A Caution on Handling Scripture (Judges 14:8-9)

Judges 14:8-9

 

8 After some days he returned to take her. And he turned aside to see the carcass of the lion, and behold, there was a swarm of bees in the body of the lion, and honey. 9 He scraped it out into his hands and went on, eating as he went. And he came to his father and mother and gave some to them, and they ate. But he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey from the carcass of the lion.

 

            One of the sad things about our Christian pop culture is that we are so easily given to terrible handling of the word of God.  I’m not trying to be full of myself here.  I have no doubt that I still have an eternity’s-worth to learn of my Lord and his ways.  However, it is true that God has given us his word and with it has spoken plainly about things we are to think and believe.

 

            The passage above is one of those that I have heard so misinterpreted in times past that the bad handling of it still rings in my ears.  I still remember walking out of a local Christian bookstore with a little devotional book entitled Don’t Quit Until You Taste the Honey.  This little work used the picture of Samson finding honey in the carcass of the lion as an encouragement for us to find the good that will come out of our dangerous or scary situations.  However, such an interpretation would not have been what a Jew would have taken from this passage.  What Samson did was wrong, unclean and a violation of God’s law—especially for a Nazirite.

 

            Regarding this passage, Daniel Block writes:

 

Empowered by the Spirit of Yahweh, Samson had passed the physical test posed by the lion. For a person who operates by his senses, these bees and their honey will test his spiritual mettle. Will he be true to his Nazirite calling and leave the honey alone? The answer is not long in coming—Samson scrapes some of the honey out of the cavity in the corpse with his hands and nonchalantly eats it as he resumes his walk to Timnah. Like the Timnite woman in v. 1, the test has become a trap. In fact, Samson’s response to this test is triply sinful. First, since contact with a corpse renders any object unclean, as an ordinary Israelite Samson should have left the honey alone (cf. Lev 11:24–25, 39). Second, contact with a cadaver is particularly defiling for a Nazirite (Num 6:6).

Third, Samson callously implicates his parents in the defilement, offering them some of the honey without telling them that he had scraped it out of the corpse of a lion. Samson’s perversity knows no bounds. His parents had sanctified him, but now he desecrates them. Unaware of his defilement, Samson’s father continues the journey down to Timnah, presumably to finalize the wedding arrangements and to settle the business side of this “arranged” marriage.*

 

      One who knew the Bible and interpreted the Bible by the Bible would have seen that Samson’s actions went against God’s commands.  It is not good to miss this and then to spiritualize some sort of feel-good message for the Christian pop culture in a devotional.  Such a thought may eventually bring out a truth—that God can bring good out of bad.  However, such handling of the text leaves the door wide open for anyone to bring any meaning they wish to the text.  Eventually, if such interpretation persists, the Bible has no meaning other than what a person “gets out of it.”  Such meaning strips the divine revelation from the Bible and leaves it only as a vehicle through which readers find themselves and their own wishes.

 

      I’m not wanting to be overly harsh on the author of my little devotional book from years ago.  I do not for a moment doubt that he intended well.  Perhaps the author was even led to believe that his lesson from the passage above was correct.  What I want to expose is that we must be very careful looking to the text of Scripture to “get something out of it.”  What we need to do is to look to the Scripture and ask what God, through the author, intended everyone to see in the passage.

 

 

*Daniel Isaac Block, vol. 6, Judges, Ruth (electronic ed.;, Logos Library System; The New American Commentary Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2001, c1999), 429.