No King in Israel (9)

The fourth judge of Israel was a woman named Deborah. Yes, there was a female judge. Deborah was also a ‘prophetess’, a term the politically sensitive programmers of my word processor are desperate to render obsolete and refuse to dignify by acknowledging as legit English. I therefore refuse to stop typing it: it’s in my Bible, after all. Such is life in 2025.

Brace yourself for the inevitable if you dare to Google-search the combo of ‘Deborah’ and ‘judge’. Tanya Hendrix conjectures, “She was a warrior.” Christianity.com is confident being a judge and prophetess means Deborah “preached” and led “worship services”. The Jewish Women’s Archive hypothesizes, “Torah scholars would come to learn from her” and that she was “a worker at the temple”.

*Sigh*. Oh well, as Michael Buffer used to so memorably intone, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”

II. Twelve Judges in Chronological Order (continued)

4. Deborah (continued)

Judges 4:4-9 — A Reluctant General

“Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came up to her for judgment. She sent and summoned Barak the son of Abinoam from Kedesh-naphtali and said to him, ‘Has not the Lord, the God of Israel, commanded you, ‘Go, gather your men at Mount Tabor, taking 10,000 from the people of Naphtali and the people of Zebulun. And I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the river Kishon with his chariots and his troops, and I will give him into your hand’?’ Barak said to her, ‘If you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go.’ And she said, ‘I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.’ ”

Ten-Second Correctionfest

Ten seconds of misinformation correction. One: Deborah did not work in the temple, which did not then exist. Solomon erected the first temple in Israel 400 years later, miles away in Jerusalem.

Two: Deborah did not work in the tabernacle either, because the text locates her in the hills between Ramah and Bethel. That is where you would find her if you went looking. At that time, the tabernacle resided in Shiloh, some twenty kilometers northeast of Deborah’s judgment seat under a palm tree (see map to the right). It is certainly possible Deborah and her husband traveled there from time to time to offer sacrifices like other devout Israelites, but the promised centralization of Israelite worship had yet to occur. The Lord had yet to specify the location where he would put his name and make his habitation.

Three: The tabernacle was the primary place where priests offered sacrifices, but we have no evidence that worship services or preaching in the form with which we are familiar took place at all in those days, let alone that Deborah took part in these or led them.

More Revisionist History

Four: In the Old Testament, reading and explaining the Torah were priestly functions. There were no female priests in Israel. Not ever. A prophet (or prophetess) passed on new revelation from God to those who inquired of him (or her), and was occasionally sent by the Lord with messages for specific individuals. That was Deborah’s role. Some prophets wrote books of scripture. Deborah was not that sort, apparently. Other prophets (Jonah, for example) challenged entire nations through the public preaching of imminent judgment. Deborah was not that sort either. I picture her sitting under her palm, giving sound and just counsel to those in desperate need of it, rather like an unusually sagacious and well-respected grandma, except that she also resolved disputes and answered questions about how to apply the law.

Five: As for the idea that Deborah was a warrior and fought alongside Barak, we are moving into the realm of comic books rather than scripture. Women simply did not go to war in those days, period. Anyone who says they did is making stories up out of whole cloth, as the women who wrote these articles about Deborah seem to have done with the rest of their unsupported fantasies.

Women and Leadership

As for using Deborah to negate the plain teaching about the role of women in the New Testament, we need to understand that Judges is not some glorious utopian realization of God’s purposes for Israel, to be trotted out by feminists as precedent for anything they think the church ought to be doing today. Those three hundred-plus years were a chaotic mess largely characterized by periods of oppressive foreign rule, idolatry and evil behavior punctuated by the occasional few years of repentance and forgiveness, before lapsing back into disorder again.

We also need to understand that God had committed leadership in Israel to men. A female judge was an aberration, not a sign of God’s blessing or a role model for other women of the day. Isaiah would bemoan the state of his nation years later with these words: “My people — infants are their oppressors, and women rule over them.” The prophet was not giving his opinion but speaking the very words of God, who sighed over the condition of his people.

