Okay, okay, my informal poll of CT editors and designers doesn’t have the scientific rigor of a study from Barna Research. Still, the results are suggestive. “When did you last hear a sermon about Samson?” Some CT staffers said never; others said not since they were very young (and then in Sunday school rather than in a sermon proper). Not a single respondent recalled hearing a sermon or lesson on Samson since childhood.
Pastors of America, shut down your laptops for a minute. Seminary professors, take five. Samson! Is there a more gripping figure in the entire Old Testament? Where did we go off the rails? How did we lose our stories?
A clue may be found in The Book of Samson (St. Martin’s), a novel by David Maine. This is Maine’s third novel with an Old Testament base, following The Preservationist (Noah’s Ark) and Fallen (Cain and Abel and the Fall). I don’t know what he believes or doesn’t believe today. Since 1998, he has lived in Lahore, Pakistan, with his wife, the novelist Uzma Aslam Khan. He inhabits biblical stories and wrenches them into fiction with a fierce intelligence and a cunning wit.
Maine’s Samson tells his own story, hewing closely to chapters 13 through 16 of the Book of Judges but fleshing out the biblical narrative. In Judges, for instance, we read how Samson was angered when the Philistines pressured his wife to give them the answer to his riddle: “And the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave change of garments unto them which expounded the riddle” (Judges 14:19, KJV). In the novel, Samson briefly describes all thirty killings, one by one, with the bravado and cruel humor of what anthropologists call an “honor culture” (think gangsta rap).
The story begins with Samson blind and in chains. It ends with that spectacular scene of destruction when Samson—his strength restored by God—brings down the house on the mocking Philistine crowd who have come to worship their god Dagon and have a little fun with the prisoner. (Poetic license permits the narrator to recount his own death.) Samson, we realize, was not a suicide bomber but a suicide crusher: “So the dead he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” More Old Testament humor.
One way to read Maine’s novel is as a deadpan skewering of familiar Christian notions of God and how he does business (notions that might apply to certain other faiths as well). But it’s not as if the only Christian response to such a book is to run away in panic, more determined than ever to keep Samson and his story safely in the nursery. What about the long tradition of reading Samson as a type of Christ? Should we reclaim that tradition? Or throw it overboard and propose another reading, as some modern commentators have done? What about the Lord as described in this magnificent tale? What does he intend for us to take from it?
Preachers, you have your text.
John Wilson, Books & Culture editor.
Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:
The Book of Samson is available in hardcover and paperback from Amazon.com and other retailers.
St. Martin’s posted an excerpt from The Book of Samson.
The New York Times also reviewed the book.
See our books section for more reviews.
