The Bible

[Spademan 94]

OMG YOU TATOO'D A BABY!@?!?You're sick dude.Reported.

[Roll the Bones 74]

Another issue of Bible stories with RTB. (Sorry)Okay, I was watching Jeopardy the other night and yelled out the answer to a question about Samson which reminded me that I wanted to tell this bible story as well. It was a favorite but for different reasons. My vision of Samson from my children’s bible was that of a Thor hero-like figure and was amazed how far off I was on this saga. It’s a tale that tells us women are deceptive and heartless and that men are too stupid and sex-crazed to realize it. (As if we didn't know this already).To start, an angel appears and tells a barren woman that she will have a son that will deliver the Israelites from the Philistines and that she should never cut his hair. Like many bible stories the woman doesn’t have a name. She tells her husband who naturally (and hilariously) doesn’t believe her. So, he prays to the lord who sends a prophet that tells him the same thing and says “dude, I told your wife this already?” It reminds me of my brother and his wife. Anyway, Samson is born.Samson falls for a Philistine chick and wants to marry her prompting the first ever Jewish parents to say, “Couldn’t you just find a nice Jewish girl?” But no, he has a thing for Pagan chicks and makes dad arrange the marriage.Samson turns out to be like a big dumb jock. On the way to the wedding he tears a lion apart with his bare hands. Later he dips it in honey and eats it. When he meets the future in-laws' family and friends at the wedding banquet he gives them a riddle about this honey/lion munchfest. They are pissed off they can’t answer it so they cajole his future bride into prying the answer out of him. She tries for 3 days before he gives into her nagging and trickery and then she runs off to tell them the answer. Samson is so pissed off about them getting it he accuses them of sleeping with her and kills 30 apparently innocent philistines. According to Judges, Samson was filled with the spirit of the lord while slaying them in a kind of roid’ RAGE. I never got why God would be all for this slaughter though. I mean, it was a damn riddle.So now the future father in law is upset and won’t let Samson marry his daughter, but instead offers up her sister. I know this has happened a couple other times so far with Laban and Jacob, and often in the bible stories kind of repeat with different characters. So what does Samson do? Goes on another RAGE naturally and attaches 300 torches to the tails of foxes and sets them loose on their crops and burns them down. PETA has to be infuriated by this! The Phillies are outraged and kill the father and his daughter, (burnt them actually) that Samson wanted to marry. Samson then butchers a bunch more Phillies in return. The Phillies send an army to attack Samson’s home land, Judah. To stop the war, Samson agrees to let Judah hand him over to the Phillies in exchange (as a sacrifice) for peace between the tribes. When he gets there, the spirit of the lord hits him again (more RAGE) and grabs a donkey’s jawbone and massacres 1000 of them.The only real message I got from this whole debacle is “don’t tell riddles”. That’s what started the war.And so we get the smoking hot Angelina Jolie temptress vixen of the story, Delilah. It doesn’t say she is a Phillie, but given Sampsons lust for foreign hotties and her allegiance to them it’s pretty obvious. So naturally, Samson falls hard for her. I was thinking he reminded me of Brad Pitt here.The Phillies order Delilah to find out the secret of Samson’s strength, and naturally he learned nothing from the first incident. Oh he, resists at firsts and tells her a lie about being tied up with seven bowstrings making him weak. So she ties him up with seven bowstrings while he’s sleeping and kinky sex is introduced to the world. (kidding, no sex was mentioned). Of course he wakes up and fights off the attackers. Now, at this point any complete moron would be on to the vixen, but love is blind or the male sex drives too strong to dump her. So Samson, the dumbest Jew in history, snuggles back up with her trying to get laid and again she asks what his secret is and again he lies to her and again he has to beat off the Phillies trying to kill him. It happens a third time and he still doesn’t leave her. Eventually, having blue balls and giving into the nagging, he tells her the truth of his secret hair. Like I said, dumb, dumb, dumb jock.So you know what happens next. A really bad haircut. They arrest him and gouge out his eyes and throw him in the pokey. The Phillies apparently are just as stupid as Samson though and let him grow his hair back out. Really, they do. Then they let him out and bring him to Pagan party, to celebrate their god Dagon. Samson asks the lord to return his power, and like after Popeye eating spinach the Phillies are in trouble. He knocks over the banquet hall and kills 3000 Phillies and himself.So, in retrospect, as if Judges, who Samson was one of wasn’t weird enough, I was left miffed again at the whole point of the story. When it was done Samson wasn’t a hero or someone I would admire. He did nothing for God’s glory, his people or anything. It was all private revenge and killed shitloads of innocent Philistines and Israelites. I do think Judges is really only emphasizing the point that the Israelites need a king and separation of church of state, because left to their own devices man is too self absorbed and cruel. Not that the king thing works out so well in later chapters all the time either.