The State of the Nation

That Israelites in the north had to come to a woman to get God’s direction when they disagreed was evidence of the low state into which the nation had fallen. It was a sign of God’s judgment. Deborah did the job because the men around her were too unspiritual, undiscerning, incompetent or cowardly for God to use them. Again, this is evident from the text. We don’t need to make it up. Deborah calls Barak to inquire why he has not followed God’s instructions (“Has not the Lord commanded you?”). The question is rhetorical. Barak is plainly unwilling to obey God’s command without someone he trusts holding his hand. The situation is pathetic, and while Deborah agrees to accompany him, she warns him that the glory for the victory God intends to provide will go to a woman, and not to him. It’s a humiliating rebuke, and not a situation anyone today should be looking to duplicate.

Interestingly, the woman to whom the glory went was not Deborah. Far from being the pushy firebrand her fans want to make her, in the text Deborah is quite demure and maternal. She refers to herself not as a warrior but as “a mother in Israel”. When she sings in chapter 5, it’s not a solo but a duet. She was not out there making eloquent speeches to heads of state like Jephthah, disemboweling overweight kings like Ehud, or tearing up the Philistine countryside like Samson. I suspect she would happily have stayed home if there were anyone else available to do what she did. Instead, she became the first and only “Judge Mom”.

So then, Deborah actually does serve as a role model for the female believer, just not quite in the way her proponents would like her to. It’s safe to say she did not wear a chainmail bikini like Red Sonya.

Leaders of Men

Barak appears to have been an adequate leader of men when pressed into it — 10,000 men followed him into battle, after all — but he had no desire to stand out from the crowd or make command decisions. Of Deborah’s role in shaping Israel’s battle strategy, we know nothing at all, assuming she had one. Her role was to serve as Barak’s conscience and encourage him to do a job he didn’t want to do. So she said to him, “Up! For this is the day in which the Lord has given Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you?”

Barak probably needed the reminder desperately. He was in that moment picturing 900 iron chariots moving onto the battlefield, and thinking he’d like to beat feet right back to Kedesh-naphtali.

Judges 4:14-16 — An Unexpected Turn

“So Barak went down from Mount Tabor with 10,000 men following him. And the Lord routed Sisera and all his chariots and all his army before Barak by the edge of the sword. And Sisera got down from his chariot and fled away on foot. And Barak pursued the chariots and the army to Harosheth-hagoyim, and all the army of Sisera fell by the edge of the sword; not a man was left.”

The Lord used various methods to give Israel the victory over the period of the judges, from miracles to devices of greater subtlety. In this case, no obvious supernatural element was in play. Our writer tells us the Lord routed Sisera’s army, but he did it “by the edge of the sword”. In this instance, those hard-working 10,000 soldiers were the means by which the Lord got the job done. When the general of the opposing army gets out of his chariot and runs away on foot, victory is decisive. The applications make themselves: when the Lord wants something done, we ought to get to work.

In between verses 17 and 22, Sisera seeks safety in the tent of a man he considers an ally, only to get a spike through the temple from the man’s wife when he is foolish enough to fall asleep. So in displaying reluctance to obey the Lord’s word without question, Barak forfeited the opportunity to be the man of the hour. It was not just a woman, but probably a foreign woman, who got the glory that day, and Deborah’s prediction turned out to be spot-on.

Judges 4:23-24 — The Beginning of the End

“So on that day God subdued Jabin the king of Canaan before the people of Israel. And the hand of the people of Israel pressed harder and harder against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they destroyed Jabin king of Canaan.”

This was only the first of many battles with the king of Hazor, the remainder of which took place much closer to his home base and in the absence of his famous general. The final conquest of Hazor appears to have taken some time to accomplish, and we do not know how much involvement Deborah had in that process. The song of victory she sang with Barak takes up almost all the next chapter, but it commemorates only this great initial victory over Sisera.

This is also the last we hear of the city of Hazor until Solomon rebuilt it as an Israelite possession in 1 Kings 9, after which, like the rest of the Israelite north, it was eventually captured by the king of Assyria hundreds of years later.