This year I have had liminal and settled space on my mind quite a bit. I first encountered the concept in graduate school, at the tutelage of my professor Dr. Victor Matthews, with whom I took a seminar on the Book of Judges. Dr. Matthews had been my temporary adviser a year or so before, since my normal adviser had been on Sabbatical, so we were familiar enough that when I was blanking on what I should write about for the course I could simply make an appointment with him to brainstorm. His advice remains some of the best advice, which largely guides the vagrant character of this newsletter: write about what interests me, when it interests me, for as long as it interests me, and in Judges, what has always interested me—and what should really be of primary interest to anyone who reads the book—is the figure of Samson.
For my money, Judges is shouting at you to pay attention to Samson. Of all the Israelite warlords the book highlights, Samson alone gets three chapters to himself (Jdg 13-16),1 and he is the last individual shofet (“judge,” “warlord,” etc.) that Judges names; after his saga erupts the debacle of the Levite’s concubine in chapters 17-21, which betrays the Deuteronomist’s editorial hand in shaping the traditions preserved in this text in the interest of his particular reading of the saga of the decline and exile of Israel and Judah,2 since it serves as a kind of historical etiology for why Saul, a Benjaminite king from Gibeah, ended up being rejected by YHWH in favor of David. My paper took the logic of this observation one step backward to ask if that was not also the case in the literary portrait of David, and while not every paper that I wrote in grad school remains one I would claim today, I find that my argument for the parallelism of Samson and David remains a fundamental one and is illuminative for spatial theory.
So, anyway, liminal and settled space: “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold,” and so liminal space broadly encompasses all of the transitional, unsettled, unclaimed space we might find ourselves in. The paradigmatic liminal space in antiquity and in biblical literature was the wilderness (Hebrew: midbar), not so much “disordered” space as space not ordered primarily for human use, in which, yes, there can be great danger to human life but also in which there is strong possibility of divine encounter; settled space is by contrast that space which is ordered to human use, activity, and life. Both liminal and settled space can be experienced, conceptualized, represented, or remembered; and no space is ever finally, fully liminal or settled, since liminality and settlement are archetypal realities that coexist in every space dependent on perspective. By these metrics, Samson—like most of the Judges—is a decidedly, even distinctively “liminal” hero, as Gregory Mobley has argued.3 Samson is a wild man, like Near Eastern heroes such as Enkidu4 or Greek ones such as Herakles: he spends most of his time outside; he does hand-to-hand combat with animals (the lion episode, 14:5-9), and employs them in his schemes (the fox episode, 15:1-8); he has a primal, shamanic energy to him, since he is strongly hinted to be a demigod (re-read, closely and without prejudice, the story of Samson’s conception in 13:1-25, and then go read the scholarship footnoted here),5 is consecrated as a nazir, which in context is not derived from the legislation in Numbers 6:1-21 but is a preexilic, ancient Israelite form of charismatic, holy, divine power, and refuses to use cultivated, professional weaponry (preferring instead the infamous ass’ jawbone).6 Taken together, Samson is indeed ancient Israel’s great demigod hero whose swashbuckling adventures, navigable by reference to the three f’s, would have enchanted ancient Israelite and Judahite listeners. Samson does several of the things that ancient Israelites and Judahites in the preexilic period, and indeed in the premonarchic period, valued in their men: he’s excessively strong; he’s a great fighter; and he’s both rhetorically savvy and tactically brilliant, capable of luring the guests at his wedding into his debt with a well-worded riddle and of hatching genius plots to agitate the Philistines (like, again, the fox episode; see 14:14-18). But in other ways, as Stephen M. Wilson has decisively argued, Samson is effectively an ancient Israelite man-child: he never matures where it counts, by successfully marrying, marrying within his wider Israelite kinship group, producing heirs, and leaving battle behind to join the leading men of the community as a masculine elder.7 If Samson is the main judge in the Book of Judges, which he is, and therefore summarizes the period and, arguably, the nation in that period, then Samson represents a liminal Israel that cannot seem to grow up out of its adolescent years of marauding adventures against Canaanites and Philistines and get on with the more serious business of the (Deuteronomic) covenant with God and the stability it requires.
