Samson made sport for his Cretan captors
in a Minoan Theatral Area by the portico of some degenerate House
of Minos, half palace, half shrine, with Cretan ladies in their
strangely modern garb of frills and flounces looking down from
the balconies to see his feats of strength, as their ancestresses
had looked down at Knossos on the boxing and bull-grappling of the
palmy days when Knossos ruled the AEgean. The great champion whom
David met and slew in the vale of Elah was a Cretan, a Pelasgian,
one of the Greeks before the Greeks, wearing the bronze panoply with
the feather-crested helmet which his people had adopted in their
later days in place of the old leathern cap and huge figure-eight
shield. Ittai of Gath, David's faithful captain of the bodyguard,
and David's body-guards themselves, the Cherethites and Pelethites
(Cretans and Philistines), were all of the same race.
Though these last supporters of the great Minoan tradition had
fallen upon evil times, it is evident that they were not altogether
degenerate. The references to their cities in Scripture show that
they still retained the national taste for splendid buildings;
and no doubt their culture, though belonging to the last and most
debased period of Minoan art, was far in advance of that of the
rude Hebrew tribes. The golden mice and tumours which they sent to
the Hebrews along with the ark of Jehovah recall on the one hand
the skill of the Minoan goldsmiths, and on the other the votive
images of animals and diseased human organs placed in the old shrine
at Petsofa.
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