father said unto him: "Is there never a woman among the daughters
of thy brethren or among all my people that thou goest to take a
wife of the uncircumcised Philistines?" he did not know that "it
was of the Lord that he sought an occasion against the
Philistines." Out of that wooing and winning grew the first of the
encounters which culminated in the destruction of the temple of
Dagon, when "the dead which he slew at his death were more than
they which he slew in his life." So his yielding to the pleadings
of his wife when she betrayed the answer to his riddle and his
succumbing to the wheedling arts of Delilah when he betrayed the
secret of his strength (acts incompatible with the character of an
ordinary strong and wise man) were of the type essential to the
machinery of the Greek drama.

A word about the mythological interpretation of the characters
which have been placed in parallel: It may be helpful to an
understanding of the Hellenic mind to conceive Herakles as a
marvellously strong man, first glorified into a national hero and
finally deified. So, too, the theory, that Herakles sinking down
upon his couch of fire is but a symbol of the declining sun can be
entertained without marring the grandeur of the hero or belittling
Nature's phenomenon; but it would obscure our understanding of the
Hebrew intellect and profane the Hebrew religion to conceive Samson
as anything but the man that the Bible says he was; while to make
of him, as Ignaz Golziher suggests, a symbol of the setting sun
whose curly locks (crines Phoebi) are sheared by Delilah-Night,
would bring contumely upon one of the most beautiful and impressive
of Nature's spectacles. Before the days of comparative mythology
scholars were not troubled by such interpretations. Josephus
disposes of the Delilah episode curtly: "As for Samson being