Nicolas Roeg’s Retelling of Judges 16 in Samson and Delilah (1996)

This chapter considers popular understandings of Samson and Delilah’s relationship in Judges 16, arguing that readers’ interpretations of this relationship are often guided by the discourses, beliefs, and ideologies dominant within their own sociocultural context. The chapter first offers an overview of some common interpretive traditions surrounding this biblical story, which appear to draw upon those familiar tropes of feminine treachery and masculine vulnerability. Specifically, it suggests that interpreters’ reading strategies for the Judges 16 text are constantly negotiated and shaped by readers’ own heteronormative assumptions and discourses of gender and sexuality. In the subsequent section, the chapter focuses on a cultural retelling of this biblical story—Nicolas Roeg’s 1996 movie, Samson and Delilah—and considers the ways that this contemporary cultural text likewise employs these same tropes, imbued with the cultural flavors of the time, to offer a portrayal of Delilah as a postfeminist femme fatale whose erotic allure proved too hot to handle for “new man” Samson. Considering interpretive and cultural afterlives side by side, the chapter demonstrates the complexities of the reading process and the multiple threads—those sociocultural discourses, ideologies, and trends—that occupy and direct readers’ interpretations of the biblical text.