Peer-reviewed
SAMSON'S HÎDÂ
This article proposes a new interpretation of Judges xiv, the episode commonly referred to as Samson's riddle to the Philistines. I briefly demostrate that the traditional understanding of the exchange between Samson and the Philistines as a riddle is untenable. The correct interpretation is, I submit, that the exchange is a Greek skolion or "capping song" that are quite well-attested at wedding (and other) symposia. Building, in part, on a series of articles by O. Margalith in VT, I demostrate that the Greek cultural context is also key to understanding the wedding narrative as a whole, and leads to important conclusions concerning the redaction of the narrative, the literary figure of Samson and the semantic range of the term Hîdâ
Article, 2002
Vetus Testamentum, 52, 2002, 407
Brill Academic Publishers, 2002