Samson’s Initial Exploits According to Josephus

Josephus devotes a total of eighteen extended paragraphs of Antiquities 5 to his reproduction of Judges 14-15. Already this “quantitative” observation makes clear the historian’s interest in the passage. That interest becomes even more interest when one attends – as I have tried to do in this essay – to the manifold pains Josephus has taken in adapting the biblical presentation of Samson’s exploits to his own purposes in writing his history. Such exertion on the historian’s part, in turn, calls for a like exertion by contemporary students of his corpus.