Jeremy Duncan: So here's the thing. I have no interest in celebrating the violence in this story. I refuse to hold JL up as a hero to emulate. Please don't follow her way. But I do see the movement here in the text that makes possible more steps somewhere down the line.
We are picking up in a series that we started last Sunday. It's called The Last of Them. And in this series, we are working our way toward the story of Samuel who was the last of the judges in Israel. And we're going to spend a couple weeks here in the book of Judges, and then we'll spend the majority of the series in the book of first Samuel. Today, though, we're going to talk about the judge Deborah.
Next week will be Samson, and then we will be on to our boy Sam. But last week, we started this series without even really getting into the text at all. We just spent all of our time setting context. And that's important because as I said last week, our goal in this series is not to search out a middle ground between the judges of Israel and the way of Jesus. Our goal as Christians who follow the way of Jesus is to look back and try to understand the story of Judges through the lens of Jesus.
Trusting that the story was always going somewhere, and then doing the work to look for the trajectory throughout the Hebrew Scriptures violence of these conquest narratives, and how we make sense of them as Christians. We even talked about different ways that these violent narratives have been understood in the Christian tradition. For example, some people have argued, well, if God commanded it, then you don't get to question it. If God does it, it's automatically okay. And personally, I think that's, like, it's insufficient.
If Jesus is our final full revelation of the divine, and we know that God is willing to die for what is good rather than kill to get there, I think we need to reevaluate these stories in light of that. And some people will argue, well, you don't even know good from evil. So who are you to judge? And even though there is truth to that, definitely, we still see in Jesus' teachings how he appeals to our sense of good as a way that we can come to understand God. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
And if you, even though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, then how much more will your father in heaven be gracious to you? And, the whole argument here is built on this idea that you have an innate ability to know what is good. Be kind and gracious to those you love even though you fall short of that love all the time. Your imperfect love can still lead you to trusting the immeasurable goodness of God. In fact, you know love when you see it even though you miss the mark all the time.
So no, you don't just have to ignore your instincts when you come across violence even in scriptures. It's okay. In fact, I would argue it's necessary that you wrestle with it and question it. Others have argued, well, the Canaanites deserved it. They were so uniquely evil that God had to wipe them out.
But I don't think that really gets us all the way home either. Because, yes, Jesus will absolutely talk about the consequences of our sin. He will describe that as destruction even. But if you pay attention to Jesus, when He says things like Matthew 714, the wide road leads to destruction, you'll notice that he ascribes that destruction not to God, but to the consequence of our sin and our actions. The word there is apoleia in Greek, and it literally means ruins, or waste, or the destruction that we cause in the world.
God is trying to save us from the destruction we bring on ourselves when we follow that wide road, not trying to visit more ruin on top of us. And yes, it may be that our evil leads to conflict, and our conflict leads to war, and wars absolutely lead to destruction. But that is not ever because God wants this for any of us, including Canaanites. In fact, that's exactly what God is desperately trying to save us from. So that led us then to looking at these narratives through their archeological context.
And what we find there is that a lot of these hyperbolic proclamations of victory recorded from both sides, by the way, are not objective. They are, for lack of a better term, propagandistic. And we know that from the testimony of scripture itself, because there are all kinds of examples where we are told that one of these neighboring nations is utterly wiped out by Israel, only to find a couple of books later, or sometimes even chapters later, that, well, they're still around. In fact, the entire narrative that drives these conquest stories, this idea that the Hebrew people cannot be contaminated by their neighbors, is eventually overruled by the more dominant theme of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is precisely the welcome of the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow into Israel. The theme that will eventually expand to include the Gentiles and even all of God's children through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
So all of this puts us in a unique place as Christians looking back and reading these stories in the light of Christ. Seeing the God, searching out the God who was on the side of this terrified little fledgling nation of former slaves who are surrounded by much more powerful foes, the God who's always on the side of the underdog, and yet the God who always intends even this story to lead slowly toward more grace for the world. So that's our context. That's what we're searching for, and today we get Deborah. But first, let's pray.
God of grace, who has been with us, patient, at every step along the human story, calling us forward, timid by fearful step, trusting that the path we walk can bring us all the way back to you. In these moments where we reckon with the violence of our past. Both in our shared story of scripture, but also in our personal journeys, might we slowly learn to look back on it all through the light of Christ, Christ who saved us, Christ who is saving us, Christ who is teaching us how to make peace in the world even today. Might our mistakes become lessons for our future. Might our shameful moments illuminate your grace extended to us.
Might even our missteps and wandering paths slowly come to be seen as part of the long way round to you. In fact, might the crooked become straight and the violent become peaceful, might we slowly begin to look more and more like the image of your son with every step we take. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Alright.
