Judges & Ruth (TOTC) by Arthur E. Cundall & Leon Morris

Author:Arthur E. Cundall & Leon Morris [Cundall, Arthur E. & Morris, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783592272
Publisher: Inter-Varsity Press
Published: 2008-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

The answer to this riddle could hardly be found without the personal knowledge which only Samson possessed, and it is not surprising that, faced with considerable individual expense, the thirty guests were deeply concerned when they realized that a solution was beyond them. The atmosphere of the feast assumed an ugly, menacing aspect with their threat (15), in which they assumed that Samson’s wife was implicated in a plot to strip them of their possessions. 15:6 shows that it was no idle threat. The woman, fearing for her life and her father’s house, used the last resort of her sex, a flood of tears and the innuendo that Samson did not love her or he would keep no secrets from her—devices that have led to untold misery for both sexes! Samson was able to answer the innuendo by pointing out that his own parents, to whom he had the greater responsibility, were in ignorance of the answer (16); but he could not withstand the corrosive influence of three or four days of weeping. The suspense was maintained up to the last day. Samson, anticipating the consummation of the marriage, was anxious to stop the flow of tears. But the shared secret meant that the marriage was, in fact, never consummated, for, as the seventh day drew to its close, the riddle was answered. Samson never entered the bridal chamber and without this the marriage was considered invalid. His retort to the thirty companions is in the same form as the riddle, a three-beat couplet which, somewhat unusually in Hebrew poetry, has a rhyme formed by the repetition of the first person singular suffix to the nouns. C. F. Burney successfully renders this:

If ye had not plowed with this heifer of mine,

Ye would not have found out this riddle of mine.39

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