The Philistine wars lasted for many years. They began with raids on the Israelitish territory immediately adjoining that of the Philistines. Perhaps the conquest of the plain at the foot of the mountains of Judah first roused their hostility against Judah; at all events, it brought them into contact with the conquering tribe. A desultory warfare was carried on for some years; then the plans of the Philistines became more definite, and they aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the whole of Canaan. The sea-robbers had been gradually changed into a nation of soldiers. Samson, the hero of popular tradition, belongs to the earlier part of the Philistine wars. The last relics of the tribe of Dan in the neighbourhood of Zorah and Eshtaol have not as yet been absorbed by Judah; the Philistines, on the other hand, have gained possession of the whole plain. Between them and the Israelites there is constant intercourse, partly friendly, partly hostile; at one time the two peoples intermarry, visit, and trade with one another; at another time they carry on a guerilla warfare. Of late years it has been the fashion to transform Samson into the hero of a myth.[365] It is true that his name is derived from _Shemesh_, ‘the sun,’ and it cannot be denied that the stories relating to him have come rather from popular tradition than from written records. His hair, in which his strength lay, reminds us of the face of the sun-god engraved on the platform of the Phœnician temple of Rakleh on Mount Hermon, where the flaming rays of the sun take the place of human hair. But it must be remembered that Samson is represented as a Nazarite—a purely Israelitish institution between which and a solar myth there is no connection—and that his strength was dependent on the keeping of the vow which consecrated him to Yahveh as a Nazarite from the day of his birth. With the loss of the hair the vow was broken, the consecration at an end; the strength had been given by Yahveh, and Yahveh took it away. Between this and the fiery locks of the sun-god there is but little connection. The character of Samson, however, is that of a hero of popular tradition. His utter ignoring of moral principles, his hankering after foreign women, his riddle, his devices for deceiving and slaying his enemies, belong to the tales told by the Easterns at the door of a _café_, or around the camp-fire, rather than to sober history. When we hear that Ramath-lehi was so called from the ‘jawbone’ of an ass which Samson had ‘flung away’ after slaying a thousand men with it, or that Ên-hakkorê received its name from the water which flowed from the bone to quench the hero’s thirst, we find ourselves in the presence of those etymological puns with which the historian has nothing to do.[366]