Chronology of the Samson Narrative
How does the story of Samson’s conception and birth fit into the forty-year Philistine oppression?
The Angel of Yahweh tells Samson’s mother that Samson will begin to deliver Israel. When she reports to her husband, she interprets the Angel’s message as meaning that Samson will die without completing the task of delivering Israel: he will be a Nazirite, she says, until his death. So the forty-year Philistine oppression ends sometime after Samson’s death.
But it cannot end “well beyond” it, as Barry Webb (350) mysteriously says. After all, Samson’s death comes after twenty years of judging Israel, and Samson begins judging Israel at a time when he is ready to get married. Those twenty years as judge didn’t begin when he was a child, but rather when he was a man. He was probably twenty years old, the age of manhood in the book of Numbers, though my point here still stands even if he was a year or two younger.
Putting twenty years of judgeship together with twenty years of growing up prior to judging Israel gives us a total lifespan for Samson of (about) forty years, which roughly coincides with the entire length of the Philistine oppression. Samson begins to deliver Israel and accomplishes the greatest part of his work at his death, and then the full deliverance comes.
But not in the time of David, as K. Lawson Younger suggests (287n11: “Samson will only begin the process of deliverance. The delivering activities of Samuel, Saul, Jonathan, and David are yet future”). There is simply no way to fit Samson’s youth, Samson’s judgeship, Saul’s reign, and David’s rule until his victory over the Philistines into the space of forty years. Instead, the most obvious answer is that this particular Philistine oppression ended at the battle of Mizpah (1 Sam 7), when Samuel led Israel to victory. That, in turn, means that Samuel and Samson were contemporaries and that the battle of Mizpah took place only shortly after Samson’s death.
The battle of Mizpah itself comes twenty years after the fateful battle of Aphek, when the Ark was captured by the Philistines and the high priest, Eli, died (1 Sam 4). The removal and capture of the Ark is the tearing apart of the Tabernacle of Moses, and the Tabernacle was never put together again. When the Philistines removed the Ark, it was not returned to the Tabernacle but was kept in Kiriath Jearim for those twenty years (1 Sam 7:2). As James Jordan points out, this chronology suggests that Samson’s actions in Judges 14-15 may take place just after Aphek, perhaps even during the time when the Ark was in captivity in Philistia.
These calculations are significant also for the beginning of the Samson narrative. Barry Webb writes about Judges 13: “By the time Samson is born the Philistine domination over Israel is so complete, and the morale of Israel so low, that even the hope that Yahweh might save them has been extinguished. There is no strength even to cry out” (350). And certainly Israel doesn’t cry out in Judges 13, and by Judges 15 Judah is even willing to hand over its savior to the Philistines.
But if we count backwards from the end of Samson’s life to the beginning, those forty years, we discover God’s grace. Normally, in Judges, Israel cries out to Yahweh after several years of oppression, and only then does Yahweh raise up a judge. But Judges 13 doesn’t take place (as Webb may imply) after a long time of Philistine oppression. It takes place at the beginning of it. At the very time the Philistine oppression starts and without any mention of Israel crying out for help, Yahweh is already preparing the judge, sending his Angel to announce to a barren woman the conception of the one who will begin to deliver Israel.