Catholic Commentary
A Sign of Hope: The Hair Begins to Grow
22However, the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaved.
Judges 16:22 describes how Samson's hair begins to grow again after the Philistines shaved his head, signifying the potential restoration of his Nazirite consecration despite his captivity and blindness. The regrowth symbolizes God's covenant claim remaining active even through Samson's punishment and humiliation.
Even in spiritual death—blinded, imprisoned, stripped of all power—the sign of God's claim on us never stops growing back.
Furthermore, the verse invites a moral-spiritual reading applicable to every soul. Samson's imprisonment results from his own catastrophic failures — pride, lust, the repeated testing of divine patience. Yet even in the consequence of his sin, grace does not abandon him. His hair — the sign of his original calling — grows back. Catholic spiritual tradition would call this the persistence of baptismal character: sin may wound and disfigure, but the indelible mark of God's consecration cannot be wholly erased. Repentance and renewal are always possible because the divine seed planted at the beginning of one's calling retains its vitality.
Catholic tradition reads this verse within a rich tapestry of covenant theology and sacramental anthropology. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God's love for Israel is compared to a father's love for his son" and that God's covenantal fidelity persists even when the human partner fails (CCC §218–219). Judges 16:22 is a narrative icon of precisely this truth: Samson has violated every term of his Nazirite consecration, yet God does not rescind the gift of calling. This aligns with St. Paul's teaching in Romans 11:29 — "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable."
The Church Fathers were attentive to Samson's typological significance. Origen, in his Homilies on Judges, treats Samson's hair as a figure of spiritual virtue — when it is lost through sin, the soul's strength departs; when restored through penance, divine power returns. Tertullian (Against Marcion) sees in Samson a demonstration that the God of the Old Testament is the same God of mercy who restores the fallen.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, Q. 89), reflects on how grave sin diminishes but does not entirely destroy the natural inclination toward good — a point this verse illustrates concretely: even in the prison of his consequences, Samson's consecrated nature begins to reassert itself. The Nazirite vow's external sign returning is, in Thomistic terms, the analogical re-emergence of the habitus of grace seeking restoration. This passage thus quietly teaches the Catholic doctrine that no soul, however fallen, lies entirely beyond the reach of God's regenerating grace — a cornerstone of Catholic soteriology in contrast to any theology of irrecoverable reprobation.
Contemporary Catholics will recognize in Judges 16:22 a deeply personal word about the aftermath of serious sin and spiritual failure. Many Catholics carry memories of times when they, like Samson, squandered great gifts — through pride, addiction, moral compromise, or betrayal of relationships — and found themselves "blinded" and "imprisoned," grinding in the mill of consequences. This verse insists that no season of ruin is the final chapter.
Concretely, this passage calls Catholics to resist the lie of spiritual despair — the feeling that one's original calling or baptismal dignity has been permanently cancelled by one's failures. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is precisely the liturgical enactment of Judges 16:22: it is the moment in which the hair, so to speak, begins visibly to grow again. The grace of the sacrament does not pretend the shaving never happened; Samson will carry the scars of Gaza. But it restores what was taken. Pope Francis, in Misericordiae Vultus (§17), insists that mercy is not a sentimental concession but a "force that overcomes everything" — and in this verse, that force is simply, quietly, growing back, hair by hair, in the dark of a Philistine prison.
Commentary
Literal and Narrative Sense
Judges 16:22 is one of the most economical yet theologically loaded sentences in the entire book of Judges. Having described in the preceding verses the catastrophic fall of Samson — the cutting of his seven locks by Delilah (v. 19), the departure of the Lord from him (v. 20), his capture by the Philistines, the gouging out of his eyes, and his reduction to a blind mill-slave grinding grain in Gaza's prison (v. 21) — the narrator pauses to insert this single, luminous detail: "the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaved."
The Hebrew verb used here, ḥālal (to begin), combined with ṣāmaḥ (to sprout or grow), carries agricultural and organic connotations — the hair does not simply return; it sprouts, like a seed breaking dormant soil. This is not incidental biography. In the ancient Near Eastern context, and specifically within Israel's Nazirite law (Numbers 6), hair was the visible, tangible sign of consecration to God. When the hair was cut, the consecration was visibly broken. When the hair begins to grow, the sign of the covenant begins, silently and stubbornly, to reconstitute itself.
The Nazirite Covenant and Samson's Identity
Samson's Nazirite status was not self-chosen but divinely ordained before his birth (Judges 13:5). His mother was told by the angel of the Lord that "no razor shall come upon his head." The hair, therefore, was never merely a physical attribute — it was the external sacramental sign of a divine calling. When Delilah removed it at the prompting of the Philistines, she did not merely groom a man; she symbolically unmade his vocation. Yet Judges 16:22 insists that this unmaking is not final. The body, even in bondage, reasserts the mark of God's claim.
The Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church's interpretive tradition has long read Samson as a type (typos) of Christ. St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XVIII, ch. 19), explicitly numbers Samson among the prefigurations of Christ, noting that his great deeds against Israel's enemies foreshadow Christ's victory over the powers of darkness. In this typological reading, verse 22 becomes profoundly resonant: just as Samson lies in chains, blinded, humiliated, apparently defeated — yet with new life silently returning — so Christ in the tomb appears defeated to the eyes of His enemies, yet the power of resurrection is already, invisibly, at work. The growing hair is thus a figure of the Triduum's hidden dynamic: the quiet, unstoppable movement of divine power within apparent death and abandonment.