belief in its verity? Is the story only a parable enforcing a moral
lesson which is as old as humanity? If so, how got it into the
canonical Book of Judges, which, with all its mythical and
legendary material, seems yet to contain a large substratum of
unquestionable history?

There was nothing of the divine essence in Samson as the Hebrews
conceived him, except that spirit of God with which he was directly
endowed in supreme crises. There is little evidence of his
possession of great wisdom, but strong proof of his moral and
religious laxity. He sinned against the laws of Israel's God when
he took a Philistine woman, an idolater, to wife; he sinned against
the moral law when he visited the harlot at Gaza. He was wofully
weak in character when he yielded to the blandishments of Delilah
and wrought his own undoing, as well as that of his people. The
disgraceful slavery into which Herakles fell was not caused by the
hero's incontinence or uxoriousness, but a punishment for crime, in
that he had in a fit of madness killed his friend Iphitus. And the
three years which he spent as the slave of Omphale were punctuated
by larger and better deeds than those of Samson in like situation--
bursting the new cords with which the men of Judah had bound him
and the green withes and new ropes with which Delilah shackled him.
The record that Samson "judged Israel in the days of the
Philistines twenty years" leads the ordinary reader to think of him
as a sage, judicial personage, whereas it means only that he was
the political and military leader of his people during that period,
lifted to a magisterial position by his strength and prowess in
war. His achievements were muscular, not mental.

Rabbinical legends have magnified his stature and power in