“So . . . feel.” These four lines draw together two Old Testament stories of retribution against idol worshippers, linked by the body count of three thousand. In Moses’s absence, the Israelites make a golden calf to worship, offer it burnt sacrifices, “and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play” (Exodus 32:6). One seventeenth-century commentator specifies that this means that they rose up “namely to dance, to leap, and be merry, rejoicing in their new God” (Gervase Babington, The Works . . . Containing Comfortable Notes upon the Five Books of Moses [London, 1615], p. 403). Moses talks Jehovah out of killing all of the Israelites but then loses his temper when he hears the Israelites singing and sees them dancing. Moses then orders the “children of Levi” to kill the idol worshippers, including their own sons and brothers, “and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men” (Exodus 32:28). In this context, emphasis seems to fall on the self-sacrificing nature of their victory. When the blinded prisoner Samson pulls down the temple where Philistines are offering a sacrifice to their god, Dagon, he too kills three thousand people, getting his revenge but also killing himself so that he is simultaneously victorious and dead (Judges 16:27). One commentator struggles to explain that Samson was not suicidal: “His primary and direct intention was not such as is theirs that make away themselves, but his direct aim was to destroy the Philistines; only he was content to lose his life in an action so advantageous to the people of God, and whereby he should give such a deadly blow to their enemies” (Arthur Jackson, Annotations upon the Remaining Historical Part of the Old Testament [Cambridge, 1646], sig. M2r). It’s hard to be sure where the story of Moses ends and that of Samson begins in these four lines in the poem. Samson’s story of antipathy turning into a kind of sympathy as he and his antagonists die at once best suits the argument Pulter seems to be making here. As the Messenger puts it in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (London, 1671): “Samson with these inmixed, inevitably / Pulled down the same destruction on himself” (1657-8). Pulter’s poem may suggest that the slaughter of the Israelites was a kind of self-sacrifice the Levites were willing to make to appease God, or that the antagonisms between Israelites and Levites, Samson and the Philistines result from a natural antipathy resolvable only in death, or that even enemies are ultimately united in death.