IT was the custom in those days for the bridegroom’s family to throw a seven-day feast. Among the guests were thirty young men of Timnath, and on the first day Samson challenged them to guess the answer to a riddle. ‘Out of the eater came forth meat,’ he intoned mysteriously, thinking of his lion, ‘and out of the strong came forth sweetness.’*
He wagered thirty suits of clothes that they would not solve it, but they wormed the answer out of Samson’s bride by threatening to burn the house down. On the last day of the feast they accosted Samson. ‘What is sweeter than honey?’ they said triumphantly. ‘And what is stronger than a lion?’ ‘You would not have unearthed my riddle,’ retorted Samson, who knew what had happened, ‘had you not ploughed with my heifer.’ But he honoured his debt. He went down to Ashkelon, a city of the Philistines,* and picked a fight with thirty men. He slew them, stripped them, and handed over thirty suits of clothes to the men of Timnath.
As given in the Authorised Version of 1611. ‘Meat’ is used in the archaic sense of food generally, in this case honey. The New International Version (1978) gives it as ‘Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.’
The Philistines conquered Ashkelon from the Canaanites in about 1150 BC. The city remained in their hands until 604 BC when, as had happened to Jerusalem a few years before, it was conquered by the Babylonians and destroyed, and its nobility were carried off into exile.