Skip to content
QuotesFromBible.com

The Bible on

about 6 min read

The Bible on Samson

Old Testament old-testamentjudgesnaziritehebrew

The text is explicit — Samson's strength came from his Nazirite vow, not from his hair. The hair was the sign; the vow was the source.

Judges, Hebrews Books
Shimshon — possibly related to shemesh ('sun'), 'of the sun' or 'sunny' Name means
Judges 13:24 First mention

What the text says

Samson’s story spans Judges 13–16 — four chapters. Hebrews 11:32 lists him among the heroes of faith but adds nothing narratively.

Judges 13 records his birth. An angel of the LORD appears to the unnamed wife of Manoah (a Danite) — she is barren. The angel instructs her:

Now please be careful not to drink wine or strong drink, and not to eat anything unclean. For behold, you will conceive and give birth to a son. And no razor shall come over his head, for the boy shall be a Nazirite to God from the womb. (Judges 13:4–5, BSB adapted)

The Nazirite vow framework (Numbers 6) imposes three restrictions: no wine or other product of the vine, no contact with a corpse, and no cutting of hair. The hair is the visible sign of the vow; the other two prohibitions are dietary and ritual.

Samson’s adult life is a sequence of episodes in which the Nazirite vow is repeatedly compromised. He marries a Philistine woman (against Israelite custom). He eats honey scooped from a lion’s carcass (Judges 14:8–9) — contact with a corpse, which violates the second Nazirite prohibition. He hosts a wedding feast (Judges 14:10) — the Hebrew mishteh (מִשְׁתֶּה) literally means “drinking-feast,” implying alcohol. The hair restriction remains intact until Delilah; the other two are compromised over the course of the narrative.

Judges 16:17 is Samson’s own account of the mechanism:

So he told her everything: “No razor has ever been used on my head, because I am a Nazirite to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any other man.”

Note the construction: because I am a Nazirite. The hair is identified as the sign of the Nazirite state; the strength is connected to that state.

Judges 16:19–20 records what happens when Delilah has the hair cut:

She let him fall asleep on her lap, and called for someone to shave off the seven braids of his head. In this way she began to subdue him, and his strength left him.

Then she called out, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” He awoke from his sleep and thought, “I will escape as before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the LORD had left him.

The phrasing of verse 20 is exact and is the textual key to the mechanism: “the LORD had left him.” The narrator identifies the departure of YHWH, not the absence of hair, as the source of weakness. The hair was the visible breaking-point of the vow; the vow being broken was the departure of God’s empowering presence.

Judges 16:22. The text adds: “However, the hair of his head began to grow back after it had been shaved.” The hair regrows; the strength returns when Samson prays in 16:28: “O Lord GOD, please remember me. Strengthen me, O God, just once more.” The mechanism of restoration is petitionary prayer, not regrown hair.

What the text doesn’t say

That the hair itself was the source of strength. Judges 16:17 says cutting the hair would lead to strength leaving — the hair is the sign of the vow, and breaking the sign breaks the vow. Judges 16:20 makes the mechanism explicit: God left him. The widespread folk reading that the hair is magically powerful is contradicted by the text’s own diagnosis.

That Samson was a model of consistent piety. Across four chapters he marries outside his people (against Deuteronomy 7:3), pursues sexual encounters (Judges 16:1, with a prostitute in Gaza), repeatedly violates the dietary and corpse-contact provisions of his vow, and exhibits a temper that produces collateral damage at scale (1,000 Philistines dead at Lehi, the wheat-fields-with-foxes incident). The text records all of this. Hebrews 11:32 includes him in a list of figures who acted in faith without endorsing every action.

Delilah’s tribal or ethnic identity. Judges 16:4 says only that she lived in the Sorek Valley. Whether she was Philistine, Israelite, or otherwise is not specified. The traditional assumption that she was Philistine is inferred from the context (Philistine rulers paying her) but not stated.

Key verse

Judges 16:20:

But he did not know that the LORD had left him.

Hebrew wəhuʾ loʾ yadaʿ ki YHWH sar mēʿālāyw. The verb sar (סָר, “to turn aside, depart”) is the same verb used elsewhere for someone leaving a place or a covenant being broken. The grammar is unambiguous: the subject of the departure is YHWH, the object is Samson.

Read in other translations

The passages above use the BSB and KJV — both public domain. To read Judges 16:17 in copyrighted modern translations, follow the links to BibleGateway:

Original language note

Shimshon (שִׁמְשׁוֹן) — Samson’s Hebrew name — is generally derived from shemesh (שֶׁמֶשׁ, “sun”), giving the sense “of the sun” or “sunny.” The connection to solar imagery is sometimes noted in scholarship — Samson’s strength, his association with light/eye imagery (his blinding in Judges 16:21), and the geographical setting (his hometown Beth-Shemesh, “House of the Sun,” in the Sorek Valley) — but the name’s deeper meaning is debated.

Nazirite comes from the Hebrew nazir (נָזִיר), from the verb nazar (נָזַר, “to separate, to consecrate”). The vow is described in Numbers 6:1–21 and includes three prohibitions (wine, corpse contact, haircutting) and one consecration formula. Two other named Nazirites in the Old Testament are Samuel (1 Samuel 1:11, by his mother Hannah’s vow) and John the Baptist (Luke 1:15, in similar terms — though Luke does not use the word Nazirite).

  • The Bible on Job — another Old Testament narrative whose tradition diverges sharply from what the text records
  • The Bible on John the Baptist — another figure with Nazirite-resembling characteristics whom the text does not formally identify as one