Desired: The Untold Story of Samson and Delilah (Lost Loves of the Bible) by Ginger Garrett Page B

beside the crock. It needed a good airing in the sun tomorrow.
    “When I took you from your mother’s home, could you have imagined any of this?” Manoah asked.
    I chuckled. “No.”
    “Then you cannot imagine what He may be doing now. Hold onto what is good, and trust God.”
    A smile played on my lips, thinking of my belly in those long ago days, that improbable swelling at my age. How the other wives talked of it, and nothing else! At my age, with age spots on my face and hands, my knees sore and a back that was already bending forward, at that age God gave me a child. Syvah, my sister-in-law, the one who would later bear two sons herself, rejoiced with me. She had a full, soft face with a wide blunt nose and sparkling brown eyes. She was not beautiful, but her smile could make you forget that.
    “A miracle!” Syvah and the women had said, holding their hands against my belly.
    “More than a miracle!” I had told them. “A gift to all our tribes! He is sent for all of them. He will deliver our people from the Philistines.”
    Manoah yawned. I lifted my ash-soiled tunic over my head. Manoah rose and took a clean one from next to my pallet and lowered it over my head. I accepted his help quietly. Then I went to our pallet and lay down. As I rested my head against his chest, he spoke.
    “I leave for Timnah in the morning.” He was going to make arrangements to get the Philistine girl as a bride for our son.
    “Why do you give in to him?”
    “Do you remember when the strength first came upon him?”
    Wise Manoah. There was one memory that always stayed with me.
    It had been an early spring day, just before the wheat came ready for harvesting. The sun was not out. Several tribes had sent warriors to a nearby Danite camp for training. Danites were, of course, the fiercest tribe. We wanted nothing given to us; we preferred to fight for what we wanted. It was our nature.
    This day, a mercenary from Egypt was in camp. He was a big man, by our standards, with dark thighs as wide and rippled as tree trunks. He wore a leather shirt that wrapped around his chest, crossing over each shoulder, and a short blue and white kilt tucked in at his waist. He had on more jewelry than all the Hebrew wives combined: a nose ring, bracelets, a necklace with odd dangling amulets, and fat gold rings on his wide fingers.
    Our enemies hated the Egyptians, and for good reason. Long ago, the Philistines had left their ancient homeland across the sea and gone into the waters searching for a new home. When they landed in Egypt, it looked good to them, and they made claim.
    The Egyptians beat them so badly, all that was left of the Philistines in Egypt was a memory, a little sneering joke. Our men were eager to see what the Egyptian could teach us. If the Egyptians had defeated the Philistines, we could learn their secrets.
    We women watched the Egyptian man closely and covered our mouths with our hands as we spoke to one another. Syvah, so young and bold, spoke without covering her mouth. “He has no hair!” I smiled to see her bulging stomach. She was soon to deliver her second child. Her first, Liam, a boy not yet two years old, played near us.
    “They shave themselves—everywhere!” another wife answered. We spoke at once, over each other and too fast, as we did when we had a rare moment to sit together.
    “Oh!”
    “He looks like a newborn!”
    “If the wind picks up his kilt one more time, I will run for the hills. It’s too early in the morning to see that much of Egypt.”
    We were in for a wonderful day of gossip and laughter and freedom from work. Syvah’s husband, Joash, sat with Manoah. They were brothers. Joash was the eldest. His hair was pure white, and his hands shook when he ate. Syvah married for the birthright, I suspected. He would die not four months after that day, passing quietly in his sleep.
    Dark gray clouds, gaping holes in each, hung low in the sky, pink and yellow sun just now beaming to the earth. The men