And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass. — Here we once more find ourselves in very primitive regions of poetry and paronomasia. Samson’s exultation over his extraordinary achievement finds vent in a sort of punning couplet, which turns entirely on the identity of sound between chamor, a heap, and chamor, an ass, and the play of meaning between aleph, a thousand, and aleph, an ox. In the Hebrew the couplet runs: —
“Bi-lechi ha-chamor chamor chamorathaim.
Bi-lechi ha-chamor hicceythî eleph eesh.”
Literally, with some attempt, however clumsy, to keep up the play of words,
“With jaw of the ass, a (m)ass two (m) asses,
With jaw of the ass I smote an ox-load of men.”
The versions are, of course, unable to preserve these rough paronomasias, which are characteristic of the age. It would be quite a mistake to infer that they show any levity of spirit in Samson. On the contrary, such peculiarities of expression often arise out of deep emotion. When John of Gaunt begins his dying speech to Richard II. with —
“Old Gaunt, indeed! and gaunt in being old,” &c.,
the king asks: —
“Can sick men play so nicely with their names?”
and the dying prince makes the striking answer: —
“No; misery makes sport to mock herself.”
I have fully examined the whole subject in Chapter s on Language, pp. 227-238. These sallies of playful fancy tended no less than the flashes of military prowess to prepare the nation for better times by keeping up their buoyant mood. “The nation felt unsubdued in mind and body, while its sons could flow out in such health and vivacity;” and thus Samson began to deliver them, though his actual deeds were casual — “a sort of teasing, reiterated mark of mortifying humiliation” (Ewald).