Riddles

5984 words long.

Published on 2024-05-10

Riddles are a delight and a torment. They are a delight to the teller and the rare soul who can guess them. They are an aggravation to the dull-minded when their arrogant pretense of wisdom is punctured. But oh, are riddles a torment to the person whose life depends on solving them. Such a person was the unnamed first wife of Samson the Judge, who died over a honey of a riddle.

I am no expert at solving riddles, but I love composing them. My first nonfiction book, The Endless Hunt, was filled with riddles of my own design. I ended every chapter with a riddle and answered it in the next. As I study the Bible, I am keen to discover and solve the riddles I find along the way. The articles in this section are about Biblical riddles that I have solved while researching and writing my books.

This article is about two things:

It will introduce a peculiar kind of riddle, which I call an Emotional Riddle.
It will explore a riddle that I haven't solved: Samson's riddle.

Emotional Riddles

Emotional riddles are riddles that God has encrypted with an extra layer of security: triggering statements. These riddles are phrased in a way that angers, confuses, causes despair and generally shuts people down from looking further for answers. The riddle may tell you that you are worthless, aren't important enough to be told the answer, that a matter is settled and unchangeable in a way that alienates or diminishes you. The riddle may portray the speaker (a character in the Bible who delivers a message) in a light that makes them seem untrustworthy, proud, or foolish, so that you dismiss what they say without studying their words closer.

Why would God do this? Why would He cloak His messengers in garb that conceals what they have to say?

It is the glory of God to conceal things,

but the glory of kings is to search things out.

- Proverbs 25:2

God loves riddles. He even likes proposing hard riddles. If every one of His riddles was easy, then they would all have been solved by now. That would leave us late-born riddle lovers nothing to do.

God also prizes diligence. By including riddles whose difficulty ranges from the simple to the impossible, He rewards the patient student of the Bible with treasures that others will never know.

Looking at a few examples of emotional riddles should make things clearer.

The Fear of the Lord. The whole subject of the Fear of the Lord is an emotional riddle. In mid 1992, I was leading a Bible study. One participant was a hardened abuse survivor. She alternated between fragile and furious. Then we got to a verse about fear, perhaps 1 Peter 2, which says, "Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor." I was thirty and only dimly understood the fear of the Lord. Arguing for the goodness of anything related to fear with such a person was a losing battle. How well I now understand Proverbs 2:

My son, if you receive my words

and treasure up my commandments with you,

making your ear attentive to wisdom

and inclining your heart to understanding;

yes, if you call out for insight

and raise your voice for understanding,

if you seek it like silver

and search for it as for hidden treasures,

then you will understand the fear of the Lord

and find the knowledge of God.

- Proverbs 2:1-5

Solomon made two things clear:

The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7) and wisdom (Proverbs 9:10)
Getting to the place of understanding the Fear of the Lord is a journey in itself

Just getting to the starting line of the race to attain wisdom is hard! Some never even make it that far. That is a fearful emotional riddle.

Humility. Braggarts will claim to have more of everything than you, even humility. I wrestled with one proverb related to this topic.

In my vain life I have seen everything.

There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness,

and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing.

Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise.

Why should you destroy yourself?

Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool.

Why should you die before your time?

It is good that you should take hold of this,

and from that withhold not your hand,

for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them.

- Ecclesiastes 7:15-18

These verses baffled me. "Why should you destroy yourself by being too righteous?" Is this some sort of trick question? I was raised Catholic, then became a Christian through a fundamentalist church steeped in legalism. I labored to obey God in everything. Surely finding a balance between doing good and doing evil is a materialistic, unspiritual cop out, no? We should strive always to do good, confess when we fail, and resume striving after that. No compromise with sin.

With an attitude like that, how could I never understand Ecclesiastes? In fact, Solomon's book is one of the books I have struggled with the most, right up there with Philippians. Facing my own self-righteousness was a drawn out process. That is one reason why Job finally clicked with me.

Solomon was not recommending licentiousness. He was counseling people that when you try to "make yourself too wise", it is just that. It is you trying to perfect yourself in order to salve your conscience and gain a good reputation. It isn't real wisdom and it isn't real righteousness. That we must pursue, but only God can give it. Only Christ can make you righteous. Our effort must be to go to him to change us, not to do the job ourself. It is one thing to hear a sermon on legalism, and quite another to recognize it in yourself. This riddle is one I solved and continue to solve at great cost.

