Samson and Hercules

Paper Summary:

This research compares and contrasts the mythic figures Hercules, from Greek mythology, and Samson, from the Hebrew Bible. It shows how the narrative lines of Hercules (Heracles/Herakles) and Samson are strikingly similar. Both are heroes of their respective cultures, both are distinguished chiefly by their great physical strength and both are decisively flawed as human beings, superhuman as they are. The paper examines how these flaws figure prominently into their individual experience, but their behavior and growth over the period of their lives are implicated in the culture of which they are each representative.

From the Paper:

"There appears to have been rough equivalence in the time period that the stories of Samson and Hercules first emerged. The Samson narrative, which takes up four chapters of Judges (13-16), focuses on the exceptionalism of Samson within the community of the people of Israel in the period between the death of Joshua, Moses's legatee, and the onset of the so-called historical period of Israel, which includes the reigns of Saul and David (Hartman, et al. 215), the division of Israel into north and south kingdoms in Palestine, the Babylonian captivity, and the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC. The time of the Samson story is positioned at about 1200 BC; the Trojan War is positioned at 1193-1184 (Hartman, et al. 23-4), and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey have been dated at 850 BC at the latest ("Homer" 425-6). Given the flowering of Aegean and Mycenaean civilization after 1500 BC, the Hercules story, which is cited by Homer (Rose 210), doubtless predates that of Samson. This does not mean that the Samson story is derived from that of Hercules; however, the correspondence between the heroic narratives of Greek myth and Hebrew tradition is difficult to ignore."

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