Hercules and Sampson: A Comparison

There appears to have been rough equivalence in the time period that the stories of Samson and Hercules first emerged. The Samson narrative, which takes up four chapters of Judges (13-16), focuses on the exceptionalism of Samson within the community of the people of Israel in the period between the death of Joshua, Moses's legatee, and the onset of the so-called historical period of Israel, which includes the reigns of David and Solomon (Hartman, et al. 215), the division of Israel into north and south kingdoms in Palestine, the Babylonian captivity, and the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. The time of the Samson story is positioned at about 1200 BC; the Trojan War is positioned at 1193-1184 (Hartman, et al. 23-4), and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey have been dated at 850 BC at the latest ("Homer" 425-6). Given the flowering of Ae

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to use it for worthy ends (Elliott 792). Accordingly, Delilah "put[s] him to sleep on her lap" (Judges 16:19)--whether by drugs or sexual exhaustion is less important than the fact that Samson's failing is not one of continence but instead of moral lapse into not being watchful about the divine gift of physical strength: "And he did not know that the Lord had left him" (16:20). Complicating what happens to Samson individually is the fact that his fate is reflected in the fate of the people of Israel. Samson's personal fate reaches mythic proportions. He is subdued, blinded, imprisoned, transformed from feared beast and important Israelite into a figure of Philistine fun (Judges 16:27). Whatever authentic love, loss, humiliation and betrayal Samson may experience cannot compensate for the misery to the Israelites implicated in his surrender to Delilah. The Samson stories help explain to the people of Israel how it is possible that, as Myers says, there was "a situation of local conflicts between small bands of Israelites and Philistine groups [which] . . . were in the process of extending their control over strategic territory" (684). Samson's ability to transcend his own situation, not just physically but also morally, helps exp
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Approximate Word count = 3363
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)