Sir Thomas Browne

Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims

(Page 6 of 8)

No story demonstrates the magical properties of hair better than the rough-hewn hero tale of Samson. Contrasting sharply with the rest of the solemn Book of Judges, the strongman's exploits resemble those of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh and the Greek myths of Hercules. All three are solar figures. A requisite attribute of sun-related gods was hair radiating outward from the head like rays. To cut a lock of a man's hair was to steal from him his masculine vigor, as contained in the solar power of the hair rays. Samson's story also exhibits the petulant, revisionist air of the Rambo movies a hero designed to rewrite history and reclaim lost dignity.

First an angel appears before Manoah's wife and declares, "Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not: but thou shalt conceive, and bear a son." He then lists some prenatal guidelines. The future mother is to avoid unclean foods. Like mothers nowadays, she is advised to abstain from alcohol. And the angel points out that after the son's birth, "no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazirite unto God from the womb." We never learn the name of Samson's mother.

The Nazirites were a sect apart. They took their name from the Hebrew word nazir, which meant "consecrated" or "dedicated," and they vowed abstinence and separation as proof of their devotion to the service of God. Most chose the role themselves; few were saddled with it from birth by an angel. Being a Nazirite was also usually a temporary role, lasting sometimes for as brief a period as thirty days. Only three biblical characters are on record as lifelong Nazirites John the Baptist, the judge and prophet Samuel, and Samson.

There were other restrictions besides the angel's list. For one thing, it wasn't only the mother who was to be a teetotaler. In the Book of Numbers, speaking through Moses, God warns those contemplating the honor and burden of becoming a Nazirite that they must abstain not only from wine but from all grape products. The most visible declaration of faith was the Nazirites' hairiness, and therein lies the story of Samson. Because he is a consecrated Nazirite, Samson misses a family milestone, the first haircut. There are no doting parents watching when, as an adult, he unwittingly receives his first trim.

In the King James Version of the Bible, the verse (Numbers 6:5) referring to Samson's hair is straightforward:

All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head: until the days be fulfilled, in that which he separateth himself unto the Lord, he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.

Because Samson is a homicidal buffoon who rejects all of the vows into which he was born, some scholars maintain that he could not possibly have been a true Nazirite. The one vow he keeps is allowing his hair to grow untrimmed. Apparently Samson regards this external symbol as his one inescapable covenant and, because God provides him with supernatural strength no matter how ungodly his behavior, he must be correct.

Now let's leap forward a few thousand years, to 1949. After more than twenty years of directing and producing other types of films, Cecil B. DeMille returned to his favorite source for sex and violence the Bible. He had already created such howlingly campy pseudobiblical fare as King of Kings, The Sign of the Cross, and the first version of The Ten Commandments. Then DeMille added to his résumé what he described as "the greatest love story ever told." Samson and Delilah starred Victor Mature as the doomed strongman and Hedy Lamarr as the Philistine temptress who betrays him. Mature was a large man, but he was not exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger. Indeed, Samson and Delilah has been described as one of the few movies in which the hero has larger breasts than the heroine. Not that it matters, because the Bible doesn't describe Samson's physique. His strength magically derives from his hair rather than from daily workouts. To emphasize this point, a remake might star, say, a longhaired Woody Allen.

Although the Legion of Decency denounced DeMille for "portraying Samson and Delilah as a morally corrupt couple yet billing it as a religious film," in this aspect he was remaining true to his source. The biblical pair hardly exemplify family values. In the film Samson spurns Delilah for what the rouged and lipsticked Philistine dismisses as a "milk-faced Danite lily," and she vows revenge. Later she employs all her siren's wiles to draw from Samson the secret of his extraordinary strength.

"Is it some herb you mix in your food," she purrs, "or some charmed oil you rub into your body?"

Three times she begs him; three times he lies. Finally he explains that his strength comes from God, the idol-less deity that the Philistines dismiss as an "invisible" god. Samson obliquely declares that the lion's and the stallion's manes are the symbol of their power, like the wool of the ram and the eagle's two "prime feathers."

Delilah finally gets the point and touches his hair. "This is the mark of your power. If it were shorn from your head "
"I'd be as weak as any other man."

Because the scriptwriters were children of the twentieth century rather than the tenth century b.c.e., the cinematic Delilah expresses incredulity: "You believe that this great god of yours has given you your power through your hair?"

To find out if he is finally telling her the truth, Delilah drugs Samson's drink, and soon he is unconscious. She trims his locks with his own knife. (In the biblical version Delilah "called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.") It is the tonsorial equivalent of throwing kryptonite at Superman. When Samson awakens with a crew cut, he is unable to resist the waiting Philistines. In despair he cries out, "Throw your spears! The shield of my god is gone from me." Instead of killing him, the soldiers blind him with a red-hot sword.

Throughout the film Samson's hair has been growing ever longer. However, apparently neither womanizing nor killing multitudes with an ass's jawbone keeps him from shaving; he grows the beard that was required of him as a Nazirite only after he is blind and bound to a mill wheel. We know that Samson is blind because Mature keeps his eyes closed to reveal dark eye shadow. And, as he trudges in his sightless circle day after day, mocked by onlookers, his hair slowly lengthens. The movie finally returns to the point of the story: Samson discovers that his strength is returning with his hair. He doesn't reveal this new development until the fateful day when he is led to the pagan temple to provide sport for the Philistines. There, under their towering idol of Dagon, he wreaks his vengeance. The walls come tumbling down upon the film's numerous villains, and upon Delilah and the wayward Nazirite himself.

By the tribal logic of the Bible, with this mass homicide and his own suicide Samson is redeemed in the eyes of the Lord. In the film's coda, the still milk-faced Miriam says of Samson, "Men will tell his story for a thousand years." She underestimated. By the time Cecil B. DeMille got around to exploiting the story of Samson, it had been at least three thousand years since the first stirrings of the Hercules-like legend among the Hebrews. To this day it is the best-known fable about hair.

© 2004 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Michael Sims has written about science and culture for newspapers and radio, and for magazines ranging from American Archaeology to Creative Loafing. He is also the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts and Adam's Nave.