Elihu. In Job 32, we meet Elihu, a younger man. His words and attitude rub most people the wrong way. He spends a whole chapter telling Job that he has something to say - without saying anything! Elihu comes across like a windbag who loves the sound of his own voice. At a conference of pastors, one attendee asked for a show of hands. Who trusts what Elihu had to say and who thought him no better than the three friends? The room was evenly split. That is an effective riddle. In my book Job Rises, I did a thorough analysis of Elihu's statements about Job and concluded that he was right. What tipped me toward believing him? It was these words:

For I am full of words;

the spirit within me constrains me.

Behold, my belly is like wine that has no vent;

like new wineskins ready to burst.

I must speak, that I may find relief;

I must open my lips and answer.

- Job 32:18-20

The bursting of a wineskin is found in a parable of Jesus. The wine is the new teachings of the Holy Spirit, which require that a person be born again, otherwise they cannot comprehend it. It will literally blow their mind. When I experienced the Baptism of the Holy Spirit decades ago, it was because I visited a dying Christian woman named Janet. After I left her bedside, I was consumed with deep sadness and mourning, wept bitterly, but then a half hour later was filled with joy. After church that morning, I rushed home, read Philippians, and then wrote a ten page article about the joy of the Holy Spirit. My feeling of having this pent up energy and need to speak about God perfectly matched what Elihu described in Job. How can that be?

At Janet's funeral months later, someone said something with which we all agreed, "When you were with Janet, it was like the Holy Spirit was pouring out of her." Because I stood in the presence of a holy woman undergoing great suffering, and I was there to comfort her in her trials, the Holy Spirit passed from her to me.

In the Book of Job, Elihu was standing in the presence of Job, a suffering, righteous man. He refused to speak harsh words and unjustly accuse Job without evidence of doing wicked things to deserve his suffering. Because his heart was young and pliable, not like a tough old wineskin set in its ways like the three friends, Elihu was receptive. Thus the Holy Spirit entered him and he prophesied true words from God. Had I never had the experience of meeting Janet and being transformed, I never would have understood Elihu. The man did not say "nothing" in that first chapter; he said everything. Even he did not know where his words were coming from, but he described his religious experience accurately so that later people with like experiences would be able to understand him.

Is Elihu the only person that we misunderstand? No!

Hannah. Eli the judge, when he saw Hannah moving her lips but saying nothing, thought she was drunk and berated her. She defended herself by saying that she was full of grief and pouring her heart out to God because of her barrenness. Hear that? A judge appointed by God misjudged a woman!

After God answered her desperate prayer, Hannah gave birth to a son, Samuel. In gratitude, Hannah uttered a wonderful prayer. Have you read her prayer? Have you considered it so important that you devoted days to studying it, praying over it, and trying to comprehend its mysteries? Have you marveled at its prophetic richness? I never would have done any of these things, had God not showed me that her prayer spoke of certain mysteries of wisdom a century before Solomon lived and wrote more about them. She saw them first! I now consider her one of the wisest women who ever lived. I once thought of her as an ordinary, unschooled mom with reproductive issues, a victim. In an emotional riddle, the concealing power of prejudice is immense. Hannah was a woman of no account to whom God gave a great gift. Do not look to the glaze on the earthen jar, look to its contents!

To get a peek at the contents of Hannah's prayer, read my article about it:

Hannah's Song

God, the Aloof. The tone of someone's words is as important as the words themselves. In Job, God comes across as transcendant. He is so far away that we can not see him. Even when He shows up, His words are off-putting. This also applies to people who speak on his behalf. First, consider Elihu in Job 37:

Teach us what we shall say to him;

we cannot draw up our case because of darkness.

Shall it be told him that I would speak?

Did a man ever wish that he would be swallowed up?