Today it's Deborah, and there are 2 stories of Judges that we're gonna look at here before we move on to Samuel, who was the last of them. But today, we need to cover son of who, the major players, the big twist ending, and where the story points us now. But we've chosen 2 judges here to ground ourselves in this era, precisely because each of them are unique among the 12 named in the book, but also because Deborah and Samson are 2 of the longest and most detailed stories in the book to study. For example, this is how the story of Deborah is introduced. This is Judges 3, verse 31.
After Ehud came Shamgar son of Anath, who struck down 600 Philistines with an ox goad. He too saved Israel, But again, the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Now, that sets up the stage for Deborah who's going to emerge. But first, I want you to notice here, Shamgar, son of Anath, he is one of the 12 judges of Israel. And yet, that right there is the extent of his story in the book of Judges.
Tough to write a sermon about him. He struck down 600 Philistines with an ox code. He too saved Israel the end. That's like the Biblical equivalent of asking my son how school was today, frequently. I pick him up from school at the end of the day, and I ask what happened.
He's like, yeah, nothing really. And then 5 minutes later, I check my email and find an email from his teacher explaining how they went on a field trip, and they learned how windmills work. And there's a photo of him attached holding a baby duck. And I'm like, dude, that was 10 times better than my day. I don't know how you get away with meh.
Nothing really. Shamgar, though, gets essentially that treatment in scripture. Oh, by the way, he was a judge. He saved Israel too. Moving on.
But I do want to talk about Shamgar here just for a second before we get to Deborah, because I think he actually might be part of this setup here. See, Shamgar, son of Anath, is a real mystery to us. Anath was a Canaanite war goddess. In fact, this precise phrase, personal name, son of Anath, has been found on a whole bunch of bronze age arrowheads that were found in the region. And that tells us that there was an entire warrior class of Canaanites that saw Anath as their patron deity of war.
Even weirder is that we have uncovered clay tablets that have poems and stories about Anath. She was one of 3 major Canaanite gods that we actually know quite a bit about. But, she was not a fertility god. As you might expect of a female deity in the Bronze Age, she was very specifically the warrior goddess with a following of warriors in Canaan. So the question is, what is Shamgar, son of Anav, doing here in the book of Judges, saving Israel?
Well, there's a lot of speculation. Fair warning, though. We're probably not going to settle it all today. But some of it settles on His foes, the Philistines. Because the Philistines, like the Hebrews, were not Canaanites.
They were yet another group. This time, people from the northern Aegean Sea who came and settled in Canaan during the late bronze age. And they found themselves in conflict with the Hebrews, but also with many of the other surrounding Canaanite nations. So it's very possible that Shamgar, as his name suggests, was actually just a Canaanite warrior who intervened in a conflict between the Hebrews and the Philistines, saving Israel, thus earning His place in their lore. Now, there's other explanations.
Some have suggested that the phrase Ben Anath or son of Anath came to describe a place, and that's where Shamgar was from, maybe. Others have suggested that over time, the phrase son of Anaf came to be something more like a generic description of a warrior like figure. Sort of like Jesus calling James and John the sons of thunder in the New Testament. It's just a nickname. But to be honest, I find those explanations just maybe a little bit too convenient.
The idea that you have a Hebrew leader adopting the name of a Canaanite goddess just because he thinks it sounds cool feels maybe a little bit stretched, particularly when the text feels no compulsion to give Shamgar any Hebrew tribe or any Hebrew background at all. It doesn't say anything about him that way. So the question then is, is it possible that here, even within the conquest of Canaan, the Hebrews themselves have this hint at an expansion of the story. Perhaps those we think of as our enemies could become our saviors. Perhaps what makes someone a friend or an enemy of God is not their ethnic or even ideological background, but their actions to protect the vulnerable against the more powerful.
Is it possible that the book of Judges itself names a Canaanite as the savior of Israel in the midst of the conquest of Canaan? Personally, I think that's very possible. I think that's the most likely explanation. But I also don't think it's a coincidence that this brief, but perhaps poignant story is inserted directly before the emergence of Deborah. In fact, the only other mention of Shamgar in the Bible will come a couple chapters later in a song that Deborah sings about her victory.
And I wonder if the writer who compiled these stories and wrote this book wondered to themselves, well, if the Israelites could believe that a Canaanite could save them, maybe they could come to believe that a woman could as well. Maybe these stories are meant to go together to expand the story even just a little bit. Because this is, like obviously the most striking figure about Deborah. Right? Not only is she the only woman who judges Israel, she is the only woman in the Hebrew scriptures who rules over Israel.
