The Chosen Key Word in this Chapter is “Strength” it comes from the Hebrew Word “koach” which means “strength, power.”
The strongest man in Israel finally meets the one person who can bring him down. Welcome to Bible Life Basics Chapter Reviews, I am Chris and this is Judges 16.
Samson visits a harlot in Gaza, and when the Philistines plot to trap him inside the city gates, he tears the entire gate, posts and all, from the ground and carries it away on his shoulders. Samson then falls in love with a woman named Delilah, and Philistine lords bribe her heavily to discover the secret of his great “strength,” “koach” in Hebrew, so they can subdue him. Delilah repeatedly presses Samson for his secret, and he toys with her three times, giving false answers involving fresh bowstrings, new ropes, and weaving his hair into a loom, each time nearly being captured yet escaping since none of these were true.
Delilah presses him relentlessly, wearing him down day after day “until his soul was vexed unto death,” and Samson finally reveals the real truth, that he has been a Nazarite from birth, and if his hair is ever cut, his strength will leave him completely. Recognizing this is finally the truth, Delilah lulls Samson to sleep on her knees and has his seven locks of hair shaved off, and his strength departs from him without his even realizing it at first, since “he wist not that the LORD was departed from him.”
The Philistines seize the now-powerless Samson, gouge out his eyes, and bind him to grind grain in prison, a devastating fall for Israel’s once-mighty judge. But over time, his hair begins to grow back. At a great feast honoring their god Dagon for delivering their enemy, the Philistines bring Samson out to mock him, and he asks the boy guiding him to let him feel the pillars supporting the building. Praying earnestly for strength one final time, Samson pushes the pillars apart with all his might, and the entire building collapses, killing more Philistines in his death than he had killed throughout his entire life.
The most tragic line in Samson’s entire story might be the simplest one, he did not know that the Lord had departed from him. His strength had become so familiar that he mistook it for his own possession rather than a gift dependent entirely on his relationship with God, a sobering warning about taking God’s ongoing presence for granted.
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