_And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death_ (Judges 16:16).
All terrorists do not carry bombs and swords; some merely carry words. All terrorists do not blow up public planes and strike off ‘heathen’ heads; some merely blow up intangible souls and decapitate dreaded dreams. One gang bleeds the body and publicly prides itself in the goriness that we cringe at in Christian civility; the other slashes the soul in dark romantic rooms with Judas kisses. Because our ears hardly hear the cry of dying souls; because the soul bleeds a blood that mortal juries do not always see, we are prone to pamper the bloodless dangerousness of swordless terrorists while we fry those that dare to publish their bloodlines in promise of a perverted paradise. It is blind and complicit partiality, but some call it justice for the ‘weak.’
A bleeding body is not what tells all gruesome deaths. There are also bleeding souls. Samson was the victim of verbal terrorism; a victim whose tale others lived to tell. In the wrestling ring of a dark bedroom, the fragile Delilah _“pressed him”_ down until, _“vexed unto death,”_ the Referee counted him out of the fight. They carried him out of the cage blinded for life. In her apparent fragility, away from the public eyes before whom she often acted like his conquered queen, she pried and _“pressed”_ the life out of the anointed of the Lord.
Who says that words are weak? Who says that blows from cruel lips kill less dangerously than blows from the fist of a strong man? Only the ‘pressed’ can tell the killing weight of weightless words from lying lips that cry loudly for outside ‘help’ while, like a giant python, they secretly and slowly squeeze the life out of the dying insider. Meanwhile, for his apparent public muscles and his old stories of torn gates and killed lions, a blind world might be prompt to blame the dying man for her loud dishonest cries.
Weak as she seemed to all, _“she *pressed him* daily with her words”_ until _“his soul was vexed unto death.”_ According to the New Living Translation, _“She *tormented* him with her nagging day after day until he was sick to *death.*”_ Had he not been blinded at last for all to see, who might have believed that a cultured and fragile Delilah could ‘press’ any man, let alone a strong man such as that, in the fashion described against her? Who could have dared to entitle that pretty homely woman a domestic ‘Tormentor’?
Outing Samson, she became the New Champion, without his belt. All champions may not be known by their bulging biceps. There are biceps of other kinds, in the muscular tongue of fragile Delilahs. She _“pressed him,”_ and she kept at that stranglehold _“day after day,”_ until she was sure that he had been knocked out of the fight. She ‘pressed’ him down not with a ten-ton boulder but with words a thousand times heavier; caustic dynamite words weightier than her apparently fragile frame. Who dares say that terrorist words are less lethal than their bombs? Who says that cruel words are no weapons at all?
It does not take only blows to kill. Sabre words torment and kill no less dangerously, in secret bedrooms where shy strong men would rather die than cry out, until their eyes are plucked out and their beautiful dreams, perhaps, killed.
_Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again … And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me …_ (Judges 16:22, 28). Amen.
Your brother
Salami Solomon