The Mekhilta highlights Samson as another example of the principle that a person's punishment mirrors their sin. Whatever someone boasts about or indulges in becomes the exact instrument of their downfall.
Samson's weakness was his eyes. When he demanded that his father find him a Philistine woman to marry, he said, "Take her for me, for she is just in my eyes" (Judges 14:3). He followed his gaze rather than wisdom. He chose based on what looked appealing rather than what was right. His eyes governed his decisions, leading him into one disastrous entanglement after another with Philistine women.
The consequence was devastating in its precision. After Delilah betrayed him and the Philistines seized him, the text records: "And the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. And they brought him down to Azzah" (Judges 16:21). The very organs that led him astray were the ones taken from him.
Rabbi Yehudah adds a further geographic detail to sharpen the point. The beginning of Samson's moral lapse took place in Azzah (Gaza), where he first visited a Philistine woman. And his punishment — blinding, imprisonment, and forced labor grinding grain — also occurred in Azzah. The place of the sin became the place of the reckoning.
The Mekhilta's lesson is not that God acts cruelly, but that divine justice operates with extraordinary precision. The punishment is never arbitrary. It is a mirror held up to the transgression itself, measure for measure.