1. Judges 16:4 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

Who is this woman?

Judges 16:4 (ESV)

4 After this he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah.

Other than her name, we are told basically nothing about her. We do not know her family, or if she has one. We are not told whether she is a Philistine, though we were also not informed of the ethnicity of the prostitute in Gaza (in contrast to our being told that the Timnite woman was a Philistine). In the case of both Delilah and the prostitute, we can try to deduce their ethnicity from the location of the events and the context. It could be that they were both Philistines, but we can be by no means certain (see the discussion in another note on this verse). Beyond Delilah’s name, which sounds Semitic, the only thing we can know for sure is Samson's relationship to her: he loved her.1