“Have You Called Us Here to Dispossess Us?” (Judg 14:15)

Abstract Samson’s riddle (Judg 14:14) has inspired interpretation for millennia. Told during a wedding feast in a rival settlement, the knowledge contest of the חידה is an apposite literary feature around which the folklore found in Judg 14 is structured. But while the natural object of study is this written witness to the tale in the Hebrew text, in concentrating on literary details, scholarship has tended to relegate the significance of the preliterate geopolitical setting that the folktale claims for itself. It is this paper’s claim that the story exploits the territorial tension of the late second millennium BCE Sorek Valley in its contest theme, evoking contemporary social struggles among the settlements to construct an engaging and socially relevant riddle challenge.