Re-Imagining Delilah’s Afterlives as a Femme Fatale
The biblical narrative is riddled with gaps and ambiguities around Delilah’s character – we are told nothing about her social status or ethnicity, her personality, the nature of her relationship (emotional, sexual, or otherwise) with Samson, or even her motives for betraying him. This ambiguity in turn provides readers and creators of her cultural afterlives with a ‘multi-layered system of realized and unrealized potentialities’ that they can engage with imaginatively to construct their own afterlives for this intriguing persona…
See Also: Reimagining Delilah’s Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction (T&T Clark, 2017).
By Caroline Blyth
Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies
University of Auckland
December 2017
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