iotic virtues and pathetic end have kept his memory alive through
the ages? Have a hundred generations of men to whom the story of
Herakles has appeared to be only a fanciful romance, the product of
that imagination heightened by religion which led the Greeks to exalt
their supreme heroes to the extent of deification, persisted in hearing
and telling the story of Samson with a sympathetic interest which
betrays at least a sub-conscious 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 precisely
the same manner as the imagination of the poet of the "Lay of the
Nibelung" magnified the stature and strength of Siegfried. His
shoulders, says the legend, were sixty ells broad; when the Spirit of
God came on him he could step from Zorah to Eshtaol