Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson Book

 
A Miniature Masterpiece

I have recently become interested in the Myths series published by the Canongate Press: stories from various cultures retold by distinguished contemporary novelists in compact form. I have enjoyed Margaret Atwood's feminist take on the Odyssey in The Penelopiad, and A. S. Byatt's colorful retelling of Icelandic saga in Ragnarok. But Lion's Honey, by Israeli novelist David Grossman (author of the recent To the End of the Land ) is by far the best of the three. A brilliant retelling and exegesis of the story of Samson, it is part simple narrative, part Talmudic, part Freudian, part contemporary political commentary, and all highly personal. In 150 small-format pages, it is a miniature masterpiece.

Other reviewers have suggested that this is as much textual analysis as narrative. And so it may be, but it works as storytelling too. It is a long time since I have read the book of Judges, and I had forgotten how many brilliantly cinematic incidents the story of Samson contained, from killing a lion with his bare hands and using 300 foxes as incendiary devices, to his seduction by Delilah and climactic destruction of the Philistine temple. Grossman kept me on the edge of my seat, as though I were reading a screenplay. Indeed, he views Samson as an artist on the grand scale; there is a style to his actions, the "artistic need to draw on something private and singular in everything he does."

So when Grossman stops and says, in effect, "Wait a minute; there may be another way of looking at this," I never felt frustrated. For each diversion from the through line opens the story out into other dimensions, some of which are richer than the original myth and explain why it retains such a powerful hold on the imagination. Freud has a field day; we see
…Samson's passion to tie and be tied, and also to be ensnared, and we may read the serpentine jumble of ropes'this tangled web'and wonder, how many ropes does a man need to replace one umbilical cord that was never properly spun? Time after time, Grossman takes a phrase in the Hebrew and dissects it, calling upon more than two millennia of rabbinical commentary, not as an academic exercise but a window into the Jewish mind, with an immense resonance that I trust entirely. And when Grossman calls Samson "the first suicide-killer," he is not attempting some smart updating but repeatedly bringing the story to bear on the Israel he knows: its history and beauty, but also its contemporary politics, power fetish, and security paranoia'all this from a man who lost a son in service with the Israeli armed forces.

There is one other resonance in the book that came over very strongly to one who was raised in a different tradition. Grossman never once mentions Jesus, but it is extraordinary how many parallels there are between the two stories, reminding me that Jesus was a Jewish prophet long before he was adopted as the Christian savior. Samson too had a mysterious birth announced by an angel. He too made his first public display of power at a wedding feast. He too loved to talk in poetic riddles. He too seemed almost to court betrayal and capture, even if it would result in his death. There is the major difference, of course, that Jesus was a man of peace and Samson one of war'but a number of recent retellings of the gospel story, such as Naomi Alderman's brilliant The Liars' Gospel, emphasize the likelihood that it was precisely in the context of armed rebellion that Jesus would have been seen by many of his early followers.

All in all, a richly dimensioned, thought-provoking, and utterly readable book.