Charles Ellicott Commentary Judges 16:6

"And Delilah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict thee." — Judges 16:6 (ASV)

And with what you might be bound. —The narrative, if taken as a full account of all that took place, would leave in the mind an impression of almost incredible foolishness on the part of Samson. The general lesson is that of 1 Esdras 4:26: “Many have lost their minds for women, and have become slaves on account of them; many have perished and erred and sinned because of women.” (Compare to Proverbs 7:26.) Eastern legends constantly show how women have deceived even prophets. But there was no reason why the sacred historian should linger over the details of scenes so unworthy.

If Delilah spoke so plainly at once, we can only imagine that she was professing to treat the whole matter as a joke. Josephus says: “When Samson was drinking, or at other moments, expressing admiration of his deeds, she kept scheming how to determine in what way he was so outstanding in bravery.” An illustration may be found in 1 Esdras 4:29: “I saw Apame taking the crown from the king’s head and setting it on her own head; she also struck the king with her left hand, and yet for all that the king gaped and gazed upon her with open mouth. If she laughed upon him, he laughed; if she took displeasure at him, he flattered her, so that she might be reconciled to him.”

The genius of a great poet has depicted such deceptions in the idyll of Merlin and Vivienne, and it is only by supposing that such deceptions were employed in this instance that we can give the Danite hero credit for even the most ordinary sense.

But his fault was not stupidity—it was sensual infatuation; and in the ruin and shame which this sensual weakness brought upon him, and the way in which, step by step, it led him to lose the great gift of God, lies the chief moral of the story. We find the same lesson in the legend of Hercules and Omphale; and even if this legend was not influenced by the story of Samson’s life, yet there is a general analogy between the character of the Greek and the Jewish hero. Samson was no Solomon, and yet the heart of even Solomon—

“...though large,
Beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell.”