David, by contrast, succeeds where Samson fails on all of these points. David starts out, in his life as a shepherd, as an archetype of the wild boy, a kind of wild man with some degree of civilization like Samson, and in his first encounter with Goliath, he, like Samson, refuses the offer of professional arms in favor of the rudimentary, unsophisticated weaponry of sling and stone, which David the character and the author of 1 Samuel takes to be evidence that YHWH has defeated Goliath (1 Sam 17:1-50). But then, something curious happens: David takes Goliath’s sword to behead him, and then has to identify himself a second time to Saul (17:51-58). Then, in the following chapter, Jonathan takes off his own armor, puts it on David, and David is now, suddenly, a general in Saul’s armies, and a more successful professional warrior than Saul himself (18:1-7). David goes on to successfully become king, first of Judah (2 Sam 2:1-7) and then of Israel (5:1-5), following which he takes Jerusalem for his capital and decisively, finally destroys the Philistines, which Samson, for all his epic heroism, failed to do (5:6-25). David then succeeds to fulfill the Deuteronomic vision for cultic centrality by bringing the Ark to Jerusalem (Deut 12:15-28; 2 Sam 6). David has brought the stability, at long last, that the covenant fidelity Deuteronomy envisions requires: all Israel under one king, with one central place of worship, the indigenous enemies of Canaan driven out, and then, too, the promise of an everlasting dynasty (2 Sam 7:1-17).
The fly in the ointment, of course, is that David, like Samson, spends most of his life as a liminal hero—living in the wilderness, transgressing boundaries like, for example, eating priestly bread (1 Sam 21:1-9) and raiding Israelite villages for a Philistine king (1 Sam 27:1-12)—and it is the liminal virtues of traditional heroism that allow him to establish the kingdom. But David is decidedly bad at functioning in settled space: the text does not seem to intend to paint him as a bad husband, but David’s falling out with Michal in 2 Samuel 6 and his acquisition of Bathsheba through rape and murder in 11:1-27 both signify that he is not overly concerned with the female agency of his various wives and the multiple concubines in his harem.8 But he is an undeniably poor father, as the Absalom episode in 2 Samuel 13-18 demonstrates, and he is arguably a poor king, too, as the census episode in 24:1-25 shows. David’s story is one common both to many historical warrior-kings as well as to modern day soldiers: the demands of life in the liminal world are fluid, morally gray, and tactical, and while to some degree, the settled space of political, cultic, and judicial life have some liminality to them too, life in settled space is quite different than life in the wilderness and comes with different demands. David is on the whole better at being YHWH’s anointed when he is a warrior-king, the founder of a dynasty, than when he is a sitting king; when other kings are at war and David is at home is when he gets into trouble.
In this sense, the literary parallelism between Samson and David in the Deuteronomistic History is one that favors the superiority of David as YHWH’s anointed above the wild, raw charisma of Samson as the nazir, the premonarchic Israelite wild man. David, as mashiach or christos, accomplishes much that Samson cannot as shofet and nazir: he creates safety and stability for Israel, but at the price of his own ability to enjoy it, just as Moses could not enter the promised land. But the Deuteronomist does not stop there, because in his reading of the history of Israel and Judah, YHWH’s anointed is not a perfect source of charismatic authority, either: David fails as a king because he is too liminal and not settled enough, but Solomon fails as king for the opposite reason. Where Solomon rules a vast and glorious empire (1 Kgs 4:20-34), it is his inexperience with liminality, as a product of a life lived almost entirely in settled space and with none of his father’s experience as an adventuring hero, that ultimately dooms him, for he does not know how to navigate his universalist, cosmopolitan kingdom while maintaining fidelity to his own traditions, leading to the divinely decreed fate that the kingdom will be split under his son, Rehoboam (11:1-43).
