“If my head is shaved, my strength will leave me”
Samson told her all that was in his heart: 'My hair has never been cut, because I have been a Nazirite to God from my mother's womb. If I am shaved, my strength will leave me, and I will become as weak as any other man.' (Judges 16:17 BSB)
What it sounds like today
His strength lives magically in his hair, like a fairy tale.
The cultural key
It is easy to read the hair as a magic charm, but the text is careful. Samson had already broken the other terms of his Nazirite vow, touching corpses, feasting, chasing forbidden women; the uncut hair was the one remaining sign of his consecration to God. When it is cut, the vow is finally and fully broken, and the narrator states the true cause of his collapse: 'he did not know that the LORD had departed from him' (16:20). The strength was never in the follicles but in the calling the hair represented and the Spirit of the LORD behind it. Lose the last sign, forfeit the calling, lose the power.
Recovered meaning
Samson's strength was tied to his consecration, not to enchanted hair; the shaving is the final breach of a vow already in tatters. What really left him was not his hair but the LORD.