A Nazarite unto Elohim from my mother's womb - Jud 16: 17

Israel having been a long time in bitter servitude to the Philistines, the time had arrived when God would deliver them. The angel of Yahweh appeared to the wife of Manoah, of the family of the Danites, in Zorah, and informed her of the coming birth of Samson, for this purpose, and of the need for bringing him up as a Nazarite. The woman, without knowing the nature of her visitor, described him to her husband as

"a man of God (with) countenance like the countenance of an angel of God—very terrible" (Judges 13: 6).

Manoah entreated Yahweh that the man might return to them to instruct them how to bring up the child that should be born. Manoah's request was granted, and the angel returned and repeated the message, with instructions how the mother was to treat herself. Manoah, who

"knew not that he was an angel of Yahweh,"

asked the man's name, and pressed him to accept their hospitality. The angel declined on both points, but consented to remain while Manoah offered an offering to Yahweh.

"And Manoah took a kid with a meat offering and offered it upon a rock unto Yahweh. And the angel did wondrously. And Manoah and his wife looked on. For it came to pass when the flame went up toward heaven that the angel of Yahweh ascended in the flame of the altar. . . . Then Manoah knew that he was an angel of Yahweh" (Judges 13: 19-21).

Afterwards came the birth of Samson, who was tended, in accordance with the angel's instructions, with all the scrupulous care which such a prelude to his birth would generate.

When Samson was grown to manhood, he evinced a super-natural strength which enabled him single-handed to work his will upon the enemies of Israel, and finally to deliver his people. The record of his exploits is a record of miracle, in so far as his great strength was miraculous; but in so far as those exploits were natural to great strength, the narrative need not particularly engage our attention.

Suffice it, that the whole episode was one of many instrumentalities by which the feeble and struggling nationality of Israel was divinely kept alive in the midst of unfriendly surroundings, which, left to themselves, would have destroyed it from the earth, as in the case of all other nationalities of that time.

The miraculous was a necessary element occasionally brought to bear in the process by which this result was achieved. The agencies employed were in the main natural, but, in the right manipulation of these, the visible hand was necessary at certain points, and the time of Samson was one of these.

Visible Hand of God Ch 21