The Samson narrative presented an interpretative conundrum for early modern preachers and legal theorists alike. On the one hand, Samson is a hero within the Christian tradition, cited alongside Abraham and Moses in the honor roll of faith-heroes in Hebrews 11. On the other hand, he blatantly violates natural and divine law, often under apparent divine sanction: he marries a Philistine woman, he commits suicide, and he appears to violate the moral law against excessive violence. Protestant divines like Richard Rogers and Arthur Jackson attempt to solve this conundrum by providing casuistic explanations of Samson’s (and God’s) deviation from the law: God needs Samson to marry a Philistine woman so that a “private personal wrong” will lead him to wreak vengeance upon the Philistines. Hugo Grotius also attempts to provide a logical explanation for Samson’s violation of the law, arguing that Samson’s violence is a legitimate act of pre-emptive violence.

            My paper focuses on two rewritings of the Samson story that refuse to provide logical explanations for the story’s violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Francis Quarles’s The Historie of Samson. I argue that, rather than explaining the violence in the Samson story, both poems dramatize the experience of watching violence. By positioning their readers as spectators within the community, both writers emphasize the unintelligibility of an ethics based upon individual inspiration. Moreover, both writers highlight the problems of theology, theodicy, and law that arise when God cannot be trusted to follow his own rules. Consequently, the study of both poems can usefully inflect our understanding of early modern notions of law, legal subjectivity, absolutism, and the philosophy of divine freedom.