It is tempting to see the argument of the Deuteronomist about heroism and kings in general as something unique to Early Jewish tradition, but in point of fact, this is the same case made by Greek myth a la Homer and Hesiod. As Hesiod puts it, the age of heroes came to an end by the will of Zeus (Hesiod, Works and Days 140-169d), and it is this same will that drove Achilles to that wrath which intensified the final year of the Trojan War in the Iliad (Iliad I.4). Over the course of the Iliad, the cost of Achilles’ aristocratic, warrior’s sense of honor, outrage, and due restitution costs countless lives of the Achaians and the Trojans, including his own male lover and comrade, Patroklos.9 In the Odyssey, the trouble is that Odysseus cannot seem to put the war away: the liminal values of his life as a warrior and a conniving trickster come home to terrible ruin for the suitors, such that in Book XXII Odysseus does to the suitors what Achilles does to Hektor in Iliad XXII, but in the settled space of his own home, after he has already killed the genuine offender and, in theory, should be capable of gaining simple restitution from the other suitors and their families, as Eurymachos argues. This is the source of the conflict of Books XXIII and XXIV, as the other noble families of Ithaka rally for vengeance against Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachos and absolute civil war is only prevented by the intervention of Athena (true to narrative chiasmus, in the appearance of Mentor, whose guise she wears in Book I to instigate Telemachos on to the Telemachy of Books II-IV).
Liminal and settled space is a useful binary to think about because it deconstructs itself. Every space is liminal to some degree and settled to some other, and life largely consists in learning how to navigate transitions between liminality and settlement, internal and external. There are legitimate critiques to make of Joseph Campbell’s model, but his basic identification of the hero’s journey, with appropriate modifications and deconstructions, remains a genuinely useful mythographic, psychological, and philosophical tool. Certainly, it highlights aspects of biblical literature that we are trained, through habituation to think of it as “religious” in character, to ignore, as though there were really some kind of ontic difference between texts like Iliad, Odyssey, Ramayana, and Mahabharata on the one hand and the J narrative of the Torah, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, and 1-2 Kings on the other. Sure, the Judahite archive is, at least in those later texts, something closer to an actual history than are, say, the South Asian epics, but they are no less blended memories, ideologies, critiques, and enduring witnesses to the fruit of communal experience about the virtues and limits of heroism. “Homer” is trying to say something about the archaic Greek world of Iliad and Odyssey’s composition, and he was understood to be saying something to Classical, Hellenistic, and Imperial-era readers, too, about the human experience; the Deuteronomist is not an objective reporter but wants to make a definitive point about what happened to his people that merited the tragedy of the exile and how, in the wake of the possibility of return and some degree of restoration, they might organize their renaissance.
Why is this on my mind? The summer before I wrote that paper, my hair, like Samson’s, fell thick and long upon my shoulders, was braided at my ears; I spent my days exercising, hauling lumber for money, walking everywhere, bathing in the sun (what a friend’s mother once insisted to me was “worship”), and indiscriminately reading and re-reading Fagles’ translation of the Iliad.10 I felt close to Achilles: I understood his anger, could feel his breath as readily I felt I could taste the salt of the wine-dark Aegean air in Springfield, MO, reveled in the fire of thumos. But by the time I was writing that paper, I was dating my wife, my hair was cut, it was graying, it was falling out, I had less and less time for freedom and exercise, I was more and more just seeking the peace of a completed quest, feeling the anxiety of a stalled adventure. These days I am four years into marriage; I have a child, a dog, and a house, three things notorious for the maintenance they require; and I prefer to keep my head free of hair so as not to remind myself of what once was. Though I think Odysseus is an antihero, he makes more sense to me as a character now than he did, and Achilles less: the constant thinking-on-one’s feet, the inability to settle and trust that one is truly safe and home—I feel that angst, that sense of weighty experience crowding out innocence, and of innocence deferred or denied, just as Odysseus did not really have a choice about whether to sail for Troy, and had limited choice about whether and how he would make it home (at least, if one believes his Apologos).
