Judges 14:5

5. Then went Samson down, and his father and his mother He overcame their scruples, and they accordingly accompanied him to Timnath to consummate the betrothal. The laws and customs of the age required the parents of the bridegroom to be parties in negotiating the marriage of a son, and for this purpose must Samson’s parents go down with him to the residence of the desired maiden.

The vineyards of Timnath “There were then vineyards belonging to Timnath,” says Thomson, “as there now are in all these hamlets along the base of the hills and upon the mountain sides. These vineyards are very often far out from the villages, climbing up rough wadies and wild cliffs.”

A young lion roared against him His parents seem to have been in advance. “At present lions do not exist in Palestine, though they are said to be found in the desert on the road to Egypt. They abound on the banks of the Euphrates between Bussorah and Bagdad, and in the marshes and jungles near the rivers of Babylonia. But though they have now disappeared from Palestine, they must in ancient times have been numerous. The names Lebaoth, (Joshua 15:32,)

Beth-lebaoth, (Joshua 19:6,) Arieh, (2 Kings 15:25,) and Laish, (Judges 18:7,) were probably derived from the presence of lions, and point to the fact that they were at one time common. The strength, courage, and ferocity of the lion are proverbial. The terrible roar of the lion is expressed in Hebrew by four different words, between which the following distinction appears to be maintained: shaag (here and Psalms 22:13; Psalms 104:21; Amos 3:4) denotes the roar of the lion while seeking his prey; naham (Isaiah 5:29) expresses the cry which he utters when he seizes his victim; hagah (Isaiah 31:4) the growl with which he defies any attempt to snatch the prey from his teeth; while naar is descriptive of the cry of the young lions. Jeremiah 51:38.” Smith’s Bible Dictionary.

A recent ingenious attempt (in “Scribner’s Monthly” for July, 1871) to explain away the common and traditional sense of this passage, and to give a new solution of Samson’s riddle, demands, perhaps, a notice here. It asserts that Samson rent no young lion, but smashed or demolished a winepress, and renders this sentence, “Behold, the lion-cup called loudly to invite him.” It affirms that כפיר , young lion, is meant for כפור , a cup, and that cup of lions means a winepress, which was made of hewn stone and resembled a great cup or goblet, and was hence called cup of lions, or lion-cup. The roaring ( שׁאג ) is explained of the raging of wine when it is red in the cup. Samson being a Nazarite, wine was his enemy, and when he heard it raging, and saw it giving its colour in the mammoth cup, he treated it as a tempting foe, and rent the winepress to fragments. It is also claimed that מפלת , in Judges 14:8 means properly a ruin, or heap, and is applicable to a broken winepress, but not to the dead carcass of a lion; and גֶוית rendered carcass in the same verse, is, when we leave out the matres lectionis ו and י , the same word ( גת ) which is rendered winepress in chap. Judges 6:11. Further, it is argued that a broken winepress would be a tempting receptacle for bees, while a dead carcass would be repulsive; and that by destroying this property of the Philistines he was injuring the enemies of his people and thus fulfilling his mission, while the rending of a lion would have been no act of destruction against the Philistines, but a blessing, in thus ridding their vineyards of dangerous beasts. The writer finally gives the following solution of the riddle: Out of the wine-press, which consumes or eats grapes by the million, came forth wine, one of the three leading meats of the Bible, (corn, wine, and oil;) and out of the strong (or the lion-cup, capable of overcoming the mightiest potentates of the earth) came forth sweetness, (or the honey Samson had taken out of the ruins of the winepress.)

To all this it may be easily replied: 1. The changing of כפיר into כפור is wholly arbitrary, and opens the way to such unbounded license in criticism as is not to be accepted unless for weightier reasons than this expositor has offered. 2. To speak of a winepress roaring to meet one, is, to say the least, a very strange expression, and a use of Hebrew that has no parallel in the Bible. שׁאג is often used of the roaring of the lion, but never of the fermentation of grapes, or the raging of strong drink. 3. The rent carcass of a lion may be as appropriately called a ruin ( מפלת ) as a smashed winepress, or the fallen trunk of a tree, (Ezekiel 31:13,) or the misfortunes of the wicked, Proverbs 29:16. Proverbs 29:4. To omit the two letters ו and י from the word גוית , in which they each have the full power of a consonant, and thus make the word גת , is to set at defiance all sound principles of criticism. To omit or ignore the so-called matres lectionis, or assume that they are nowhere consonants, is violently to change the orthography of perhaps a tenth or more of all the words in the Hebrew language. 5. The notion that bees would not have entered a lion’s carcass is sufficiently refuted in our note on Judges 14:8; and the idea that Samson, when suddenly attacked by a lion, would have paused to reflect whether he would injure or bless the Philistines by rending it, may be safely passed over without further notice. 6. Finally, this new solution of Samson’s riddle is less apt and clear than the traditional one, and is of too little worth to justify such a laboured effort and such arbitrary criticism as must be undertaken to make it even plausible. We should add, that, contrary to the evident import of Judges 14:17, which says that Samson told his wife the riddle, and she explained it to the Philistines, this new exposition assumes that Samson, by a play on words, (like lion-cup and lion-cub,) deceived his wife, and so his thirty companions never correctly solved his riddle. In this case he surely should have demanded of them the thirty changes of garments, and not have succumbed to their treachery and fraud.