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moreover, that a woman as sharp as she is had failed to notice that the angel opted – twice – to appear to her alone.
    But it may also be that these guesses are incorrect, confusing cause and effect; and it is rather that she has been this way all along, a strong and quick-witted woman, resourceful and brave, and precisely for these reasons the angel preferred to bring her, and not her husband, the news. It is interesting to note in this connection that Rembrandt, when he drew the encounter between the couple and the angel, ‘pushed’ Manoah face down into a submissive, even ridiculous position – at first glance he resembles a sack of potatoes – whereas the wife, in contrast to the biblical account, sits erect beside her fallen husband, exuding nobility, confidence,and determination. It is clear that Rembrandt too, like many who have read the story, sensed that the woman is the strong, dominant one. And if this is so, we can already imagine how decisive her influence, and that of the words she has just spoken, will be upon Samson – from the womb until his dying day.
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    Zorah today is a kibbutz, located not far from a tel , or mound, that almost certainly sits atop the archaeological remains of the biblical settlement. Its founders, members of the socialist ‘United Kibbutz’ movement and veterans of the legendary Palmach fighting force, settled there towards the end of 1948, in the midst of the War of Independence that had broken out when the armies of four Arab countries invaded the newborn State of Israel. During this war, as in the wars in the time of the Judges, the Judean lowlands were of great strategic importance and therefore a focus of the warring forces.When the Israeli army drew near the Arab village of Sar’a, most of its inhabitants fled, and the ones who remained were expelled. All became refugees, most of whom ended up in the Deheishe refugee camp not far from Hebron, where their families reside to this day.
    It is mid-October 2002. A hot, gloomy day in the lowlands. The radio reports heavy traffic at the Samson Junction, between Zorah and Eshtaol. A dirt path winds away from the main highway into a forest, leading the hiker into the abandoned gardens of Arab Sar’a. There, hidden in a small grove, suddenly appear two figures, a mother and son, Palestinians who have come from Deheishe to harvest the olives from trees that once belonged to their family. The woman vigorously shakes the branches of the tree and beats at them with a stick, and her son, a boy of about ten, swiftly and silently gathers the black hail of olives on a sheet spread out beneath the tree.
    Here, roughly three thousand years ago, in this same brown, rugged landscape, amidst olive and oaktrees, terebinths and carobs, the wife of Manoah lay down to give birth. Here she gave the boy his name, Shimshon , which in Hebrew connotes ‘little sun’, and perhaps also a conflation of shemesh and on – sun plus strength, virility.
    There is, of course, great similarity between Samson and other ‘sun-heroes’ such as Hercules, Perseus, Prometheus and Mopsus, son of Apollo. 5 In the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan sought to ‘purify’ Samson of any hint of paganism: ‘Samson was called by the name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, as it is said, ‘For the Lord God is a sun and a shield’ (Psalms 84:12) … as God protects the entire world, so too Samson in his time protects Israel.’ 6 Whereas the first-century Judeo-Roman historian Josephus Flavius, in his Jewish Antiquities , asserts that ‘Samson’ means ‘strong’, adding that ‘the child grew apace and it was plain from the frugality of his diet and his loosely flowing locks that he was to be a prophet’. 7
    ‘The boy grew up, and the Lord blessed him’, the Bible tells us, and the Talmud comments, ‘Hewas blessed b’amato’ , the word amah (literally, ‘cubit’) being a euphemism for penis: ‘His amah was like that of other men’, continues the Talmud, ‘but his