Bible Commentaries
Judges 16

Verses 1-31

Here we have the sad and awful account of Samson's relapse and final fall. He went to Gaza. It is easy to imagine how much there must have been in Gaza which should have appealed to one acting for the fulfillment of the divine purpose. There were idolatries and evil things against which he should have flung himself in force. But he did not. He was still swayed by the strength of his animal nature, and the tragic sentence is written, ". . .

Samson went to Gaza, and saw there a harlot."

In the midst of his sin, his enemies attempted to imprison him. He broke through by plucking up the gates of the city and carrying them to the top of an adjacent mountain. Even then, however, he did not learn his lesson and we see him in the toils of Delilah. At last she triumphed, and the man who had long since ceased to be in any deep sense a Nazarite was at last shorn of even the outward symbols of his vow.

There is nothing perhaps in the sacred writings at once more pathetically tragic than the vision of Samson with his eyes put out, grinding in the prison house of the Philistines. It is a picture and a parable needing no enforcement of exposition to make it powerful.

At last, out of the depths of his degradation, he cried to God, and in his death struck the heaviest blow at the people from whose oppression he ought to have delivered his people.

At this point ends the history of this Book. It is taken up again in the first Book of Samuel. The remaining chapters of the Book and the Book of Ruth have their chronological place in the period already surveyed.