Myth #94:

Samson pulled down a Philistine temple.

The Myth : And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. (Judg. 16:29-30)

The Reality : This story was borrowed from an Egyptian tale about Re-Herakhte.

Samson’s final act was to bring down the temple of the Philistines and kill about three thousand Philistines attending a celebration for the god Dagon. The discussion in Myth #93 showed how the Greeks identified Herakles with the Egyptian god Re-Herakhte and how the two were related to Samson. Herodotus tells an interesting anecdote about this Egyptian Herakles.

According to the Greeks, says Herodotus, Herakles came to Egypt and was taken by the Egyptians to a temple of Zeus [i.e., the god Amen] to be sacrificed, with all due pomp and circumstance. They even put a sacrificial wreath on his head.“He quietly submitted,” he writes, “until the moment came for the actual ceremony at the altar, when he exerted his strength and killed them all.”

Herodotus knew virtually nothing about the Hebrews and their Bible, yet his story preserves the essential elements of the story of Samson in the Philistine temple, only it changes the locale to Egypt. Since Herodotus attributes the story to the Greeks, we have a separately preserved tradition about the same events as in the Samson story. The characters in Herodotus’s story provide clues to the origin of the tale.

The opponents in this Egyptian tale are Amen (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and Herakles. Herakles, as an Egyptian character, represents Re-Herakhte. The original story, therefore, described some sort of a political feud between Amen worshippers and Re-Herakhte worshippers, with the latter humiliating the former. Since the Re-Herakhte character won the fight and destroyed the enemy, the context suggests that the story must have been a disguised account of events during the reign of pharaoh Akhenaten.

This pharaoh was a rabid monotheist who worshipped Re-Herakhte in the form of a solar disk known as the Aten. While on the throne, he launched a major campaign to obliterate all public references to the god Amen, literally sending out armies of workers to chisel Amen’s name out of stone monuments and close Amen’s temples, the equivalent of destroying that god’s house of worship. Shortly after Akhenaten’s death the Amen cult re-established its authority, but the Egyptians continued to recognize Re-Herakhte as head of the pantheon.

The conflict between the monotheistic sun-worshipping Akhenaten and the Amen worshippers would have been well-known to the Israelites, who were in Egypt during Akhenaten’s reign. The victory of the monotheistic sun-deity over the polytheistic Egyptian gods would have been of great interest to the Hebrews coming out of Egypt after a conflict between their own monotheistic deity and the Egyptian gods. The Greeks would have picked up the same story from the Sea Peoples. Both the Sea Peoples and the Hebrews attached the story to Samson, the “sun-man,” and made it part of their literary heritage.