Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 53:2 (Jun 2010)
Article: What Type Of Son Is Samson? Reading Judges 13 As A Biblical Type-Scene
Author: Benjamin J. M. Johnson

JETS 53:2 (June 2010) p. 269

What Type Of Son Is Samson? Reading Judges 13 As A Biblical Type-Scene

Benjamin J. M. Johnson

Ben Johnson is a Ph.D. student at Durham University. He resides at 42 Front Street, Durham, DH1 5DW, UK.

I. Introduction: A Biblical Type-Scene

What do Jacob, Joseph, Jesus, and Samson have in common? The answer is, quite simply, their birth narratives. But that is not the true issue at hand. The real question is, why do Jacob, Joseph, Jesus, and Samson have such similar birth narratives? Nor are these four characters the only ones with such similar birth narratives; they merely make for the most clever alliteration. What this article is really going to address is why there are several characters in the Bible whose birth narratives are so similar. The answer to this question seems most clearly to be that each of these stories is making use of the narrative convention of a “type-scene.”

In 1978, Robert Alter published an article in which he proposed the existence of this narrative convention he calls a “type-scene.”1 In his work he borrowed from Homeric scholarship2 and proposed that often in biblical narrative “there is a series of recurrent narrative episodes attached to the careers of biblical heroes that are analogous to Homeric type-scenes in that they are dependent on the manipulation of a fixed constellation of predetermined motifs.”3 Alter identifies six different biblical type-scenes: (1) the annunciation of the birth of the hero to a barren woman; (2) encountering the bride at the well; (3) the epiphany in the field; (4) the initiatory trial; (5) danger in the desert and discovery of a source of sustenance; and (6) the testament of the dying hero;4 though many other type-scenes have been proposed since Alter’s work.5

JETS 53:2 (June 2010) p. 270

The type-scene in which we are interested is what Alter has called the “annunciation type-scene.” I will refer to it as the “son of a barren woman” type-scene.6 There are five, maybe six, occurrences of this type-scene in the OT and two in the NT. The five occurrences of this type-scene in the OT are (1) Abraham and Sarah with the birth of Isaac (Gen 16:1-21:7); (2) Isaac and Rebekah with the birth of Jacob and Esau (Gen 25:19-26); (3) Jacob and Leah and Rachel with the birth of the eleven sons (You must have a subscription and be logged in to read the entire article.
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