The Wrestler: Biblical Allegory for the Story of Samson

I wrote this piece about 10 years back as a meditation on the Samson and Delilah story. https://robertkham.com/2017/03/08/on-life-experience/ I recently reread the post, and now I have some new thoughts. They’re not really related to the original post – I was just surprised at how rereading the story with a fresh set of eyes drew out such a different reading.

The Samson and Delilah story is not an isolated incident – Samson’s story is fundamentally about a man who is trapped in a life of isolation. From before Samson is born, he is chosen by God to be special and different. The first thing we see of him after his birth is his attempt to marry a Philistine woman, an outsider. Notice what happens when he throws the wedding feast – the Philistines provide his wedding band, presumably because he doesn’t have his own. Likewise, after he’s betrayed by his wife and goes on a rampage, killing Philistines en masse, his own countrymen rise up against him to subdue him. He lets them, since he knows he won’t be under any physical danger. After this, he proceeds to judge for 20 years – no words spoken on the Israelites’ thoughts about him or his rule. After this, he meets Delilah, who, as we know, betrays him. He’s then imprisoned by the Philistines, blinded, and forced to work as a slave doing domestic labor until he gains one last feat of strength to kill thousands of Philistines at a party they’re throwing in their god Dagon’s honor to celebrate them defeating Samson. It’s stated that he killed more Philistines in that act than he did in his entire life.

One very interesting tidbit that’s mentioned in the story is that he exclusively fraternizes with Philistine women in the short summary of his life – His first Philistine wife, a random Philistine prostitute, and Delilah, who he opens his heart to, before she betrays him. Why does he exclusively relate to the women of his enemy? Note that all three times he interacts with women, something bad happens to him – the first, his ruined wedding when his wife betrays his secret to the Philistines, the second, when he sleeps with the prostitute, him being surrounded for an ambush, to the point where he has to steal away in the middle of the night to escape, and the third being his eventual betrayal by Delilah and him losing his strength after his hair is shaved off.

The story of Samson is typically told as a man who is led by his lusts and as a result, comes to a bad end. I see it as a man who is so alienated that he becomes desperate to seek connection, even if that search is a self destructive impulse. His own people don’t relate to him and fear him. The only two instances that he directly interacts with his kinsmen is when he marries his first wife, the Philistine, and his father asks him if he wouldn’t rather marry one of his relatives or kinsmen. I think from here, it’s already clear that his parents already do not relate to him, though they may still love him. He simply states, “Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well.” When he later kills the lion and runs into the carcass filled with honey, he eats freely and shares with his parents, without telling them where he sourced the honey. He then meets the Philistine woman and talks with her before deciding she’s right for him. After he marries her and poses his riddle to the Philistines in his wedding party (again, noting that everyone at the party were Philistines, not his own kinsmen – even the groomsmen were Philistines), they threaten her to get the answer and she immediately gets to work on convincing him to tell her the answer. Before he relents, he says, “Behold, I have not told it my father nor my mother, and shall I tell it thee?” This is a man who is more open with foreign women than his own people. We see a similar pattern repeat, when after this incident, he proceeds to a kill a lot more Philistines. They come down on the Israelites because of Samson’s feats, and 3000 Israelites band together to capture Samson to deliver him to the Philistines. They don’t ask about him or understand what he’s doing. All they say is, “Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us?” They don’t care about or relate to him in the slightest, only the misfortune he has brought upon them.

One other connection I’ve noticed since reading the story is seeing the connection between the story of Samson and Randy Robinson in The Wrestler. The movie had a lot of religious iconography and they played up the Christlike similarities, but in retrospect, I see it much closer to an allegory for the story of Samson. Randy has a big thing for his hair – the comparisons to Samson and the power of his hair is obvious. In a real sense, Samson’s hair is his armor – a physical manifestation of his Nazirite vow that protects him from harm. When his armor is removed (hair is shaved) he becomes vulnerable. In a sense, Randy’s persona of the Ram is his armor that protects him in some real sense – it’s only when he has to be Robin, the person, that he suffers real emotional harm from interacting with the real world. Similarly, Randy the Wrestler, akin to Samson the Judge, only brings disaster to his kinsmen – for Samson, his first wife and the people of Judah, and Randy, his career as a wrestler has destroyed his relationship with his daughter. She’s collateral damage by virtue of who The Ram is, simply by virtue of being his daughter. There’s also a similar structure to the three women in The Wrestler vs the story of Samson – Randy’s daughter, the unnamed one night stand, and Cassidy the stripper, analogous to Samson’s first wife, the unnamed Philistine prostitute, and Delilah. They play similar roles, though not exactly one to one.

