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meaning of this repeated omission, this time on the angel’s part? When the woman did so, it could be attributed to her temporary confusion. But this time the omission takes on a more serious aspect: Samson’s weak spot was, of course, his hair, and the shearing of his locks was what, in the end, brought about his death. Can it be that the woman and the angel wished, for somereason, to conceal from the father the secret of the son’s weakness? Is it possible that that the two of them sensed that in a matter so critical to the life of ‘the child that is to be born’ Manoah could not be relied upon to keep the secret?
    Even after the outlining of the instructions, the tension between the husband and the angel continues. Manoah’s situation is intolerable: a sea of information overwhelms him from every side; he is flooded by harsh, conflicting feelings, foremost the nagging suspicion that his wife and the haughty stranger are weaving an elaborate conspiracy against him. Even someone far quicker and cleverer would feel, at a moment like this, that his mind was growing dim. In his distress, Manoah attempts to draw closer to the angel: ‘Let us detain you and prepare a kid for you,’ he offers. The angel declines, for no apparent reason, in a hostile and judgmental manner: ‘If you detain me, I shall not eat your food,’ he says, adding that Manoah should sacrifice the kid to God, not to him. Maybe he suspects that Manoah merely wants to detain him, in order totry to figure him out. ‘For Manoah did not know that he was an angel of the Lord,’ reads the text, and this lack of knowledge, even after a few minutes have gone by, further attests to the dullness of Manoah’s character.
    Embarrassed, Manoah asks the angel’s name, appending a clumsy explanation to his question: ‘We should like to honour you when your words come true,’ in other words, when your prophecy comes to pass. But the angel rebuffs him: ‘You must not ask for my name; it is peli ,’ miraculous, unknowable. ‘ Peli ,’ he retorts; in other words, beyond your ken, too big for you. One can assume that this word, spoken out of a clear desire to silence Manoah, will long be etched in his memory. An insult like this cannot but echo in days to come, when he will face his son and will run into – as into a wall – his unfathomable, strange, miraculous deeds.
    Manoah, hesitant and confused following the angel’s off-putting reply, places the kid and the meal offering on the rock. The angel performs a miracle, produces fire from the rock, and then ascends heavenwardas Manoah and his wife watch and fling themselves face downwards on the ground. And only now, finally, does Manoah believe that indeed this was an angel of God. ‘We shall surely die, for we have seen a divine being,’ he tells his wife, his voice quivering with fear – a fear not only of God and angel but of everything that the astonishing encounter is destined to bring about in their lives. And maybe it is also a fear of the unborn child, their child, for whom they had waited and prayed, who even now is surrounded not only by amniotic fluid but by an impenetrable membrane of enigma and menace.
    ‘We will surely die,’ mumbles Manoah, and his wife responds with simple logic, perhaps also with subtle scorn that she draws from the angel’s air of chilly condescension, which still hovers over them: ‘Had the Lord meant to take our lives, He would not have accepted a burnt offering and meal offering from us, nor let us see all these things, and He would not have made such an announcement to us.’
    And so, this woman, who until moments earlierhad been reducible to the epithet ‘the childless one’, grows larger in the reader’s mind with every passing verse. Perhaps it is the new pregnancy that empowers and ennobles her, or perhaps what instils new confidence, despite all her doubts and anxieties, is the knowledge that she carries a child who is one of a kind. It is hard to imagine,