Samson’s Ransom

Milton’s worldly, prosaic Manoa has won few admirers, and the ransom plot in Samson Agonistes often elicits puzzlement. This article situates Manoa in relation to the soteriological anxieties that Milton’s tragedy explores. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalytic account of monotheism, this article suggests that Manoa’s presence clarifies the paternal substitution realized in Samson’s elevation by God, but also threatens to unsettle it. Whereas Yahweh chooses Samson, Manoa’s love is fundamentally choiceless—an expression of an absolute bond. Reading Samson against two other Judges tragedies—Buchanan’s and Vondel’s plays about Jephthah’s sacrifice—the article argues that Milton’s dramatic poem reveals both the allure of chosenness and its psychological impasses. Manoa’s unconditional love offers a release from the drama of election. But Samson’s tragedy is that he can only reject it: to accept a love that demands nothing, that needs no choice, would mean giving up his most cherished wish—the wish to be chosen.