What Does Judges 16:6 Mean?
And Delilah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray you, where your great strength lies, and with what you may be bound to bend you low.
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 to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee.THE KEY
The question reaches for the hidden point where strength can become a place of captivity.
THE MEANING
This question searches for what gives you strength and what can restrain it. The verse holds power and vulnerability together: strength does not make a person impossible to bind.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that strength makes a person untouchable; the verse shows that vulnerability can be sought through the very source of that strength.
THE ROOT
תֵאָסֵר
tēʾāsēr
GROWS FROM
אָסַר
ʾāsar
To bind or restrain.
The word translated “bound” belongs to the same root family as words for a captive and imprisonment. That connection makes Delilah’s question reach beyond physical restraint: it seeks the means by which strength can be turned into confinement.
ALSO GROWS
ʾāsîr: Captive or prisoner.
אָסִיר
The branch names the person held by the binding Delilah is asking how to bring about.
maʾasār: Imprisonment or confinement.
מַאֲסָר
It shows how the act of binding extends into a state of being held.
THE PATTERN
When a hidden source or sign is disclosed, it can become the route by which another person is seized or restrained.
That he laid open to her all his heart, and said to her, No blade has come up upon my head, for I have been set apart unto God from my mother's womb. If I am shaved, then my strength will turn aside from me, and I will become weak, and be like any other man.You are snared in the words of your mouth; you are caught in the words of your mouth.Now the one who handed him over gave them a sign, saying, Whomever I kiss, he is the one. Seize him.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 question in verse 6 names the possibility of binding; here that restraint becomes literal. The same Hebrew root, אָסַר (ʾāsar), links the sought-after means of restraint to the fetters on Samson.
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