The juxtaposition is less “two annunciations” than a deliberate stress-test of sacred power: Judges gives you charisma without character; Luke gives you sanctity with discipline. Same trope (barrenness, angel, abstention, destined son), opposite anxieties. Samson’s origin is immaculate in the narrow sense—set apart, tabooed, scripted—yet everything about him will read like a warning that consecration is not moral formation. The Nazirite rule is imposed first on the mother: holiness begins as a regime of appetite before it is a story of heroism. But the text already hints at the coming farce: the “angel” refuses a name; Manue’s wife can report the awe but not the identity. You get power delivered through obscurity. In Judges that’s not a bug; it’s the Judges-cycle feature: Israel receives deliverers who are themselves half-delivered. “He shall begin to deliver” is the quiet indictment—Samson’s vocation is truncated by design, as if the author knows that raw force can only open a door it cannot walk through. Luke rewrites the same structure in priestly key and makes the missing piece explicit: not strength but speech. Zachary’s scene is all liturgy—incense, lots, courses, ordered time—so when Gabriel arrives, the question becomes epistemic and political: can the temple’s own functionary receive a message that relativizes the temple? Zachary asks for a sign, and the sign is the removal of his public instrument: voice. In Judges, the nameless messenger withholds; in Luke, the messenger over-identifies (“I am Gabriel…”) and then withholds Zachary. Different pedagogy: Samson will be too much mouth and muscle with too little inner law; Zachary is forced into silence so the word can gestate without being managed. Both births cure “reproach,” but they treat reproach differently. In Judges, barrenness is a narrative lever to introduce an exceptional body; in Luke, barrenness is shame in the social register (“among men”), and the cure is framed as divine regard—God repairing public meaning, not just producing an instrument. That’s why John’s abstention (“no wine nor strong drink”) is not merely Nazirite cosplay; it signals a reconfiguration of authority: he will be “filled with the Holy Ghost… from his mother’s womb,” i.e., charisma without the Samson-problem of being charisma alone. Luke is anxious to baptize power into intelligibility. Straussianly: Judges is honest that Israel sometimes needs a brute miracle it can barely deserve—deliverance as emergency engineering. Luke is more rhetorically civilized: it domesticates the miracle inside institutional time (“course of Abia”) while simultaneously undermining the institution by making its priest temporarily inarticulate. The surface says: God is gracious. The subtext says: the old order can’t speak the new order into being. The most acid contrast is the angel’s treatment of doubt. Manue’s wife believes, reports, obeys; her husband is almost irrelevant. Zachary is “just… without blame,” yet is disciplined for wanting certainty. Virtue is not the same as receptivity. Luke is not flattering the pious class; it’s warning them that righteousness can still be a kind of controlling pedantry. So the pairing is a critique in stereo: Judges shows what happens when the holy is mostly prohibition plus power (a consecrated appetite attached to an unconsecrated will). Luke shows what happens when the holy is word plus silence (speech disciplined into prophecy). Samson “begins” deliverance; John “prepares” a people. One cracks Philistines; the other cracks interpretations.