be sought from Christ the revelation of the secrets of God, of faith and salvation: “What is sweeter than honey, what is stronger than a lion? To which he answered: If you had not tamed my heifer, you had not found out my question. O divine mystery! O evident Sacrament! We have escaped the slayer, we have conquered the powerful one. There now is the food of life, where before was the wretched hunger of death. Dangers are turned into safety, bitterness into sweetness. Grace has come forth from offence, power from weakness, life from death. There are some, however, who on the contrary think that the marriage could not have been founded unless the lion of the tribe of Juda had been slain. And therefore in his body, that is in the Church, bees were found, which store up the honeys of wisdom, because after the Lord’s Passion the Apostles believed the more. This lion, therefore, Samson, like a Jew, slew, and in it found honey in figure of the inheritance to be redeemed, that a remnant might be saved according to the election of grace.”
19. AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD CAME UPON HIM (impelling him to a heroic slaughter of the Ascalonites, enemies of Israel); AND HE WENT DOWN TO ASCALON, AND SLEW THERE THIRTY MEN, WHOSE SPOILS HE TOOK, AND GAVE THE CHANGES OF GARMENTS TO THEM THAT HAD SOLVED THE RIDDLE.—So he paid the enemy prize promised to enemies out of the slaughter and spoils of those same enemies. Samson therefore did this justly, both because the war of Israel with the Philistines was just, and because the Spirit of the Lord coming upon him drove him to it, which likewise brought it about that the Philistines of Thamnatha and the Oedipuses, who had solved this riddle, either did not know that these Ascalonites, their confederates, had been killed by Samson, or if they knew it, did not dare to rise against him and avenge the death of their allies.
You will say: Num. vi, it was forbidden for Nazarites to touch anything unclean, e.g. a corpse; how then did Samson, who was a Nazarite, touch the bodies of those slain by him, to take their garments from them? I answer, the necessity of paying the debt promised to the bridesmen excuses him from sin, as from legal uncleanness. Add that Samson did all these things at the impulse of the Spirit of God rushing upon him, as is said here. For God directed him like a master, and therefore dispensed with him in the law. This is plain from the fact that God prepared for him the food of honeycomb and honey in the mouth of the dead lion, and drink in the jawbone of the ass likewise dead, chap. xv. And who would not use food and drink prepared for him by God?
AND BEING EXCEEDINGLY ANGRY HE WENT UP TO HIS FATHER’S HOUSE.—“Angry,” both with his wife, who had revealed and betrayed to the Philistines the secret solution of the riddle received from Samson, and had been the cause why he had to pay them thirty coats and linen garments, and who loved the Philistine youths more than her bridegroom Samson. Hence also she made a divorce from Samson, marrying another, namely a certain Philistine of Samson’s bridesmen; and with the Philistines, who had extorted from him the secret. Angry, finally, with the whole Philistine city, which had assigned him such fraudulent bridesmen.
20. BUT HIS WIFE TOOK ONE OF HIS FRIENDS AND BRIDESMEN FOR HER HUSBAND.—The Septuagint call him nymphagogue; others, paranymph. Christ, Matt. ix, calls them “friends of the bridegroom;” elsewhere they are called “sons of the bridegroom,” or “children of the bridechamber,” such as John the Baptist was to Christ, when by his preaching he honoured and as it were reconciled his marriage with the Church.
and thence Samson took a new occasion of doing harm to the Philistines.
ANGRY,—also at his Philistine bridesmen, who by fraud through the Philistine wife extorted the solution of the enigma, and thence the prize of thirty linen garments.