of the biblical revelation adduce for the further support of this view, does not yield any tenable evidence of its correctness. The external rounding off of the account proves nothing more than that Samson's life and acts formed in themselves a compact and well-rounded whole. But the assertion, that “well-rounded circumstances form a suitable framework for the separate accounts, and that precisely twelve acts are related of Samson, which are united into beautiful pictures and narrated in artistic order” (Bertheau), is at variance with the actual character of the biblical account. In order to get exactly twelve heroic acts, Bertheau has to fix the stamp of a heroic act performed by Samson himself upon the miraculous help which he received from God through the opening up of a spring of water (Jdg 15:18-19), and also to split up a closely connected event, such as his breaking the bonds three times, into three different actions.[1]
If we simply confine ourselves to the biblical account, the acts of Samson may be divided into two parts. The first (Judg 14 and 15) contains those in which Samson smote the Philistines with gradually increasing severity; the second (Judg 16) those by which he brought about his own fall and ruin. These are separated from one another by the account of the time that his judgeship lasted (Jdg 15:20), and this account is briefly repeated at the close of the whole account (Jdg 16:31). The first part includes six distinct acts which are grouped together in twos: viz., (1 and 2) the killing of the lion on the way to Timnath, and the slaughter of the thirty Philistines for the purpose of paying for the solution of his riddle with the clothes that he took off them (Judg 14); (3 and 4) his revenge upon the Philistines by burning their crops, because his wife had been given to a Philistine, and also by the great slaughter with which he punished them for having burned
- ↑ On these grounds, L. Diestel, in the article Samson in Herzog's Cycl., has rejected Bertheau's enumeration as unsatisfactory; and also the division proposed by Ewald into five acts with three turns in each, because, in order to arrive at this grouping, Ewald is not only obliged to refer the general statement in Jdg 13:25, “the Spirit of God began to drive Samson,” to some heroic deed which is not described, but has also to assume that in the case of one act (the carrying away of the gates at Gaza) the last two steps of the legend are omitted from the present account, although in all the rest Diestel follows Ewald’s view almost without exception. The views advanced by Ewald and Bertheau form the foundation of Roskoff's Monograph, “the legend of Samson in its origin, form, and signification, and the legend of Hercules,”in which the legend of Samson is regarded as an Israelitish form of that of Hercules.
