1. Judges 16:29 (ESV)
  2. Exposition

What detail is provided here for the first time?

Judges 16:29 (ESV)

29 And Samson grasped the two middle pillars on which the house rested, and he leaned his weight against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other.

When the narrator first reported about Samson’s public humiliation, he indicated that the Philistines made him stand between the pillars (Judges 16:25). When Samson asked the young man to help him feel the pillars, he refers to them as the pillars on which the house rests (Judges 16:26). Now the narrator, at the climax, gives us their full description: The two middle [or support] pillars on which the house rests. The writer uses this progression to prepare us for Samson’s determination to destroy the enemy. This one-time hubristic hero has begun, for the first time, to gain an insight into his true God-given destiny and its possibilities.1