101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #94:
Samson pulled down a Philistine temple.
The Myth: And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the
house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the
other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed
himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people
that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which
he slew in his life. ( Judg. 16:29–30)
The Reality: This story was borrowed from an Egyptian tale about Re-Herakhte.
Samson’s final act was to bring down the temple of the Philistines and kill about
three thousand Philistines attending a celebration for the god Dagon. The discussion
in Myth #93 showed how the Greeks identified Herakles with the Egyptian god Re-
Herakhte and how the two were related to Samson. Herodotus tells an interesting
anecdote about this Egyptian Herakles.
According to the Greeks, says Herodotus, Herakles came to Egypt and was taken
by the Egyptians to a temple of Zeus [i.e., the god Amen] to be sacrificed, with all due
pomp and circumstance. They even put a sacrificial wreath on his head.“He quietly
submitted,” he writes, “until the moment came for the actual ceremony at the altar,
when he exerted his strength and killed them all.”
Herodotus knew virtually nothing about the Hebrews and their Bible, yet his
story preserves the essential elements of the story of Samson in the Philistine temple,
only it changes the locale to Egypt. Since Herodotus attributes the story to the
Greeks, we have a separately preserved tradition about the same events as in the Samson
story. The characters in Herodotus’s story provide clues to the origin of the tale.
The opponents in this Egyptian tale are Amen (whom the Greeks identified with
Zeus) and Herakles. Herakles, as an Egyptian character, represents Re-Herakhte.
The original story, therefore, described some sort of a political feud between Amen
worshippers and Re-Herakhte worshippers, with the latter humiliating the former.
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