Samson and Delilah
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Judges 16:17
The passage
That he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother’s womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak, and be like any other man.
Judges 16:17
About this plate
Samson is asleep across a low couch in a pillared room, his head fallen back into Delilah's lap. She is seated above him, upright, her hand in his hair. A second figure stands beside them in a pale robe, waiting.
Everything in the room is heavy and expensive — carved couch ends, a hanging drape, columns, a patterned floor — and Samson is the only thing in it that isn't arranged. He sprawls. She is composed.
The verse is not about the haircut. It is a sentence about talking: he told her all his heart. The strength leaves at the razor, but the story is lost here, in a room, in conversation, and the King James spends the whole verse on what he said rather than what was done to him.
Doré understands that, and so he draws the moment of no action at all. Nothing is happening in this picture. A man is asleep and a woman is sitting still with her hand in his hair, and the third figure is simply present, and the disaster has already happened somewhere in the talking.
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