- Job 37:19-20

Elihu seems to be saying, "Are you crazy? Telling God that you want to talk to him? Do you want to get yourself killed?" This is one of the many statements that turns off us lovers of the friendly, huggy, cheerful and considerate God. I know that it made me feel that way about Elihu for a time. That was before I discovered the Growth Pattern of Solomon and discovered that it matched chapters 15 to 42 of Job. Guess which one of Solomon's twenty-eight times matches Job 37? It is "a time to be silent". That means that Elihu was able to discern the times. There is a time to speak to God, and there is a time to be silent and listen. Elihu was telling Job that this was one of those times. So Elihu should not be heard as saying it is never the right time to talk to God. He is telling us that we also need to listen. God once told me (through a passage in Exodus 4) that I was spiritually deaf. I had a listening problem. Maybe that was why Elihu's words set me off so much?

That was Elihu. What about God? When he starts to speak, he spends an awful lot of time talking about animals. What? Is he saying, "Look, I have all these animals to feed and take care of. I'm busy. Can't it wait?" Now I doubt anyone reading God's speech at the end of Job comes to such an extreme conclusion as that, but the tone is just weird. It is beautiful and majestic but there is this sick man who can't keep his food down, has nasty gas and can't sleep, and he's traumatized because all his kids died and you want to talk animal husbandry?

Once I got to know Elihu, and Job, and finally God, I began to see the tenderness in God's words. When I looked long and hard at the parables of the animals, I discovered that each parable, each animal, addresses a different human need: food, shelter, help bearing and raising young, freedom, the transcendence of the eagle in flight... God was saying that he provides for ALL our needs - physical, emotional, and spiritual. The words that alienated me from the God of Job now drew me in. That is the paradox of God - majestic and high up, tender and walking beside. We do not get only one part of Him. We get it all. Any alienation we feel is because that part of God is still strange to us and makes us afraid. God is the ultimate emotional riddle.

For more about God's provision of all our needs, see the chapter "Broken Pattern, Broken Man" in Job Rises. The list of human needs that I spelled out in that book as being met by God are:

Food for the young lion & raven (38:39-41)
Help during pregnancy for the mountain goat (39:1)
Assistance giving birth & child-rearing for the deer (39:2-4)
Freedom & a home for the donkey (39:5-8)
An independent spirit & strength for the ox (39:9-12)
Speed & exuberance for the ostrich (39:13-18)
Courage & grace for the horse (39:19-25)
Adventure for the hawk (39:26)
Transcendence & safety for the eagle (39:27-28)

The Voice of the Seven Thunders. In Revelation 10, an angel with a thundering voice speaks to John. Then John is told to seal up the words. Apparently John is important. He gets to know what the seven thunders said. We are not important. We don't get to know. Or maybe it is an inside joke. God is laughing it up with John and the angels, waiting to see how much time we spend trying to decipher a meaningless message.

There is a concept called information leakage. Sometimes your attempts to conceal information actually cause it to leak out. A famous example is from World War 2. The British needed to estimate how many tanks the Germans had built. They noticed how the parts in the tanks they destroyed and captured had serial numbers on them. By analyzing the serial numbers on the parts and applying statistical techniques, they came up with an estimate of how many tanks had been built. After the war, they captured the production records. Their estimate was very close.

God doesn't leak anything unintentionally, but this speech in chapter 10 of Revelation does tell us something. It tells us that there is a voice of seven thunders. This is an important feature of emotional riddles. We are told, "No." We are told, "Seal it up." We are told, "This person is wrong, don't listen to what they have to say." Such statements trigger an emotional reaction of avoidance among the faithful. Unbelievers and charlatans will never be deterred by such words. They will investigate and speculate all kinds of foolish things about matters that we are told not to look into.

As I was writing Peace, like Solomon Never Knew, I intentionally steered clear of Revelation 10. Any theory that speaks about forbidden knowledge will be dismissed. Waste of time. I had just had a wonderful summer of Bible study in which I made many discoveries. Suddenly, I felt sour. The feeling persisted for days. Why was I feeling that way? Everything had been going well. Then I made a connection. I had been "eating" the Bible for months and it was sweet, but now my spiritual stomach was sour. I remember that this once happened to John in Revelation, so I looked it up:

And I took the little scroll from the hand

of the angel and ate it. It was sweet as honey in my mouth,

but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.

- Revelation 10:10

Ugh! Revelation 10! I took this as a word from God that I must study this chapter. I got the idea to look for thunder in other parts of the Bible. Then I found it. The Voice of the Seven Thunders had spoken before: in Exodus, Job and Psalms. It also spoke elsewhere in Revelation. So the Bible told me that I could not know what the Seven Thunders told John THEN, but I could know what the seven thunders had told other people BEFORE. However, it took a push by the Holy Spirit and the feeling of physical discomfort to overcome the emotional force that was preventing me from studying that chapter of the Bible.

