Judges 14

If you know anything about The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, then you know that Bilbo Baggins absconds with the One Ring after playing a game of riddles with Gollum--a contest at once droll and fraught with tension. After they exchange several legitimate riddles, including that "horses on a red hill" chestnut, Bilbo, desperate and running out of real riddles, cheats by asking, "What do I have in my pocket?" (The answer, of course, is Gollum's precioussss, the One Ring.) You'd think that Gollum would have accused the hobbit of asking an unfair question, but like an idiot, he tries to answer it.

I would argue that Samson's riddle here ("Out of the eater, something to eat; / out of the strong, something sweet") isn't really that fair either (verse 14). If you hadn't been aware of the very specific situation of Samson scooping up honey from a lion's carcass (breaking his Nazirite vow in the process by touching a corpse), would you have been able to guess it? I suspect the Philistines suspected foul play, so they played a dirty trick of their own by asking Samson's newfound wife to inveigle the answer out of her husband.

For all Samson's physical, lion-rending prowess, he falls for a pretty face as readily as a weeaboo falls for his anime waifu. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about--good!) Although it's not explicitly stated in the Nazirite vow, I'm sure it would make much more sense for one devoting his life to the Lord to take a wife who also believes in and follows God. And yet as soon as Samson sees this apparently fetching Philistine woman, he commands his father, "now get her for me as my wife" (verse 2), adding, in a supreme bit of logical rhetoric, "She's the right one for me" (verse 3). I'm tempted to say to Samson, "Well, go get her yourself if you find her so foxy," but that would be ignoring the cultural norm at the time of allowing one's father to choose one's mate.

I hate to say this, but the way Samson's wife gets him to reveal the secret makes her come across as a teenager. She says illogically, "You hate me! You don't really love me" (verse 16) and cries for seven days straight (verse 17). But apparently her caterwauling works on Samson, who does tell her on the seventh day right before the feast ends, which makes me think: You've tolerated her blubbering for a week. Can't you just hold out for one more stinking day?

But as verse 4 foreshadows, God uses Samson's weakness for women for His own purposes. After the Philistines solve the riddle, causing Samson to owe them 60 pieces of clothing (verse 13), God gives Samson the strength to get back at the Philistines. He gives the riddle-explainers clothes all right--but said clothes come from the bodies of 30 Philistine men from Ashkelon that he just beat down (verse 19). See? God does appreciate irony.