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legs racing through the stalks ofcorn, her arms pumping, slicing the air, the thoughts flying through her head, as she reaches Manoah and tells him that the same man, ‘the man who came to me before’, has appeared to her once again.
    Vayakom vayelech Manoah aharei ishto: ‘Manoah rose and followed his wife.’
    The ring and resonance of these words convey the slow, heavy movements of Manoah, whose name means ‘rest’ and, in more recent Hebrew, also means ‘late’, in the sense of ‘deceased’. Thus, in five words that stand in amusing contrast to ‘the woman ran in haste to tell her husband’, the narrator sketched a sluggard of sorts who drags after his quick, energetic wife. Indeed Manoah was chastised by the rabbinic authors of the Talmud, who labelled him an am ha’aretz , an ignoramus, for transgressing a cardinal rule of gender: ‘A man does not walk behind a woman on the road, even his own wife – and, even if he finds himself on a bridge with her, she should be beside him, and whoever walks behind a woman when crossing a river will have no share in the world to come.’ 3
    So Manoah follows his wife, meets the stranger, attempts to size him up. Although he had earlier explicitly requested that the Almighty bring back the ‘man of God’, Manoah may not yet be free of a nagging suspicion about the fellow whom his wife met alone in the field – twice – after which she knew immediately that she was to bear a child. ‘Are you the man who spoke to my wife?’ he demands, and the reader can imagine, beyond the words, the dejected look he directs at the angel, and hear the mixture of mistrust and jealousy and the irritable humility of a man who cannot help but recognise his own inferiority.
    Note that Manoah does not ask ‘Are you the man who came to my wife?’ Perhaps something restrains him from using that blunt word, whose utterance in such a charged setting – two men, one possibly pregnant woman – could well push the three into out-and-out confrontation. Yet at the same time, Manoah calls the stranger a ‘man’ and not ‘the man of God’, and juxtaposes the words ‘man’ and ‘wife’, coupling the two in an intimate cocoon while he stands outside, thus exposing further his suspicions and the jealousy that flickers behind his question. 4
    And the angel answers, curtly: ‘I am.’
    ‘May your words soon come true,’ says Manoah, adding: ‘What rules shall be observed for the boy?’ And here again there seeps an undertone of wariness toward the stranger, and maybe toward the promised son too, and it is clear that Manoah still does not believe he is conversing with a man of God, much less an angel , for if he did he would surely fling himself upon the ground and not speak to him as he has, with a lack of courtesy and not one word of supplication.
    And here arises the question: has the angel changed his appearance in between his two ‘performances’, before the wife and now the husband? For it is clear that in Manoah’s eyes he does not appear unmistakably to be ‘an angel of God, very frightening’. Did the woman exaggerate, for some reason, in her description – or perhaps the angel’s appearance has not changed at all, but rather the real difference lies in the abilities of the manand the woman to ‘read’ the hidden identity of their interlocutor?
    The angel, once again, provides detailed instructions regarding the right conduct that will ensure the proper birth and rearing of God’s Nazirite. At the same time, it is hard not to notice that, throughout the conversation, he speaks to Manoah with obvious reluctance, as if under protest, thus emphasising the man’s superfluousness, his second-class status in relation to his wife: ‘The woman must abstain from all the things against which I warned her.’
    Upon re-reading we notice that the angel too, when he repeats the instructions to Manoah, does not mention the prohibition against cutting the child’s hair. What is the