A full account of that discovery may be found in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew in the chapter "Aftertaste: Donner & Blitzen".

Zophar. Job is dense with riddles. The three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, are riddles in their own right. God straight out told them that they were wrong.

After the Lord had spoken these words to Job,

the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite:

“My anger burns against you and against your two friends,

for you have not spoken of me what is right,

as my servant Job has. Now therefore take seven bulls

and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up

a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job

shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer

not to deal with you according to your folly.

For you have not spoken of me what is right,

as my servant Job has.”

So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite

and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord

had told them, and the Lord accepted Job's prayer.

- Job 42:7-9

If the words spoken by three men arouse the burning anger of the Lord, and those words are objectively judged as not being right by the judge of all the universe, would you waste time studying them? Would you expect to find anything uplifting in what they had to say? I didn't! I was determined to make only the most cursory study of their words when I wrote my book on Job. Towards the end, a member of my church who was in seminary shared an article about the personalities of the three friends. After that, I paid them more attention and it was profitable. Then in my subsequent books, I made the astounding discovery that those three men were prophets in their own right. They were wrong about Job. They were wrong about God. They were not wrong about the wickedness of the nations and the judgments that would consume them. In Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace, I found many prophecies against the beastly empires of history hidden in their words. However, that discovery was preceded by just one, which I wrote about in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew.

In the chapter "CSI Babylon: Job 20", I match the words of Zophar to the medical symptoms of the ailment that killed Alexander the Great. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever noticed that metaphors in Job 20 match all known symptoms of that illness, plus the circumstances of when they began, the effect on Alexander's family, and details about his burial:

He will not look upon the rivers,

the streams flowing with honey and curds.

- Job 20:17

Alexander the Great was buried in a sarcophagus filled with honey, used to retard the decay of the body. The precision of this prophecy amazed me; I spotted eighteen details of his life spoken of in the prophecy. Equally surprising is the fact that nobody else (to my knowledge) has ever spotted this prophecy. Almost nobody wants to read Zophar's words so nobody finds the gems hidden in them. This is a testimony to the power of God's emotional riddles.

1 Timothy 2. I know of no emotional riddle that can top this one:

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority

over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

For Adam was formed first, then Eve;

and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived

and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved

through childbearing—if they continue in faith and

love and holiness, with self-control.

- 1 Timothy 2:11-15

Feminist Bible scholars were polled which Bible verses they hated the most. This verse was number two. (The story of Eve eating the fruit was number one.) This verse arouses anger, indignation, feelings of injustice, charges of sexism, or in some, resignation. If it is a riddle, to think with a clear head and set off to unravel it with objectivity cannot be anything but torture. Merely to resist excising the verses from the Bible or rejecting Biblical inerrancy is an ordeal. The stakes are so high, the passion so intense. God sealed this riddle up with so much spiritual power that only an equal spiritual force can break through.

In my opinion, a frontal assault on these verses to torture them into saying what they do not and cannot is doomed to fail. You have to stumble in, guided by God's grace. I had no problem with these verses and no interest in dissecting them towards the end of proving that women should be permitted to serve as pastors or elders. However, once I comprehended the Growth Pattern of Solomon and began to recognize it elsewhere in the Bible, I had eyes to see what I could not see before.

The Bible has words about eternal and unchanging truths but also God's unfolding plan across the years. The plan involves change. Sifting through Bible passages to separate the unchanging from the temporal is hard. For one thing, if a passage is prophetic, then there are times when things begin and times when they end. Even if you agree there is a change, you can argue over when that change will happen or has happened. The area of prophecy is one about which scholars, churches and denominations are least in agreement.

The question of women serving as leaders in the church is one of those issues that is a matter of time. No one in the Bible was ever authorized to serve as a priest without a sacrifice, a ceremony and a command from the Lord via a prophet or apostle.
There is no record of an event that recognized the propriety of women serving in those roles during the life of the early church, whether in Acts or an apostolic letter. If you believe in a closed Bible canon (as I do), you must conclude that one of two things is true:

Women shall never be permitted to serve as pastors and elders
Women would be permitted to serve at a point in the future (relative to the apostles), according to prophecy

I once believed the first statement. Now I believe the second. The problem is that there are clear prophecies and there are riddles. God gave women a riddle and it is 1 Timothy 2. Only a person who understands Solomon's times will even spot the riddle. Thus this riddle is a double riddle, one you don't even know is a riddle.

