Judges 16:13

If thou weavest the seven locks … web plaits … warp. Weaving was the work of women as well as of men; see the illustration from the Egyptian tombs at Beni Hasan dating from the Middle Kingdom, Benzinger, Hebr. Archäol.2, p. 151; Delîlah has a loom in her house. This was a horizontal loom fastened into the ground, as in the illustration referred to 1 [56]

[56] It looks as if it were upright; but this is due to the absence of perspective in Egyptian drawing.

; hence it would be easy to weave the hair of a person lying asleep upon the floor into the warp, i.e. the horizontal threads which are intersected at right angles by the weft, in this case Samson's hair. To form the web, i.e. the woven cloth, a further operation is necessary, the beating up of the weft with a flat rod or batten, here rendered pin(Judges 16:14); the word usually means peg, esp. a tent-peg (see Judges 5:26 mg.), but that it could also be used of a flat stick appears from Deuteronomy 23:13 (paddleor spade).

The sentences needed to complete Judges 16:13 and to provide the proper beginning of Judges 16:14 have accidentally fallen out. With the help of the Greek versions the gap may be filled thus: "If thou weavest the seven plaits of my head with the warp, and beatest them up with the batten, then shall I become weak and be as any other man. So she made him sleep, and wove the seven plaits of his head with the warp, and beat them up with the batten." It will be noticed that the existing text and the restored text both end in the same way. The eye of the copyist passed from the first with the warpto the second, and overlooked the intervening lines: a good instance of the source of textual mistakes known as homoioteleuton. The sevenlocks may have something to do with solar mythology. The Babyl. Gilgămesh had seven locks; in later Greek art Helios is usually represented with the same number.