Les cheveux du Nazir

Description

Who does not know the episode in which Delilah puts the powerful Samson to sleep on her knee to shave his hair and deliver him without strength to his enemies? Of all the biblical stories, it is undoubtedly one of the most famous, even one of the most erotic, without the reader knowing that the scene that inspired so many painters refers to an ancient ritual designated by an untranslatable term: the Nazir. The Nazir refers to the young man "consecrated" to God who was forced not to cut his hair. It became a simple vow that any man or woman could pronounce in order to express his piety in the temple by offering sacrifices. Analyzing this ritual makes it possible to better understand the arrangement of the biblical texts among themselves, to approach the religion of this biblical God without an image and to approach the origins of the Israelite state of the North to go as far as the Judaism of the temple. But above all, did the first Christian authors, reading the Bible only in Greek, have a practical knowledge of the rite of Nazir or did they only use this motif for hagiographic purposes? Taking this possible misunderstanding as a pretext, the author thus evokes in a new light the historical conditions of the separation of the two religions. A powerful exegesis, which revolutionizes the subject.