Samson and Delilah
Judges 16:4 to 21:25
16:4 Samson fell in love with a woman named Delilah. The Philistine aristocrats offered Delilah a lot of money to find out the secret of Samson's magical superman strength. Delilah wanted all that money. She wanted that money so very badly.
Several times Samson lied to Delilah and gave her goofy ways to sap his strength. First he said he would be weak if she tied him up with un-dried green grassy things. So she tied his hands with green things and called in some bad guys to arrest him. Samson just broke those wimpy green thingies right off his hands.
Samson easily beat up all of those idiots of course and then Delilah got all huffy about being lied to and she begged him to tell her the truth about his strength. He said tying him up with some brand new ropes would work. Yes that would be the real way to sap his super strength. It didn’t work. She called in the goons, he broke the ropes, kicked ass, and she moped. The Judeans had already tried that new rope thing earlier anyway. Maybe Samson just liked it when she tied him up.
Samson said the secret to making him weak was to braid his hair. Once again Delilah waited until he was asleep, and did the thing, braided his hair. She did a real nice job too, it was done all kind of fancy-like. Then she called in the brute squad. Again he politely kicked all their silly asses with his braids flying to and fro, and Delilah got all huffy about being lied to.
Each time she would betray him but his enemies would come and find him as strong as ever. You might think he would learn from her betrayals but no, he finally broke down and told her the truth. His secret of having hero level super strength was his long hair. He grew it out long and shaggy due to his oath as a Nazerite. Having exposed his crucial secret to a low level wench who had just already betrayed him three freaking times, he then went to sleep with his head on Delilah's lap. She called in a barber. As his long locks hit the ground, the Lord took away Samson’s power faster than a neutrino with a tail wind. So once again a great man was brought down by a conniving woman.
When the bungling bunch of first level orc thumpers arrived, Samson went out to meet them thinking like a tenth level paladin, just like he had done before. But this time the Philistines were able to capture him and gouge out his zero level eyeballs. They put him in a prison where he blindly did hard labor. Meanhile his hair began slowly growing back.
16:21 One day about 3000 Philistines got together in a great big building to honor their god Dagon for giving them Samson. It's unclear why they thanked Dagon and not Delilah. They had a young boy lead Samson in so they could poke fun at him and his funny haircut. Apparently they didn't know that his hair would grow back or they might have recut it on a regular basis. Samson asked the young boy who was guiding him to help him find the pillars that held up the building. Suddenly, the Lord gave Samson special hero powers one more time. Samson broke down the pillars, probably while shouting something clever and sarcastic.
The building collapsed killing Samson and Dagon's worshipers including some very important wealthy Philistines, and the young boy that had been so much help. Samson's family took the mighty hero's body and buried him in the family plot.
18:1 Meanwhile Samson's tribe, the tribe of Dan, still had not been able to take control of the Dan land that the Lord had promised to the Dan people. So instead the Dan tribal elders decided to take a city up north which was weak and isolated. The army of Dan went north and on the way they took an idol from some guy named Micah. Micah had befriended some Dan guys on an earlier Dan spy mission up there. The Dan soldiers also took Micah's personal priest to help with the Dan plan and when Micah objected the Dan men threatened to kill him. Micah went back into his house and left the Dan men to continue the Dan attack. The Dan troops destroyed the city of Laish and built a new city for the Dan people in its place. They couldn’t think of a good name so they just called the new city Dan.
19:1 A certain Levite guy had some problems with his sex slave who had run away to live with her father. Her father wanted to let her stay but the Levite guy retrieved her against her father's protests. On the way home he stopped and took lodging with a friendly Ephraimite guy. At first he had considered stopping in the town of Jebus but Jebus was not an Israelite town and therefore unsafe and unworthy.
19:24 The man of the house said "No, here take my daughter and his sex slave instead." The rapers refused the offer so the Levite guy grabbed his sex slave and shoved her out the door at the mob. The mob of Benjamites took the concubine and brutally beat and raped her all night. She died on the doorstep. In the morning her master found her body blocking the front door and shouted at her "Hey you, get up, let's go, it's time to hit the road." She didn't answer because she was dead.
Israelites always feel kind of bad after killing so many other Israelites but the Lord assured them it was ok in this case, not to worry, no biggie. This reactionary violence left only about 600 Benjamite men still living and with no women at all to help them reestablish their tribe. So to make things right the Israelites surprise attacked a nearby village killing all the males and non-virgin females living there. Then they kidnapped and enslaved the remaining 400 young virgin girls and gave them to the surviving 600 Benjamite men to breed. Thus the rape and murder of one woman justified the murder of thousands of people and the rape of 400 more.
21:25 In those days the Israelites had no king and everyone did pretty much whatever the freaking hell they wanted.