Note that Cassidy’s job as a stripper is to engage in transactional relationships with men – another parallel to how Samson and Delilah’s relationship plays out. Cassidy performs intimacy in exchange for money, as Delilah does. However, the relationships are inverted – Delilah sells out the relationship for money, whereas Cassidy’s relationship with Randy is predicated on the transactional nature before moving elsewhere. However, there’s one other important parallel – it’s only at the point of peak intimacy in the relationship that both men are destroyed. In Samson’s case, it’s when he reveals his true weakness to her. At this point, he had already been tested multiple other times, and yet after all that, “he told her all his heart” his real weakness, and she immediately rings the Philistine lords to reveal his weakness to them. Likewise, with Randy and Cassidy, the transactional nature of their relationship as it started in a way are like miniature betrayals, because as a stripper, she wants to foster a kind of parasocial relationship with Randy to make more money from him. This doesn’t bother Randy because it’s not his true weakness. It’s only at the end of the movie, right before he’s about to perform, that he truly opens his heart to her: “The only place I get hurt is out there. The world don’t give a shit about me.” It’s not long after this that Cassidy leaves. Right before Randy performs his final move, he looks in the crowd, sees Cassidy has left him, and decides to go out on his shield, even though he knows his body can’t handle the strain.

Structurally, the Philistines, like the Ram’s fans, are the only ones who truly recognize Samson/Randy in some real sense. The Philistines see this man as a larger than life legend, this terrible menace who plagues them in a real, old school, biblical sense. He was such a menace that thousands of Philistines celebrated and partied when they finally captured him after decades of terror. In some sense, that’s not too different from how wrestling fans see their favorite wrestlers – these larger than life characters who have ascended the realm of normal mortals. Likewise, the ending of The Wrestler is a neat parallel to Samson’s own death – his going out in one last final glory for people who are throwing a massive celebration in his honor. The Ram for his wrestling anniversary event, and inversely, a feast in honor of Dagon for having delivered Samson to them – in a sense, they’re both the guests of honor at the party celebrating their destruction. There are other parallels, but the important part is that these are two men, alienated by their own society for their unique talents, who are destroyed by their self destructive impulses – in their case, the act itself of searching for connection.

Postscript: One other thing I see hardly mentioned is the duration of the relationship between Samson and Delilah. Judges makes it clear that Samson was a Judge for a period of 20 years. Reading the events between the two as something that occurs over a period of years rather than a few days, as the story being told sequentially seems to imply, considerably changes the context of how I interpret the story. As the years went on, Delilah would test Samson, and he’d lie to her because he didn’t fully trust her. From a different perspective, it’s a woman who is asking a man to fully commit to her – in a certain warped sense, the testing is understandable, in a way that a wary woman might send her friend to surreptitiously hit on her boyfriend to test his loyalty. Over the years, Samson could rationalize more and more, as he got closer to revealing his whole self. It’s also important to say that the relationship between Samson and Delilah was established before the idea of betrayal was floated – the Philistine lords learned of the relationship and approached Delilah to bribe her – it wasn’t as if she was a honeypot to begin with. Couple this with Delilah instantly recognizing Samson’s confession as true when he tells her, instead of testing it first as she did with the other tests. In a sense, she truly does see him. This supports the reading of the man so thirsty for intimacy that he’d accept the poisoned chalice, knowing it’s poisoned, but wishing and praying this time he could trust his lover. Sadly, wishful thinking doesn’t imply a happy ending.