Scary Bedtime Stories -- from the Bible

The Blinded Samson, by Franz
Heinrich Louis Corinth, 1912

"I feel like I'm going to throw up," Luke said. I guess I had lost track of his imagination and emotional sensitivity.

"Why," I asked, "because of how the story ended?"

"Yes, it was terrible."

That was during our nightly bedtime Bible reading. We have always read to Luke, starting with the earliest kids' Bible picture books and working up to, now, the Living Bible, which I read more-or-less straight through, the narrative parts anyway. I'm wondering if that's such a great idea, or if we should consider parts of the Old Testament R-rated for violence.

We are reading through Judges because Luke had asked to hear about Gideon again. You know, the adventure stories of the heroes of the faith. The Sunday school version of Gideon ends with his victory over the camp of the Midianites, and neglects to mention the part where the soldiers bring him the heads of two of the chiefs. Well, that's just warfare.

Next, Gideon is upset because two towns won't give his men food, so when he comes back after the battle he "took the elders of the town and taught the men of Succoth a lesson by punishing them with desert thorns and briers. He also pulled down the tower of Peniel and killed the men of the town." Oh yes, just by the way, he killed the men of the town because they hadn't cooperated.

Then Gideon kills two other enemy chiefs in cold blood (well, what choice did he have, they didn't have prison camps), and asks all his own people to contribute some gold from the booty. With the gold he makes a golden idol which all the people worship. Great guy.

The next leader was Gideon's son Abimelech, who "on one stone murdered his seventy brothers" (Gideon "had many wives" but Abimelech was from a concubine, or second-class wife). Abimelech's career included killing the people of his own town, burning alive "about a thousand men and women" in a tower, and scattering salt over the town. In the end he gets his head cracked open by a millstone a woman dropped on him, but not wanting the shame of being killed by a woman, he has his servant kill him instead. "Thus God repaid the wickedness that Abimelech had done to his father by murdering his seventy brothers. God also made the men of Shechem pay for all their wickedness." So they all deserved it, anyway.

All this so far covers just chapters 6-9 of Judges. I think the real heroes are the next ones, Tola and Jair, who get only five verses between them. Tola "rose to save Israel" and "led Israel twenty-three years; then he died." That is fantastic compared with Gideon and Abimelech. Jair ruled twenty-two years and "had thirty sons, who rode thirty donkeys. They controlled thirty towns in Gilead." So we've made it through 45 years of relative sanity.

Unfortunately, Jephthah, another problem case, is next. Jephthah is actually a saint in the Armenian church, according to Wikipedia, but I'm not sure why.He did lead Israel to a military victory. "The Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah," so he advanced on the enemy and had a great victory, incidentally destroying twenty towns. But they were bad guys, so that was OK. The real problem was that this saint had made a vow to give as a burnt sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house when he returned home, and that turned out to be his daughter. (What had he been thinking, or drinking? Sacrifice the first thing coming out of his house -- would he expect that to be a sheep or what?).

Not being a bad father, but unwilling to break his vow, he kindly gives his dutiful daughter two months to mourn the fact that she will die childless, then he "did to her as he had vowed." I guess you've gotta do what you've gotta do. There is not a lot of introspection in the book of Judges, so we don't know how disturbed Jephthah was, but he doesn't seem to have agonized as Agamemnon did over his sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia.

It was this story, in fact, that made Luke sick. It's always had a similar effect on me, but I've gotten somewhat desensitized. It occurs to me that I wouldn't want my 13 year old reading other books about parents killing their children, but I've treated the Bible differently.

Maybe that whole affair put Jephthah in a bad mood, because next he gets in a quarrel with the men of Ephraim (fellow Israelites; to be fair, they started the quarrel) and sets up a blockade at the river crossing, where his men kill the Ephraimites en masse. Well, not quite en masse, because they take the time to ascertain whether each man has the right or wrong accent. If they can't say "shibboleth," then "they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time." Forty-two thousand? They're not playing games, are they? That must have been most of the clan.

Tonight we finished the story of Samson. Before we started it, last night, Luke said that he hoped the boy survived, the one who helped Samson find the pillars to pull down the temple; again, Luke is listening and thinking about the people involved, especially the children. Well, everyone knows about Samson, but to summarize his accomplishments once "the Spirit of the Lord began to stir him,"

• He marries a nice Philistine girl, but gets really annoyed that at the end of the seven-day wedding feast she spills the answer to his riddle, so after "the Spirit of the Lord came upon him in power," he goes to the nearby big town and "struck down thirty of their men, stripped them of their belongings and gave their clothes to those who had explained the riddle." Kind of a sore loser. He then leaves his bride and goes back home to live with his parents.
• Some time later, having second thoughts, he goes back to the girl's house, only to find out that her father has married her off to someone else. Talk about a misunderstanding! Samson doesn't feel the need to kill anyone at this point, but he does capture 300 foxes (about the population of 100 square miles, so quite a feat), ties their tails together, attaches torches and lets them run through the fields to burn the crops. Despite this relatively mildness of this outburst, the Philistines took it personally and went and burned Samson's ex-bride and her father. Then Samson did lose his cool, and "attacked them viciously and slaughtered many of them."
• Samson's own countrymen saw things getting out of hand as the Philistines were getting aggressive, so they "captured" Samson--with his cooperation--and handed him over to the Philistines. But God was with him again, and he grabbed a donkey's jawbone and "struck down a thousand men." He even made a song about it, "With a donkey's jawbone I have made donkeys of them, With a donkey's jawbone I have killed a thousand men." I don't think it has quite the energy of the version Peter, Paul and Mary used to sing ("If I Had My Way"), but maybe it was better in the original.
• Killing a thousand men takes a lot out of you, even if you're Samson, so he cried out to the Lord to provide him with water. So God opened up "a hollow place" (a spring?) for him.
• Then we have, "Samson led Israel for twenty years in the days of the Philistines. One day Samson went to Gaza, where he saw a prostitute. He went in to spend the night with her." He couldn't even have a fun night out, though, because the Philistines set an ambush for him. Surprising them by leaving at midnight rather than in the morning, he escaped by taking the city gates with him.
• Samson falls for Delilah, who betrays the secret that he will lose his strength if he is shaved. (I still can't understand why he would do that after she had tried three times previously to find the secret and betray him, but he didn't seem to think very strategically.) While Samson sleeps in her lap, Delilah calls a man to shave his seven braids, and poof, the Lord leaves him and he's reduced to ordinary strength. The Philistines gouge out his eyes and take him to prison to grind grain.
• Finally comes the glorious ending, when Samson "killed many more when he died than while he lived." What a feat, killing so many at once! The Philistines had forgotten, or hadn't taken seriously, the bit about Samson's strength coming from his hair (or God only giving him strength when he had long hair), so they neglected to shave him. Eventually it got long again, and Samson took advantage of a public celebration in the temple to get his revenge. (Yes, it was revenge, not a plan to save his people or glorify God. He prays, "let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.") With the help of that servant Luke was worried about, Samson pushes on the main columns, the temple collapses, and thousands are killed. Hurray for the good guys!

Such are the heroes of faith. "And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised. ...the world was not worthy of them. These were all commended for their faith...." (Hebrews 11). That's a hard one to figure out. Until I learn more, I'm thinking I should probably skip reading the rest of Judges with Luke, or just cover the Sunday school version. You can see why, from a lot of unguided reading of the Old Testament, many Christians here in Nigeria have the mistaken idea that the way to deal with their enemies is to do as Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson did.