1. Judges 14:3 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

What is absent from Samson's parents’ grounds for arguing against his marriage?

Judges 14:3 (ESV)

3 But his father and mother said to him, “Is there not a woman among the daughters of your relatives, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” But Samson said to his father, “Get her for me, for she is right in my eyes.”

His parents only raise the problem of marrying outside the covenant community, which is certainly a problem all on its own. But one might have expected them to raise other moral issues that were of equal concern to the Lord with such an alliance: Samson was a Nazirite, he was called by the Lord to deliver his people from the Philistines, and the Lord explicitly forbids intermarriage with non-Israelites (Deuteronomy 7:1–5). The parents do not put forth an explicitly spiritual reason for marrying within the covenant community. To Samson’s parents his proposition is simply a cultural and ethnic issue.1