although he was
lame in both feet; the hairs of his head arose and clashed against one
another so that they could be heard for a like distance; he was so
strong that he could uplift two mountains and rub them together like
two clods of earth, Herakles tore asunder the mountain which, divided,
now forms the Straits of Gibraltar and Gates of Hercules.

The parallel which is frequently drawn between Samson and Herakles
cannot be pursued far with advantage to the Hebrew hero. Samson rent a
young lion on the road to Timnath, whither he was going to take his
Philistine wife; Herakles, while still a youthful herdsman, slew the
Thespian lion and afterward strangled the Nemean lion with his hands.
Samson carried off the gates of Gaza and bore them to the top of a hill
before Hebron; Herakles upheld the heavens while Atlas went to fetch
the golden apples of Hesperides. Moreover, the feats of Herakles show a
higher intellectual quality than those of Samson, all of which, save
one, were predominantly physical. The exception was the trick of tying
300 foxes by their tails, two by two, with firebrands between and
turning them loose to burn the corn of the Philistines. An ingenious
way to spread a conflagration, probably, but primitive, decidedly
primitive. Herakles was a scientific engineer of the modern school; he
yoked the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to his service by turning their
waters through the Augean stables and cleansing them of the deposits of
3000 oxen for thirty years. Herakles had excellent intellectual
training; Rhadamanthus taught him wisdom and virtue, Linus music. We
know nothing about the bringing up of Samson save that "the child grew
and the Lord blessed him. And the Lord began to move him at times in
the camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol." Samson made little use of
his musical gifts, if he had any, but that little he made well;
Herakles made little use of his musical training, and that little he
made ill. He lost his temper and killed his music master with his lute;
Samson, after using an implement which only the black slaves of our
South have treated as a musical instrument, to slay a thousand
Philistines, jubilated in song:--

With the jawbone of an ass
Heaps upon heaps!
With the jawbone of an ass
Have I slain a thousand men!

The vast fund of human nature laid bare in the story of Samson is, it
appears to me, quite sufficient to explain its popularity, and account
for its origin.