Samson's final prayer brings deliverance through his death

Capture becomes Dagon's festival

The lords gather to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god and to rejoice: our god has delivered Samson our enemy into our hand, the destroyer of our country who slew many of us. When their hearts are merry they call for Samson to make them sport. He is brought from prison and performs before them. They station him between the pillars. The house is full of men and women; all the lords are there; about three thousand men and women are on the roof watching.

He prays for remembered strength and personal vengeance

He asks the lad who holds his hand to let him feel the pillars that bear the house, that he may lean on them. He calls on the LORD: remember me, strengthen me only this once, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. He takes the two middle pillars, the one with his right hand and the other with his left. He says, Let me die with the Philistines. He bows himself; the house falls on the lords and on all the people. The dead whom he slays at his death are more than those he slew in his life.

The LORD answers a blinded prisoner in a hostile temple. The prayer still names vengeance for his eyes. He includes himself in the lethal plan. A crowded worship building falls. Deliverance against rulers who displayed him is real; so is the mass of deaths. Usefulness at the end does not rewrite the whole career into a moral template.

Family burial, and the same twenty years

His brethren and father's house come down, take him, and bury him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the burying place of Manoah his father. He had judged Israel twenty years. The promised beginning of deliverance has cut the Philistine leadership in their own celebration. It has not licensed later readers to die killing a crowd.