Delilah Agonistes" and Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 Hollywood film "Samson and Delilah". Her name has become associated with treacherous and voluptuous women. Delilah was a woman of Sorek. She is the only woman in Samson's story who is named. The Bible says that Samson loved her () but not that she loved him. The two were not married and the idea that they had a sexual relationship is, in the words of Josey Bridges Snyder, "at most implicit in the biblical text". The lords of the Philistines bribed her to discover the source of Samson's great strength, each offering to give
Delilah her name is applied to cunning women. Delilah also appears as a character in a number of works of art. John Milton's closet drama "Samson Agonistes", an allegory for the downfall of the Puritans and the restoration of the English monarchy, casts Delilah as an unrepentant, but sympathetic, deceiver and speaks approvingly of the subjugation of women. In 1735, George Frideric Handel wrote the opera "Samson", with a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton, based on "Samson Agonistes". The opera is almost entirely set inside Samson's prison and Delilah appears only briefly in Act II. In 1877, Camille Saint-Saëns composed the opera