1
DEBORAH
PASSIONATE PATRIOT
SCRIPTURE
JUDGES 4:1-24
1After Ehud had died, the Israelites again did things that the LORD saw as evil. 2So the LORD gave them over to King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. The commander of his army was Sisera, and he was stationed in Harosheth-ha-goiim. 3The Israelites cried out to the LORD because Sisera had nine hundred iron chariots and had oppressed the Israelites cruelly for twenty years.
4Now Deborah, a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, was a leader of Israel at that time. 5She would sit under Deborah’s palm tree between Ramah and Bethel in the Ephraim highlands, and the Israelites would come to her to settle disputes. 6She sent word to Barak, Abinoam’s son, from Kedesh in Naphtali and said to him, “Hasn’t the LORD, Israel’s God, issued you a command? ‘Go and assemble at Mount Tabor, taking ten thousand men from the people of Naphtali and Zebulun with you. 7I’ll lure Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, to assemble with his chariots and troops against you at the Kishon River, and then I’ll help you overpower him.’”
8Barak replied to her, “If you’ll go with me, I’ll go; but if not, I won’t go.”
9Deborah answered, “I’ll definitely go with you. However, the path you’re taking won’t bring honor to you, because the LORD will hand over Sisera to a woman.” Then Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kedesh. 10He summoned Zebulun and Naphtali to Kedesh, and ten thousand men marched out behind him. Deborah marched out with him too.
11Now Heber the Kenite had moved away from the other Kenites, the descendants of Hobab, Moses’ father-in-law, and had settled as far away as Elon-bezaanannim, which is near Kedesh.
12When it was reported to Sisera that Barak, Abinoam’s son, had marched up to Mount Tabor, 13Sisera summoned all of his nine hundred iron chariots and all of the soldiers who were with him from Harosheth-ha-goiim to the Kishon River. 14Then Deborah said to Barak, “Get up! This is the day that the LORD has handed Sisera over to you. Hasn’t the LORD gone out before you?” So Barak went down from Mount Tabor with ten thousand men behind him. 15The LORD threw Sisera and all the chariots and army into a panic before Barak; Sisera himself got down from his chariot and fled on foot. 16Barak pursued the chariots and the army all the way back to Harosheth-ha-goiim, killing Sisera’s entire army with the sword. No one survived.
17Meanwhile, Sisera had fled on foot to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, because there was peace between Hazor’s King Jabin and the family of Heber the Kenite. 18Jael went out to meet Sisera and said to him, “Come in, sir, come in here. Don’t be afraid.” So he went with her into the tent, and she hid him under a blanket.
19Sisera said to her, “Please give me a little water to drink. I’m thirsty.” So she opened a jug of milk, gave him a drink, and hid him again. 20Then he said to her, “Stand at the entrance to the tent. That way, if someone comes and asks you, ‘Is there a man here?’ you can say, ‘No.’”
21But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent stake and a hammer. While Sisera was sound asleep from exhaustion, she tiptoed to him. She drove the stake through his head and down into the ground, and he died. 22Just then, Barak arrived after chasing Sisera. Jael went out to meet him and said, “Come and I’ll show you the man you’re after.” So he went in with her, and there was Sisera, lying dead, with the stake through his head.
23So on that day God brought down Canaan’s King Jabin before the Israelites. 24And the power of the Israelites grew greater and greater over Canaan’s King Jabin until they defeated him completely.
INSIGHT AND IDEAS
If you’ve ever been tempted to think that women are the “weaker sex,” you’ve 1) never been with a woman in labor, and 2) you’ve never met a woman named Deborah. She was one tough woman who was strong enough to get the job done when the men around her were weak.
The year was 1125 B.C. The Israelites had been oppressed by King Jabin the Canaanite for twenty years while Sisera, the commander of his army, occupied the plain of Jezreel.
The Israelites were discouraged, depressed, and downhearted. Their leaders had lost the will to struggle against their oppressors. The people had settled into a servile life that was beneath what God intended for them. Their sense of their own identity as the covenant people had been dashed to smithereens under the weight of Sisera’s occupation.
Enter Deborah. She was married to a man named Lappidoth. The only thing we know about him is that he married above himself. We meet Deborah under a palm tree where she served as a judge or counselor to the people.
My guess is that Deborah got sick and tired of listening to people describe the way they were suffering under Sisera’s occupation. She confronted a leader named Barak with a rhetorical question: “Hasn’t the LORD, Israel’s God, issued you a command?” In no uncertain terms, she told him that God was directing him to take ten thousand troops to Mount Tabor and lead the insurgency against Sisera. She even laid out the battle plan and promised that together they could overcome the occupation.
Barak wasn’t convinced that this was such a great idea. With something less than undaunted courage, he replied, “If you’ll go with me, I’ll go; but if not, I won’t go.” That’s not exactly what you call courageous leadership. Deborah told him not to worry. She would have his back. She promised, “I’ll definitely go with you.” But she also warned him that the honor of the victory over Sisera would go to a woman and not to him.
The conversation between Deborah and Barak reminded me of the way Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth tells her spineless husband, “Screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.”
Barak followed Deborah’s battle plan. Sisera’s forces were defeated. None survived, except for Sisera, who ran to the tent of Jael where he hid under a blanket. While Sisera was sleeping, Jael pounded a tent stake through his head and showed Barak her handiwork when he arrived. As Deborah predicted, the final victory was in the hands (and the hammer) of a woman.
When it was all over, Deborah and Barak celebrated the victory with a song (Judges 5:1-31) that scholars generally consider to be one of the oldest pieces of literature in Scripture. Deborah became one of the most heroic, if easily overlooked, figures of biblical history.
The question is: What on earth (literally, on earth) do followers of Jesus do with a story like this? How do followers of the “Prince of Peace” deal with a story that is soaked in bloodshed, violence, and war?
This is the kind of story that causes many thoughtful people to reject the Old Testament. People who are reading the Bible for the first time are sometimes shocked and often turned off by the sheer amount of bloodshed and violence in the Hebrew Scriptures and the way much of it is seemingly commanded by God.
In response, the first thing we can do is name it: There is a lot of violence in the Old Testament. God’s relationship with Israel was revealed in a world that operated on the assumption that might makes right and that a nation’s favor with God was confirmed by its military power. God’s covenant with Abraham was hammered out in a sin-broken, war-torn, politically conflicted, power-intoxicated world that was not all that different from the world in which we live.
The second thing we can do is remember that these stories were not the firsthand accounts of a CNN reporter on the scene. The Hebrew people told and retold these stories for generations after the events as a way of putting their history into the context of the covenant. As a result, they were not interested in answering a lot of the questions we are interested in asking. They were not historians doing academic research. They were cultural theologians who interpreted everything that happened in light of their covenant relationship with God.
Finally, as followers of Jesus, we can read these stories