Beauty may lead to love, yet beauty is not always attached to what is good. Sometimes, even the ugliest of things can be presented beautifully.

This painting depicts the scene of Delilah cutting Samson’s hair. This is one of the instances in which beauty and love are manipulated to destroy, in the biblical story of Samson.

Samson’s mother was visited by an angel who told her that her son was to be a Nazirite and would deliver the Israelites from the Philistines. Nazirites were those who abstained from pleasures, specifically wine; they were not to touch dead bodies, and they kept uncut hair. They were sometimes thought to be chosen by God and would experience divine ecstasy and other heavenly gifts because of their abstentions.

Samson’s story, however, is a cautionary tale. He was instructed to abstain, yet he defiled himself multiple times: he not only touched but ate from a lion he killed; he feasted with and married into a Philistine family, which was considered a sin; he killed Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey, and he had relations with several Philistine women.

Samson was always fighting the Philistines. They tried multiple ways of capturing and enslaving him in order to find out the secret of his divine power. Delilah was the one who accomplished this task. She seduced Samson with her beauty and he fell in love with her. After several failed attempts to get Samson to reveal his secret, she accused him of not loving her for not telling his deepest truth. Moved by this, Samson finally revealed that his uncut hair was the secret to his divine power. While he was sleeping that night, Delilah cut his hair and called in the Philistines…