Samson the Prankster?
As with Jephthah, so with Samson. Commentators seem to vie with one another in finding terms with which to vilify him. Robert O’Connell (The Rhetoric of the Book of Judges), for instance, calls Samson a “self-gratifying brute” and “a prankish womanizer,” and says that his “acts of deliverance are rarely better than by-products of his spiteful nature.”
Contrast these descriptions with that of Hebrews 11, where Samson is one of the great examples of a faithful man, one of those “who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”
These two approaches have implications for what we do with the details of the Samson narrative. If you view Samson’s actions in Judges 14-15 as “pranks,” then you are spared the trouble of having to interpret them, of trying to see what meaning they might have. Instead, they’re just a bunch of dumb, destructive, pointless things that a “self-gratifying brute” driven by his “spiteful nature” did instead of actually saving Israel.
But if Samson was, as Judges 13 tells us, “impelled” by the Spirit of God, then his actions are worth thinking about. In fact, we discover in Judges 14 that Samson tells riddles, which leads us to consider his actions also as riddles, puzzling parables full of wisdom. Judges 14-15, then, invites us to wrack our brains to figure out what the Spirit — and Samson! — had in mind so that we can grow in wisdom ourselves.