The Doctrine of Beitar

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The Philistines were kings in their order. From the border to the lord; and there were appointed times for the realization of the joint action of the five lords—they did not need to invite one another secretly to a council in the secret cave, which was skillfully paved with ease, like a pavement of dung, after the blocking stone had been cast aside.

Once he saw a spectacle in Gaza, which Samson had previously described from the mouth of Sandar. From all over the country, thousands of young men and women gathered for the dance; they came in their thousands—like the number of paving stones. All were dressed in one type of garment, all in clothes of white. The young men were girded with belts and the young women—[wore] dresses with double folds on the ground, narrow-waisted and long-sleeved, with a deep and wide opening at the chest.

They were all arranged according to their height. Camp opposite camp: the young men on the right, and the young women on the left. The conductor of the dances was a shaven priest who stood on the highest step of the staircase before the temple and held in his hand a small rod made of ivory.

When the music began, everything froze—both the dancers on the paved floor and the immense crowd all around, on the wooden stands, on the roofs of the houses, on the unpaved sides of the pit. A deathly silence was heard—among the dancers, no one would have noticed any who faltered; even among the swooning maidens, it was hard to sense their breath. The shaven priest turned and fixed his eyes upon them, and they upon him. He walked back and forth, and it seemed that all the suppressed wealth of feeling in thousands of people was concentrating within him and would soon burst forth. Samson felt that a hint had appeared in his heart, and if the matter continued, in a few more moments he would not be able to restrain himself and would cry out. Suddenly the priest raised his rod, almost without any perceptible movement—and all the white figures around had already fallen on their left knee and extended their left hand in a single motion, in the same fraction of a second, all as one. A groan escaped from the mouths of the tens of thousands in the crowd. Samson's lips parted and he immediately felt blood on his tongue, so deeply had he been biting them before.

All the dancing was nothing but such movements, according to the coaxing of the rod—at times straining movements and at times flowing movements, and they lasted only a short time. But Samson left the celebration with great turmoil within him. By the time Delilah told him of the spectacle, he had already re-enacted it in his imagination...