At the end of the second millennium BCE, the city of Gaza formed a federation with four other cities now located in what is today Israeli territory: Ashdod, Gath, Ekron, and Ashkelon. This federation of five cities was called Philistia, echoing the Philistines who, likely arriving from the sea, had settled in this southern corner of the Levantine coast.

However, the Philistines remain largely unknown because most of the accounts about them come from their declared enemies, the Jewish tribes of the interior, with whom conflicts over access to the Mediterranean were recurrent.

This is how the biblical hero Samson emerges: a great slayer of Philistines, as long as his hair – the source of his superhuman strength – remains untouched. Betrayed by Delilah the temptress, Samson has his hair cut off while he sleeps and is handed over to the Philistines, who blind and chain him. Imprisoned in Gaza, condemned to endlessly turn a millstone, Samson gradually regrows his hair. He becomes strong enough to take his revenge during a pagan celebration in Gaza, bringing down the temple on the Philistines, dying along with them.

The inspiration of a myth

The figure of Samson and his tragic fate have inspired many works of art. Around the year 1500, the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna chose to depict the fateful night when Delilah cuts Samson's enchanted hair. A century later, the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens painted the same scene. In 1671, the English poet John Milton devoted a tragedy to Samson, which ends with the collapse of the temple in Gaza under the pressure of his straining hero.

Yet this figure of a blind and suicidal hero is far from the most popular. Several sculptors preferred to decorate public fountains with statues of Samson as a young man, the biblical equivalent of Hercules, subduing a lion with his bare hands. Such is the case with the Samson fountains in Bern, Switzerland, in 1544, in Ceské Budejovice, Czech Republic, in 1726, and in Peterhof, Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1735.

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