Artist: Salomon de Bray (Dutch, 1597-1664)
Collection: Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, United States
The biblical account states that Samson was a Nazite, and that he was given immense strength to aid him against his enemies and allow him to perform superhuman feats, including slaying a lion with his bare hands and massacring an entire enemy army of Philistines using only the jawbone of a donkey (Judges 15:19).
Holding the jawbone as his attribute, Samson looks upward, perhaps to God. The great strongman just slew a thousand Philistines with that jawbone. Overcome by thirst, he then drank from the rock at Lechi, a name that also means “jawbone” in Hebrew. Due to a mistaken translation in the Dutch Bible, some artists, like Salomon de Bray on the painting above, depicted Samson with a jawbone and water dripping out of the bone, rather than the rock issuing water.