Samson's riddle

The solution is apparently impossible to discern through deduction alone, since it is based on a private experience of Samson's, who had previously killed a young male lion and found honeybees and honey in its corpse.

Aspects of the surrounding narrative have also been interpreted in various ways, with parallels being drawn to Greek myths of lion-killing heroes, and to the ancient belief that living creatures could spontaneously emerge from dead flesh.

"[2] The Spirit of the Lord comes upon Samson once more, and he goes to Ashkelon and kills thirty Philistines, taking their clothes to pay off the debt owed to his wedding guests.

There are several difficulties in the text, especially concerning Samson's parents' involvement in the phases preceding the wedding, and concerning chronological aspects in the description of the feast and the riddle.

[7] Carus' conjecture is rooted in an old scholarly approach, not accepted in current research, which considers Samson a mythological "solar hero" – that is, a god or a demigod related to the sun – and interprets the stories about him from this point of view.

[8] In 2012, archaeologists excavating Tel Beit Shemesh in the Judaean Hills near Jerusalem discovered an ancient stone seal that may depict the story of Samson's fight with a lion.

[9] The seal, measuring 1.5 centimeters in diameter, shows a large animal with a feline tail attacking a human figure with what appears to be long hair.

Samson's discovery of a beehive in the lion's carcass is difficult to explain in realistic terms, as bees would normally avoid putrifying flesh.

[10] The incident is more often considered to be a miraculous occurrence,[11] or to be inspired by the ancient belief in spontaneous generation, the emergence of living creatures from nonliving matter.

Numerous Greek and Roman literary sources describe a ritual known as bugonia, which was said to be a way of producing bees from the carcass of an ox, and this may have been the basis of the Samson narrative.

Heymann Steinthal, writing in the late 19th century, observed that bees in ancient Palestine would have been at their most productive when the sun was in the sign of Leo, a fact which Samson's guests ought to have known.

[22] An illustration of the lion's corpse with honey bees in it and the second half of the riddle appears prominently on the tin of Lyle's Golden syrup.