Solving this riddle completely took me years. The ideas are scattered throughout Peace, like Solomon Never Knew and Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. For part of that analysis, read the seven articles in this section:

Against Complementarianism

Samson's Riddle

In the Book of Judges, at the start of his seven-day wedding feast, Samson poses a riddle to the wedding guests. If they can solve it in seven days, he will give them lots of clothes. Otherwise, they owe him. Since they didn't have mechanical looms to make the fabric cheap and sewing machines to stitch them quickly, the sixty sets of garments (thirty dress and thirty work outfits) would probably be worth twenty thousand dollars in today's currency, maybe more. This was no ordinary riddle.

And he said to them,

“Out of the eater came something to eat.

Out of the strong came something sweet.”

And in three days they could not solve the riddle.

- Judges 14:14

The narrator lets us know that this was an intentional provocation by Samson in order to trigger a war between Israel and the Philistines, a war he believed he could win, thanks to the divine strength God had given him.

Why focus on this riddle? Judges 14 uses the word riddle eight times. Daniel only uses the word riddle twice. The whole Bible only uses it fifteen times. With over half the mentions, Judges 14 is riddle central. The trick with a riddle, a parable, or a saying of the wise is that it has a surface meaning and a deeper meaning, whether spiritual or prophetic. We are told the surface meaning. The eater was the lion that tried to eat Samson, but which he dispatched with his supernatural strength. Then days later, he passed by again and saw that bees had made a nest in the lion's corpse and there was honey to be had, the sweet (honey) that came out of the strong (lion).

What is the prophetic meaning? If there is such a meaning, we have lots of grist. Prophecies of the future often tell us how long the wait until some future event. They need either numbers or things that can be counted. This chapter and the next, where the story concludes with the death of his wife and lots of other people, have lots of numbers:

riddle: eight mentions
thirty: with reference to the wagered garments, mentioned six times
fourth: the fourth day of the feast, mentioned once
seven: with reference to days, mentioned twice
seventh: with reference to the last day of the feast, mentioned twice
three: with reference to the first three days of the feast, mentioned once
300: the foxes caught by Samson in Judges 15, tied to torches and used to burn their fields, mentioned once
3000: number of Israelites who betray and capture Samson in Judges 15, mentioned once
1000: Philistines slaughtered by Samson in Judges 15 with a jawbone, mentioned twice
twenty: years of Samson's rule as judge as stated in Judges 15, mentioned once

With all those numbers to play with, a creative person can fabricate endless possible prophecies. There is bound to be a way to get a subset to add or multiply up to the number of years until Christ, but I wouldn't put too much credence in such arithmetic. Here are a few ideas that a brief internet search turned up:

A prophecy of Samson's own fate. One writer says that the eater is Samson, and the food for eating that came from him is the grain he ground while imprisoned by the Philistines years later, after Delilah's betrayal.

A moral tale about hidden sin. Allan Johnson writes in Samson's Riddle that Samson by his riddle is unintentionally revealing his own sin. He was raised by his parents to be a Nazirite. The Nazirite vow included no cutting of the hair (which led to Samson losing his strength one day, courtesy of Delilah's shears), no drinking fermented beverages like wine, and definitely no touching of corpses! By touching a dead lion to eat from the honeycomb attached to it, he became unclean. By telling a riddle about the whole affair, he was disclosing his unfaithfulness to God. In this fashion, a man trying to conceal his actions by a riddle ends up shouting them to the world. Won't God do the same with us?

Therefore whatever you have said in the dark

shall be heard in the light, and what you have

whispered in private rooms

shall be proclaimed on the housetops.

