The Four Ladies of Judges- Part II - Deborah

The Four Ladies of the Book of Judges #2

Exploring the “Seed-Bearer” Theme

Deborah:  National Leader, Judge, Prophetess, Mother

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            An acquaintance on Twitter “favorite-d” a tweet submitted by one Gabrielle Wong who said, “The universe is not made up of tiny atoms.  It is made up of TINY STORIES.”  That does seem to me to be a very wonderful summary of how the Scriptures are God’s Word to man.  Is it a problem or the genius of the Scriptures that so much of God’s truth (if you take the Scriptures to be that, which I do) is told in little stories?  Little stories are so messy aren’t they?  A story is told and heard by its audience in a way that every hearer pulls the words into their own life experience and invariably no two hearers hear the same story because each of us filters the story into our own webs of experience, dreams, thoughts and agendas.  I suspect that is why, if our Scriptures are God’s Word, these tiny stories that appear in our Bibles in so many varied translations to be received by so many ears and understood by so many variant traditions seem as if they were always meant to be dropped like Alka-Seltzer into a glass; the story being dropped to plop-plop and fizz in a crowd of people who converge on the story and discuss and react differently to the story told; and then hopefully walk away feeling a sense of camaraderie with all who shared the story-telling with them.  If before we are about to decide that someone who differs slightly from us is a heretic, we should perhaps sit down with them and enjoy the story-telling once more with them before we act as their judge.  A moment with them in a shared pew may enable us to see them in a different manner than ever we have before.

            The tiny story of Deborah, found in chapters four and five of the Book of Judges, is a tiny story, ah but there is so much here to challenge all the positions of modern man and modern woman.  This is a story of a prophetess, a national leader, a judge, a warrior, everything a conservative patriarchal Christian wants his daughter never to admire or imagine herself becoming.  But just when the modern woman is about to own Deborah as someone just like her, Deborah goes and asks Barak to lead the army.  She seems to want a man to do what men are supposed to do.  She is perhaps not the sort of woman who wants to challenge male authority, but like so many women doing the quote “untraditional” thing, and doing it well we might add; in her druthers she’d sort of like to be in a traditional role.  She asks Barak to lead the army.  She will be content to play a diversionary role and he will lead the real army that crushes the enemy that has come down upon Israel to plunder, to rob, and to steal Israel’s milk and honey.  But Barak won’t take the lead.  He wants Deborah beside him.  Perhaps he is weak, or perhaps he understands implicitly that in this time and place she is the one meant to lead God’s people.  There is in another context a boy who refuses to wear the king’s armor because his armor has been tested and worn by the king and not by the boy.  So the boy refuses the armor and takes what he knows how to use, a sling (which by the way was a long range weapon far more suitable for a boy fighting a giant than was sword and armor).  Perhaps Barak failed his test, or perhaps he passed the humility test.  Deborah somehow seems above both our traditional and feminist roles, she is just Deborah, open to serving God in an untraditional manner from a heart of tradition.

            In Hebrew narratives the names of the characters are often written large into the fabric of the story.  Sisera, whose name I do not know the meaning of, has come down to Israel to conquer, to enslave, and to plunder.  Waiting for him is Deborah, whose name in Hebrew means “Bee”.  A bee produces honey.  The other prominent woman in these chapters is named Jael, which in Hebrew means “goat;” and goats produce milk.  So Sisera coming to plunder Israel, the land of milk and honey is met by the bee and the goat and meets his devastating destruction.

Deborah:  Hebrew meaning "Bee"

            But there is more to Deborah’s name than being a bee who produces honey to go with the goat’s milk.  Deborah is a name that if shortened with a vowel change becomes “Debar” which means the word.  So the prophetess is one who produces in her speaking the word of God.  In other passages the word play will tell how a prophet found the word of God to taste like honey in his mouth but to be bitter in his stomach.  Word plays and names and word plays sum up much of the Hebrew art of story-telling.

            Deborah shows us one more thing about how we relate to the stories we hear and the stories of our life.  When the story is blessed of God, like it was in Deborah’s life the response is not pride but praise.  The story is shown taking place in Judges 4 and then is brought to God in thankful praise and song in Judges 5, in what is described as “the song of Deborah.”  The early church understood this response to the story.  They spoke of truth as “Orthodoxy” which actually means not “right doctrine” but “right praise.”  We believe the story and offer in response “right praise.”

            But in the middle of this story and prominent in Deborah’s song is this story of how Deborah’s life changed everything for a generation of Israelites.  Israel struggled in darkness but then stood Deborah.  “The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.”  (Judges 5:7)  She felt her life identified as a mother, everything else was her other job.  This I say not as a commentary one way or another on how women should view home and career.  I think Deborah had another perspective.  She was an Old Testament believer.  She understood the promise that one was to come born of the seed of woman who would crush the serpent’s head and bring triumph to mankind. (Genesis 3:15)  That is why she saw herself as mother.  But her motherhood, in this connection, was about more than baby making.  It was a life lived in hope and expectation that one was to come who was to bring completion to humanity’s dreams, hopes and endeavors.  So in a troubled world where sin and evil often reigned one still planted a garden, built a home, and took time to sit under a tree to hear all the silly cases where this one had this against another and the other declared themselves to be in the right, so they came to Deborah as she sat and judged beneath the shade of a tree.  This was being a mother in Israel, bearing forth hope in God in the darkness, while redemption still awaited its entrance into the chosen woman’s womb.  Deborah was not the woman who would bring the life of this promised son into the world, but she carried in her life and word the embryo of hope being matured and maintained in the days of anticipation for that day when a young maiden would give birth to a son in a stall in yonder Bethlehem.  Deborah looked forward not in escapism but in building a life celebrating redemption until the day when that redeemer would take shape in a young maiden’s womb.  If we believe in a Redeemer who will bring completeness to the creation, we build him a room in our busy lives where we may ask him to remain as our honored guest.  Such was the life of Deborah, a mother in Israel.

            As a mother in Israel, Deborah shared with all the faithful women participation leading to the final event.  We make a great mistake if we imagine that Theotokos (bearing God) only took place in the life of Mary.  Mary was the chosen one, blessed above all women, but she was the representative of every faithful woman of God in the history of humankind, both those like Deborah born before Mary lived, and those like faithful ladies you and I know today who live after Mary gave birth to her son.  Each and every faithful woman’s faithfulness is part of the story of the one who gave birth to the final and only perfect patriarch, our Lord Jesus Christ.  Womanhood in the faith is no second-class estate, but the vessel through which our God chose to bring our Redeemer into the world.

            Finally, Deborah as a prophetess and as a mother in Israel focuses our attention on that promised son of the seed of woman who would redeem us from our sins.  What, if anything could we learn of who and what this promised son would be like from a prophetess-mother?  Perhaps we are meant to understand from the mystery of the prophetess-mother in Israel that the son to be born to the seed of woman was to be “the Word made flesh.”