Samson’s Bondage

abstract:The riddler of the Book of Judges, Samson, is a riddle himself, in the Bible and in Samson Agonistes. Samson’s career can be mapped out in three stages, distinguished by Samson’s different experiences of bondage. In his boisterous heyday, Samson liked to get tied up, burst free of constraints, and erupt into violence. In the time frame of Milton’s drama, Samson finds himself literally blinded, and physically, psychologically, and politically reduced to bondage, to the bestial repetition of slave labor, publicly humiliated by the gazes and taunts of passersby. Søren Kierkegaard’s analysis of the existential dilemma that Abraham faces provides by narrative analogy an interpretive key to the riddle of Samson’s various types of bondage. The final phase of bondage for Milton’s Samson is the appalling yet liberatory one in which he becomes, and acts, like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, a blindly free agent because of his belief in the absurd.