Did the Holy Spirit Empower Samson’s Violence? – Brad Jersak

QUESTION:

Thanks for introducing me to this way of reading. I’m having trouble applying that to Judges 15 and Samson slaying 1000’s with a donkey’s jawbone after the Holy Spirit had come upon him powerfully. This doesn’t sound like Jesus at all, so I don’t know what to make of it. Can you give me some pointers to please? I have read about other passages where the different authors view particular circumstances as God, then not God but the devil. I can’t find that for Samson’s exploits.

RESPONSE:

First, you are absolutely right. The vengeful massacre of Samson doesn’t sound at all like Jesus. Jesus revealed the nature of God as a life-giver, not a death-dealer and as forgiving rather than vengeful. How then do we read Judges 15 in “the Emmaus way”?

First, in A More Christlike Word, I recall the way Mileto of Sardis describes and models this way of reading. He uses the word “prefigurement.” Prefigurement literally means that the life of Christ can be seen in ‘figures’ or ‘types’ or ‘symbols’ in the Old Testament stories and images. These figures anticipate Christ but are always inferior to the Reality they point to, in the same way that a 9-inch clay model may prefigure a 90-foot golden statue.

The three broad categories are:

  • Suffering: Every time God’s people suffer, it anticipates the far greater suffering of Jesus as he bears all the world’s sins and sorrows on the Cross.
  • Sin: Every time God’s people act sinfully or unjustly, they anticipate the far greater betrayal and murder of Jesus under the state, religion, and the mob.
  • Victory: Every time God’s people win a victory, however ugly and violent, they prefigure the far greater victory of Christ over Satan, sin, and death in which he enacts no vengeance and kills nobody.

This means that the pre-figures of Christ not only foreshadow Christ by comparison. They also stand in stark contrast to him. Samson is just like that. When he stretches out his hands in the Philistine temple and brings its pillars down, we see an image of Jesus stretching out his hands on the Cross and bringing the gates of Hades down. Both acts represent victories, but Samson’s brought death and destruction to a crowd while Jesus brought life and resurrection to the world.

The Holy Spirit?

So far, so good. But the really problematic aspect of Judges 15 and other stories like it was that the text says, “The Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him.” What do we make of that? Does the Holy Spirit miraculously inspire and empower bloody massacres?

Now, what I’m about to propose may sound controversial, but hopefully far less so than contradicting Jesus’ revelation of God.

First, Jewish scholars today (e.g., the great translator of the Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter, for instance) regard these narratives as Jewish legends, rooted in oral tradition, then composed later for the author’s own literary purposes. If the stories read like historical fiction, I don’t think that would diminish their function as Scripture, and more than the fact that Jesus spoke in parables. But it sets me free from the distraction of reading them as literal history. In fact, I don’t need to decide what the stories are. I need to hear their message.

The Message

Why are they there? According to Paul,

“Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.”

—1 Corinthians 10:6:

Whether historical fact or fiction, these stories are for our benefit as cautionary tales of how NOT to live our lives. Even if Samson was anointed by the Spirit to deliverer of God’s people, his ways of going about it are sketchy to say the least. And the moral sense of his story includes this lesson: don’t try to bring about God’s ends through sketchy means.

But why is the “Spirit of the Lord” credited as the power behind Old Testament massacres? As Dr. Pete Enns says, “Because God let his children tell the story.” In other words, we are reading the perspective of those who passed down Israel’s oral traditions and of the authors who recorded them. The Spirit is no doubt speaking through these stories, but what that is exactly does not necessitate ‘monster god’ interpretations.

Jesus came along and his claim is that these stories are about him. We simply can’t read them that way—as messages fulfilled in Christ, in his death, and in his resurrection—unless and until we move beyond literalism. The Jews already had this figured out before the time of Christ, knowing that attributing such violence to God would besmirch God’s character. To see Christ in such stories, we must read them symbolically. When we read them symbolically, the Philistines represent resistance, oppression, and adversity, both in ourselves as individuals and as God’s people. And Samson’s violent ways of dealing with that point to Jesus’ more powerful, more effective, more permanent and beautiful nonviolent ways of overcoming.

So we watch for symbolic foreshadowing, both by comparison and by contrast, seeing in Samson both a powerful deliverer and a violent philanderer. Jesus, by contrast is all that which Samson could not fulfill and so much more.

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