Giday, I'm Gary Stevens.

And welcome to the third season of the History in the Bible podcast.

In this final season, I explore how the Jews and the Christians constructed new religions when they were sent spinning into the void after the destruction of the temple.

All of the history, about all of the books beyond the Bible.

Welcome to another three-way collaboration between Scott McAnlis of retelling the Bible,

Steve Guerra of the History of the Papers It podcast, and me, Gary Stevens of History in the Bible.

In this episode, we investigate Samson's father, Manoa.

As usual, we begin with an excerpt from Scott's retelling.

And here's an excerpt of episode 5.19, me myself and Manoa.

You can be sure that over the years that followed,

Manoa told the story of the following several minutes, many times over,

to whatever audiences he could persuade to listen to him.

But he always struggled to describe the man of God.

He would just mumble words like shining and shimmering, wings and circles. But he knew that, strictly speaking, none of those words actually described anything

that he had seen.

He just didn't have words for what stood before him.

But for the moment, he only had one question that he could ask.

Are you the man who spoke to this woman?

He said, gesturing to his wife, who just was coming up behind him.

The man of God rolled his eyes and glanced at the woman as if to say,

You have to deal with this all the time?

The woman shrugged.

...