So it comes to mind that perhaps what is useful, what is “scriptural” about these texts, is that they provide resources for making sense of transitions in life that often lack the guidance and supernatural assistance one might feel close to hand in youth. For much of history, the late 20s and early 30s were around the age that young men came of age to lead their households, since this was also a time when for many of them their fathers were likely dead or dying. No one tells you that you might lose your hair in your thirties; people talk in abstract generalities about the price of life’s best commitments, about how the sweetness of marriage (my wife is the best friend I’ve ever had) or the existential joy of parenthood consist in so much kenosis, but not often in specifics about how those changes are like rapids in the fluidity of the self; how as one ages, relationship to parents can take turns that one would not have expected, how familial distance becomes difficult to bridge and the desire to do so from time to time even more remote. But characters like Samson, David, Achilles, and Odysseus can help precisely here; their stories are not models for emulation, nor prescriptions, positive or negative, for behavior. They are archetypes of experience that remind us that we are not alone as we age; that what we experience as loss in this life, for all that it reflects of death and dissolution, also possibly bespeaks our good. For Christians, these cultural memories, legends, myths, whatever we might like to call them, bespeak that we stand before God supratemporally, with the whole array of who we are and have been and will yet be ever displayed before him, held in the cradle of divine love even when the narrative and moral arcs of life break down in ways we do not expect. And if there is a lesson here it is to do what Samson fails to do, and what David fails to do, and what Solomon fails to do: to embrace the limits of heroism, and of human being and becoming, as the very horizon of our own transcendence, the very launchpad from which we may come to be all that God is in Christ to the very extent that he has become all that we are. To do that requires first that we feel, honestly, the primal disappointments, the lamenting strength of youth in evanescence; if it is by death that we conquer death, we must first learn to die. And these are the real limits of heroism: that the true hero’s journey can never be genuinely completed in this life, since the death and resurrection by which Christ signifies the world’s true nature and destiny are only finally entered into by our own Pascha, prefigured in the extent to which we make the paschal mystery our own story day by day in this life. And this is only possible to the extent that we are realistic about, and willing to, let go of who we think we are at every stage, to receive ourselves again in the divine exchange: in this life, all that I am and can be is hinted at, and not all at once, but will be fully available and integrated only in the resurrection.
I link the RSV above, but if you’re going to read the Hebrew Bible in English, it really needs to either be Everett Fox, translator of The Schocken Bible—in this case, Vol. 2, The Early Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings (New York: Schocken, 2014)—or, perhaps more impressively, Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation With Commentary, Vol. 2, The Prophets (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), previously published in Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation With Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014).
For one of the more recent introductions to the concept of the Deuteronomistic History, as an editorial narrative of Israel and especially Judah’s preexilic saga from Moses to the events of 586 produced with Deuteronomy’s legislation in mind, see Thomas Romer, The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical, and Literary Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2007).
See Gregory Mobley, Samson and the Liminal Hero in the Ancient Near East (London: T&T Clark, 2006).
See Sophus Helle, “Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic,” Aeon (2019).
See Marc Zvi Brettler, "Who Was Samson’s Real Father?" TheTorah.com (2017); Naphtali Meshel, "Samson the Demigod?" TheTorah.com (2019).
See the argument in Susan Niditch, My Brother Esau is a Hairy Man: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), particularly chapters 3 and 4 on “Samson” and “The Nazirite Vow,” respectively.
See Stephen M. Wilson, “Samson the Man-Child: Failing to Come of Age in the Deuteronomistic History,” JBL 133 (2014): 43-60. Ancient masculinity studies are kind of Wilson’s thing; check out his CV here.
Though that agency does exist; see Carl S. Ehrlich, "Bathsheba the Kingmaker" TheTorah.com (2020).
Public service announcement: anyone that tries to tell you that Patroklos is not Achilles’ boyfriend is selling you something. It was a point of controversy in antiquity, but as early as Aeschylus’ now fragmentary Myrmidons, the Greek dramatist understands Achilles as erastes and Patroklos as eromenos. See, e.g., Manuel Sanz Morales and Gabriel Laguna Mariscal, “The Relationship between Achilles and Patroclus according to Chariton of Aphrodisias,” The Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 292-295. The relationship is probably not very different from that between David and Jonathan, as suggested by Luke Timothy Johnson here.
I’ve nothing against Fagles, who remains good as English poetry, but if one is to read Iliad or Odyssey in English it really needs to be Peter Green, whose translation can be found here. Fitzgerald’s formal equivalence is probably the most relevant predecessor. For Odyssey, there is also Emily Wilson’s translation here, significant as the first major translation by a woman scholar in English. There are of course numberless versions and creative appropriations of these hallmark texts; one of the most interesting might be Matt Fraction and Christian Ward’s gender-bent, space-based graphic novel Ody-C.
Succinct. Enviable writing
Beautiful, David.