What Does Judges 16:13 Mean?
And Delilah said to Samson, Until now you have mocked me and spoken what does not hold. Tell me with what you may be bound. And he said to her, If you weave the seven braids of my head into the web.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And Delilah said unto Samson, Hitherto thou hast mocked me, and told me lies: tell me wherewith thou mightest be bound. And he said unto her, If thou weavest the seven locks of my head with the web.THE KEY
Samson describes restraint as a weave that draws his own locks into the structure meant to hold him.
THE MEANING
Here deception and disclosure share one conversation: Delilah names the lies, then asks for the precise means of binding, and Samson describes his locks drawn into a woven web. His strength is already being placed inside the very structure that can restrain him. That uneasy closeness between trust and entanglement remains present wherever a request for candor also seeks the means of control.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that danger announces itself as open force: here the route toward restraint runs through a question and an answer.
THE ROOT
תֵּאָסֵר
tēʾāsēr
GROWS FROM
אָסַר
ʾ-s-r
to bind, tie, or imprison
“bound” in this verse is tēʾāsēr. The same seed grows into both the act of binding and the state of being a prisoner. Beside the image of weaving, restraint takes shape as a structure drawn around someone.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāsīr: prisoner, captive
אָסִיר
This branch shows binding as a condition Samson is being asked to make possible.
maʾasār: bondage, imprisonment
מַאֲסָר
This branch names the state toward which the proposed binding leads.
תַּאַרְגִּי
taʾargî
GROWS FROM
אָרַג
ʾ-r-g
to weave or interlace
“weavest” in this verse is taʾargî. Samson’s answer is more than a list of materials: the verb names interlacing, and his locks are drawn into the web itself. The restraint is imagined as a made structure that incorporates what belongs to him.
ALSO GROWS
ʾōrēg: weaver
אֹרֵג
This branch makes visible the person who constructs the woven structure.
ʾarīgāh: weaving
אֲרִיגָה
This branch names the process that turns strands into a connected web.
דְּלִילָה
Dəlîlāh
GROWS FROM
דָּלַל
d-l-l
to hang low, languish, or be brought low
Delilah’s name is commonly associated with this seed of being brought low or weakened. In a scene organized around the means of binding, the name echoes the exchange’s movement toward diminishment.
ALSO GROWS
dal: lowly, poor, weak
דַּל
This branch echoes the weakening toward which the conversation turns.
dallût: lowliness, poverty
דַּלּוּת
This branch gives the root’s downward movement the form of a diminished condition.
THE PATTERN
Entrapment takes shape when someone is drawn into a net or snare already arranged to hold them.
The lifted ones have hidden a snare for me, and cords; they have spread a net beside the path; they have set traps for me. Selah.For humankind does not perceive its time. As fish are caught in an evil net, and as birds are caught in the snare, so humankind is caught in an evil time, when it falls upon them in a flash.And that they may come back to their senses out of the snare of the Slanderer, who have been caught alive by him into his will.THE THREAD
But the Philistines gripped him, and dug out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with bronze chains. And he was grinding in the prison house.The Hebrew root for “bound” here appears again when the Philistines bind Samson with fetters. This verse offers the imagined method; the later verse shows the binding made real.
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