- Luke 12:3

An End Times Prophecy. Bill Somers offers an interpretation that makes use of many of the symbols from the text, but seems off to me. In his article Samson's Riddle: The Revelation of Jesus Christ, Somers makes these points (in my words):

The dead lion is Jesus, called "the Lion of the tribe of Judah" in Revelation 5:5.
The honey is the sweetness of the scroll given to John by the angel: "And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey..." Revelation 10:10.
Since in Colossians it says that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, this sweet honey of wisdom is hidden in Christ, the one who was slain.
The unfaithful gentile bride of Samson is the Bride of Christ, whom he took to himself with a promise to cleanse her.
The deeper truths of the Bible are sealed until the end times. Thus the riddle could never be understood by the Philistines (the world) or even by the church (the bride).
Samson revealed the answer to the riddle to his bride on the seventh day of the feast, which is symbolically the seventh millennia of history, when Christ will open the seals on the scroll of Revelation.
The bride, like an evangelist, then shared the answer to the riddle with her people.

If I keep searching, I will find more interpretations of Samson's riddle and get no closer to the truth. My only clue has to do with Samson's strength. The fifth of the seven Spirits of God is the Spirit of Might. Being the fifth, it points to the fifth millennia, when Christ lived and died and rose again. Being fifth, it also points to the fifth pillar of wisdom, Ecclesiastes. That book has one place that ties together marriage, work, might and a life of joy:

Go, eat your bread with joy,

and drink your wine with a merry heart,

for God has already approved what you do.

Let your garments be always white.

Let not oil be lacking on your head.

Enjoy life with the wife whom you love,

all the days of your vain life that he has

given you under the sun, because that is

your portion in life and in your toil at which

you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand

finds to do, do it with your might,

for there is no work or thought or knowledge

or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

- Ecclesiastes 9:7-10

For all his might, Samson did not enjoy life with his wives. He gloried more in his strength than in God who gave it to him. If only Samson lived later and could have been taught by Psalm 19!

In them he has set a tent for the sun,

which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,

and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy...

the fear of the Lord is clean,

enduring forever;

the rules of the Lord are true,

and righteous altogether.

More to be desired are they than gold,

even much fine gold;

sweeter also than honey

and drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them is your servant warned;

in keeping them there is great reward.

- Psalm 19:4b-5,9-11

The strong man in Psalm 19 is clean - no touching corpses. His honey is God's Word, and it warns him of danger, like marrying the wrong sort of woman.

None of this is the meaning of Samson's riddle, but it does touch on the meaning of Samson's life. Tactically, he was brilliant at provoking fights that he knew he could win, of wreaking destruction. Strategically, he was a mess. He did not know how to reach full maturity and put aside his passions so that he could build something that would last. He had an insatiable lust for excitement, danger, and death. Nothing could satisfy that lust. If one other Bible riddle is equal to Samson's, it may be this:

The leech has two daughters:

Give and Give.

Three things are never satisfied;

four never say, “Enough”:

Sheol, the barren womb,

the land never satisfied with water,

and the fire that never says, “Enough.”

- Proverbs 30:15-16

The insatiable hunger is mirrored by this parable. The two daughters of the leech are Samson's two wives, leaching secrets out of him so that he could be destroyed. The four things that can never say, "Enough!" showed up in his story as well.

Sheol is the grave. Samson killed a lot of people. He kept feeding more lost souls to its hunger.
The barren womb is the womb of Samson's first wife. Her actions led to her early death, a bride but not a mother.
The land thirsting for water was Samson. His thirsts were lust for women and revenge, but also for water (Judges 15:18-20).
Fire is the final insatiable entity. Samson catches foxes, ties burning torches to their tails, and sets them free to burn the fields and olive groves of his enemies. Later, her fellow Philistines burn Samson's faithless wife and father in retaliation.

The story begins with Samson thirsting for a heathen woman and ends with him thirsting for water:

And he was very thirsty, and he called upon the Lord and said,

“You have granted this great salvation by the hand

of your servant, and shall I now die of thirst and fall

into the hands of the uncircumcised?”

And God split open the hollow place that is at Lehi,

and water came out from it. And when he drank,

his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore the

name of it was called En-hakkore; it is at Lehi to this day.

And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years.

- Judges 15:18-20

Do you hear the arrogance in his demand for water? How did God put up with him?

Jesus said that we are to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Samson had the thirst, but for all the wrong things. We must not be like him, but we must thirst. We must pray - with humility - that God will split the rock of confusion, ignorance and exhaustion and so satisfy our thirst for Him. When the water that wells up to eternal life bubbles forth, then our spirit will revive.