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Samson and Delilah
Selected Essays
J. Cheryl Exum
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Samson and Delilah. Well-known biblical figures in a tale of deception, betrayal and a haircut. Or is there more to the tale than this?
There is, in fact, a good deal more, as J. Cheryl Exum demonstrates in this wide-ranging collection of her essays. Far from being a simple story, the tale in Judges 13–16 about Samson and his adventures, culminating in his fatal liaison with Delilah, is a subtle, nuanced and highly complex narrative with an elaborate literary structure, a sophisticated theological programme, and an ambitious and problematic androcentric agenda. It is, moreover, a story that lives on in literature, art, music and even Hollywood films.
The eleven essays brought together in this volume investigate the Samson story from a diversity of critical perspectives and in a variety of its afterlives. Both Samson and Delilah are characters of many facets, as these essays reveal, and Judges 13–16 emerges from this investigation as a story that encourages and supports rather than resists multiple, often incompatible, modes of reading it.
J. Cheryl Exum is Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. |
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Contents
FORM AND MEANING
1. PROMISE AND FULFILMENT: NARRATIVE ART IN JUDGES 13
2. SYMMETRY AND BALANCE IN THE SAMSON SAGA, PART 1
3. SYMMETRY AND BALANCE IN THE SAMSON SAGA, PART 2
4. THE THEOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE SAMSON SAGA
LITERARY AND FEMINIST READINGS
5. SAMSON AND SAUL: THE COMIC AND THE TRAGIC VISIONS
6. SAMSON’S WOMEN
CULTURAL AFTERLIVES
7. LOVIS CORINTH’S THE BLINDED SAMSON
8. WHY, WHY, WHY, DELILAH?
9. NOTORIOUS BIBLICAL WOMEN IN MANCHESTER: SPENCER STANHOPE’S EVE AND FREDERICK PICKERSGILL’S DELILAH
10. SAMSON AND HIS GOD: MODERN CULTURE READS THE BIBLE
IN CONCLUSION
11. THE MANY FACES OF SAMSON
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