Falling into a Snare

After what appears to be a significant gap of time, perhaps even years, Samson again goes down into Philistia and again falls into the snare of sin. He makes a trip to Gaza, though it is difficult to comprehend how he can go safely to one of the principal cities of the Philistines. The author of Judges is straightforward and factual about what Samson does there—he spots a prostitute and uses her services. This is a heinous failing. “His taking a Philistine to wife, in the beginning of his time, was in some degree excusable, but to join himself to a harlot that he accidentally saw among them was such a profanation of his honour as an Israelite, as a Nazirite, that we cannot but blush to read it,” Matthew Henry laments. This is a sin against the law of God, a violation of his vows of marriage to the Philistine, and a violation (at least in spirit) of his Nazirite status, which marked him as a set-apart man among God’s set-apart people.

He also places himself in mortal danger, for word leaks out that he is in the city. Perhaps it is the harlot who somehow betrays him, as did his Philistine wife and as will his next Philistine girlfriend. In any case, as he lies in the arms of his lover, the Gazites set up ambushes so as to capture and kill him at dawn. Samson, however, wakes at midnight and heads for the gate, long before the Philistines expect him. He apparently encounters no guards, or else those who are waiting at the gate have dozed off. Not bothering to try to open the gate, he simply pulls up the gateposts along with the doors and the bars, and carries them off to a hill facing Hebron, which lies some 40 miles to the east of Gaza. He performs this deed “in disdain of their attempt to secure him with gates and bars, designing thus to render himself more formidable to the Philistines and more acceptable to his people,” Henry writes in his commentary on Judges.

It is notable that this feat of strength is carried out without a special endowment of the Holy Spirit. Apparently God really has made Samson physically stronger than other men. Nevertheless, the absence of the Spirit here does not mean God is not working. Samson put himself in a dangerous position by indulging his fleshly lusts, and only the providence of God preserved him until the sunrise. He lives on so that God may use him to vex the oppressors of His beloved people.