Samson and Delilah. Well-known biblical figures in a tale of deception, betrayal and a haircut. Or is there more to the tale than this?

There is, in fact, a good deal more, as J. Cheryl Exum demonstrates in her wide-ranging collection of essays. Far from being a simple story, the tale in Judges 13–16 about Samson and his adventures, culminating in his fatal liaison with Delilah, is a subtle, nuanced and highly complex narrative with an elaborate literary structure, a sophisticated theological programme, and an ambitious and problematic androcentric agenda. It is, moreover, a story that lives on in literature, art, music and even Hollywood films.

The eleven essays brought together in this volume investigate the Samson story from a diversity of critical perspectives and in a variety of its afterlives. Both Samson and Delilah are characters of many facets, as these essays reveal, and Judges 13–16 emerges from this investigation as a story that encourages and supports rather than resists multiple, often incompatible, modes of reading it.