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Delilah, the disloyal deceiver

Bible heroes and villains series

Gather

Prepare the space

Arrange a selection of pictures of people with radical hairstyles and wigs.

Introduce the theme

Samson trusted Delilah but that wasn’t a smart decision. Ask the children

Who do you trust?
Have you ever broken someone’s trust?
Why?

Gathering activity

Ask the children to look at the pictures of people with crazy hair and decide which ones are wigs and which ones are not!

Open the Word

Read Judges 16.3-22; Delilah – the woman the hero Samson falls in love with, whom he ultimately trusts to his peril.
Ask the children to think about why Delilah is a villain.
How did she reject God?

Respond

Hair-growing Samson!

Make grass hair pots.

You will need : tights or a stocking, one ‘leg’ per child; grass seed, sawdust; elastic bands; yogurt pots; googly eyes; paper; paint and pens to decorate the pots.

Hand each child one length from a pair of tights, or a single stocking, and ask them to fill the end with grass seed, topping up with sawdust until they have a ball shape. Help them to fasten the end tightly with an elastic band.
They should then decorate the yogurt pot as the body and stand the stocking ball in the pot with the grass seed at the top. Get them to add some eyes and any other decorative bits they wish.
Invite all the children to take their own pot home and keep it topped up with water. After a few weeks their grass head should grow hair – the question is when will each child cut it!

Trust me?

A simple trust game.

Set up a simple narrow route. Scatter some objects along the route that have to be avoided.
Pair the children up and blindfold one child of each pair. The other child in each pair then leads the blindfolded friend around the route, minding out for the objects along the way.
Ask the children afterwards how it felt to trust one another. Who can they trust?