Samson, Part 1 – The Intro

About a year ago, I had the privilege of teaching Judges 13-16, which covers the life of Samson, as part of our mid-week Bible study. (As a brief point of clarification, this was in the morning section, which is open only to women.) Over the next few weeks, as it is far too long for a single post, I’m going to share my manuscript for that talk (edited for clarity, of course). This page will contain all posts in this series that are currently available. For today, I’ll just share my intro, which is really an overview of how Judges fits into the overarching story of the Bible. The following posts will review the life of Samson and the judges cycle, take a closer look at some things to note and a few difficult areas, and wrap up with a couple thoughts on how we can apply what we’ve learned.

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I wanted to take a few minutes as we get started to reorient ourselves as to where we are in terms of redemptive history and the nation of Israel. You know that the Israelites were in Egypt for about 430 years, and God delivered them up out of slavery through the hand of Moses. They then wandered in the wilderness for 40 years as discipline for their disobedience and lack of faith, and finally entered the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua, who succeeded Moses. The book of Joshua gives an account of the initial conquest and occupation of the land of Canaan; and though it is an incomplete conquest, the overarching theme of the entire book is one of success and obedience to the commands of God. We turn then to the book of Judges, which begins with the death of Joshua. The overall theme of Judges is failure and disobedience to the commands of God. We’re introduced to this cycle, where the people turn away from the Lord, they are subjugated to their enemies as a result of their idolatry, in their distress they cry out to the Lord, the Lord is compassionate and raises up a deliverer or judge, that deliverer follows the calling that is placed upon his life and saves the nation of Israel, and there is rest before the judge dies and the cycle begins all over again. Judges 2 tells us that with each iteration of this cycle, there was a downward spiral as things became a little bit worse. We saw in our study over the last couple weeks that this cycle stirred up an idea in the people that they should have a king, and that ended pretty disastrously in the accounts of Gideon and Abimilech, with less specific results when a couple other more minor judges styled their rule more along the lines of a monarchy or a family dynasty rather than along the pattern of the Lord raising up whom He will to lead His people. Ultimately, the nation as a whole began to clamor for a king so they could be even more like the pagan cultures around them, and a system of monarchy began in the nation of Israel. Three kings, Saul, David, and Solomon, ruled over the entire land in what we call the united kingdom and then during the reign of Solomon’s son, the land was divided into the northern kingdom, or Israel, and the southern kingdom, or Judah. The idolatry of both northern and southern kingdoms became so pervasive that the Lord allowed His people to not just fall into subjugation to their enemies as in the time of the judges, but to be captured and exiled into a foreign land. Eventually, a contingent of Hebrews was sent back to their native land to repopulate it, and then there was a period of silence, about 400 years during which we have no Biblical record of what happened. We know from secular sources though that upheaval is what happened. During that period of silence, the Promised Land was ruled by no fewer than 4 different empires or kings before the Romans eventually were the long-term victors, and they were still occupying the land when the New Testament opens and Jesus is born. The entirety of the Old Testament points us ahead to that time when the prophecies are fulfilled, and the better Judge and better King for which the Israelites were longing was born. For today though, we’re still in this time of the judges prior to the institution of monarchy. Samson was the very last of the judges in the book, though Samuel was truly the final judge, and so at this point, we’re roughly 250 years into the era of the judges, but we’re still about 1100 years prior to the birth of Christ.

We’ve spent the last few minutes on really a 10-mile-high overview of the Old Testament in general, and I’ve chosen to do this for two reasons. First of all, these accounts that we’ve been studying actually happened to real people in real space and real time. Sometimes it’s easy to slip into the mindset that they are just stories, and connecting them to the actual time and space, through placing them on a map or identifying the time frame in which they occurred as I’ve just done, is one way to guard against this thinking. Secondly, I did this because it is not enough to know or understand one or two books of the Bible in isolation. The Bible comes to us as 66 distinct and separate books that yet operate as a whole and tell a single story, and our understanding and grasp of an individual book is incomplete without at least a brief glimpse of how that specific book fits into the framework of the Bible in its entirety. Hopefully our time thus far this morning has facilitated such an understanding; however, if you recall nothing else from the last 5 minutes, please remember this: the beginning of Judges overlaps with the end of Joshua. This is highlighted through the duplicated account of Joshua’s death. Similarly, the end of Judges, and specifically the life of Samson, overlaps the beginning of 1 Samuel. It is said of Samson that he would “begin to deliver the Israelites from the Philistines”; that journey of deliverance is continued throughout the rule of Samuel as Israel’s final judge and also through the reign of Saul before finally being completed through David.