sleep and thought, ‘I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.’ But he did not know that the LORD had left him.” The Spirit of Yahweh is no longer empowering him. As each of the seven braids is cut, so is the Nazirite status finally severed. The gap between the breaking of the first two Nazirite prescriptions and the breaking of the third has provided the narrator with time to underline God’s long-suffering. God has continually stood by and invigorated Samson “so long as he clings to the one last strand of the naziriteship, the prohibition against shaving.”108
