Here is a sober-minded examination of the Biblical myth of Samson, which raises more questions than answers about a figure who, in the Israeli novelist's view, was more mysterious than we might imagine. Why did Samson not tell his parents that he had killed a lion? Grossman wants to know. And why was he always betrayed by women? It seems that his life story “is, at bottom, the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile.” It is, in short, a story that most of us know deep in our bones.