Manoah's Wife

        Manoah's wife (Judg. 13:2, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23) was Samson's mother. She bore no name of her own in the record but is introduced as the wife of a certain Manoah of Zorah, of the family of Danites, and seems to have been a stronger character than her husband. The remarkable thing about her life is that she was told not to drink wine or any strong drink or to eat any unclean thing, for her child would be dedicated to the sacred calling of a Nazarite.
       When the angel appeared before her, she was reverent and silent and obedient to the voice and filled with faith, but her husband became fearful and pessimistic, saying, "We shall surely die, because we have seen God.'' Judg. 13:22. But Manoah's wife remained unshaken in her faith. Together, however, they offered up a burnt sacrifice to God in grateful praise. She taught her son that no intoxicating drink should enter his lips and no razor should touch his head, for his long-grown locks would speak outwardly of his sacred vow to God.
       Manoah's wife is typical of the wife who has a simple, trusting confidence in God and of the mother who is willing to consecrate herself to all that is good. We can be sure she lived closely to God, for the angel of the Lord appeared both times to her, and each time she made haste and told her husband.
       Manoah's wife appears twice in the narrative after Samson is grown. First she and Manoah are protesting because their son has chosen for his wife a woman in Timnath, of the daughter of the Philistines, out of whose hands, it had been foretold before his birth, he would begin to deliver the Israelites. But Samson informed his mother and father that this Philistine woman "pleaseth me well'' Judges 14:3. But they knew their son's marriage was not of the Lord.
       Manoah's wife last appears on her way to Timnath to see her son married to the woman to whom she had objected Judges 14:5. The marriage turned out badly, as Manoah and his wife had predicted.
       Though Samson was weak where women were concerned, he became one of the most eminent of the Hebrew "Judges.'' Can we not believe that it was to his mother's love and prayers, her dedication of her son to God even before his birth, that he owed his true greatness.?
       Was it not the godliness he had inherited from his mother that triumphed in the end? For even at the eleventh hour, when he tore the pillars from their position and brought down the roof upon his foes, the Philistines, did he not atone for all his wasted years? Despite his weakness in character, the New Testament named him one of those Hebrew heroes whose animating principle was faith, a faith such as his godly mother had possessed before her child was born (Heb. 11:32).