Let's dive into her story a bit. This is chapter 4 of verse 2. The Lord sold them into the hands of Jabin, king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. Sisera, the commander of his army, was based in Harosheth, Hegoi'im. Take some notes.
There'll be a test on all these names at the end, so keep them straight. Because Sisera had 900 chariots fitted with iron and had cruelly oppressed the Israelites for 20 years. So they cried out to the Lord for help. Now Deborah, a prophet, the wife of Laboedath, was leading Israel at the time. And she held court under the palm of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim.
And the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided. She sent for Barak, son of Abinoam, from Kadesh in Naphtali and said to him, the Lord, the God of Israel commands you. Take with you your 10000 men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead them to the mount of Tabor. I will lead Sisera, the commander of Jabin's army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands. All right.
Lots going on here already. So let's pause and gather up a few ideas before things get really heated here. And first of all, let's gather up the characters. We have Jabin. We have Sisera.
We have Deborah. We have Barak. In a moment, we'll meet JL. But for now, these are our major players. And we'll start with Jabin.
Here, he is introduced as the king of Canaan, and that is absolutely not true. It's not true because there was no king in Canaan. In fact, there were a whole bunch of different kings ruling various city states throughout Canaan. And actually, the writer knows this full well, because later, Jabin will be described as the king of Hazor. Now, Hazor was a very specific city that Jabin ruled over.
It was a very important major city in Canaan, and we know some of the history of it. But what this tells us is that the writer is doing something here by introducing Jabin in such a like grandiose way. He's trying to position Jabin as representative of all of these collective forces that are opposing Israel. But also in doing that, he's setting Deborah up as the leader who saves them from these really outsized threats. Jabin's introduction already serves to elevate Deborah over previous judges who rise up to deal with smaller, more specific threats.
Interesting. Next, we have Sisera, the commander of the army of Jabin. And Sisera ends up being the real big bad in the story. But what's interesting about him is that his name is not Semitic. In fact, his name positions him as one of those sea peoples from the north, just like the Philistines, which lines up with where he sets himself up in Harosheth Hagoim.
Now, we don't know where that was. We don't know much about it. But we do know what it means. It meant, 'Herosheth among the nations.' And again, that gives us some indication that Sisera is an immigrant to this area who has formed an alliance with Jabin. Sisera is like essentially a mercenary, a mercenary who has a private army of 900 chariots.
And in the bronze age, chariots are all the rage. They are top end military equipment, and they are very uniquely well suited for fighting here in the plains of Jezreel. Now, if the plains of Jezreel sounds a little familiar, that is because we just talked about this a few weeks ago. This is the valley of Hinnom, also known as Gehenna, or more popularly, hell. This is that valley where Sisera and his 900 chariots battled Deborah.
This is the very specific site of so much fighting and bloodshed throughout the history of Israel that centuries later Jesus will use this as a metaphor for what sin does to us. This is that. Okay. Now we get to Deborah. She's our judge in the story, but as hinted toward earlier, she's also a lot more than that.
Because right off the bat, you might have noticed this, she's introduced not only as a judge, but as a prophet. And well, you and I probably know the major and the minor prophets from later in the Hebrew story. Those prophets wrote mainly in the period of Babylonian and Assyrian conquest, centuries later. There's also a very small handful of people identified as prophets before that. Specifically, there was Moses.
There was his brother Aaron. And there was his sister Miriam. Now, there's talk of prophets in Torah. A guy named King Abimelech even describes Abraham as a prophet at one point. But you can count on one hand the number of named people who receive this title before Deborah.
And not only that, she rules over Israel even before any kind of crisis breaks out in Israel. Now interestingly, the NIV says that she leads Israel at the time. That's totally fair. That is, of course, exactly what she is doing. But the word there is shafat.
That is exactly the same word that is used to describe all the other judges who are always translated as judges in the book of judges. Now, I'm not sure why the translators here have decided to use a different word to describe the only female judge in the book, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume that it's because her story starts with her as a peacetime judge, a peacetime ruler. Still, that's not our only important piece here, because after that, we read that Deborah holds court under the palm of Deborah. That's right. She has a tree named after her, kind of a big deal.
And we read that she settles disputes within the nation. Now here, the word is mishpat. And that's another word for judge. But this time, it specifically means that she is the law in the nation. This is a word.
It's very similar to shawfat, but it refers specifically to judgment in the legal sense, not just as a ruler. She's a judge in that way as well. So Deborah is the prophet slash ruler slash judge slash law in Israel. There is no one else in this area, including Samuel, that comes close to having this kind of authority that she seems to wield here. And what's really interesting to me is that she does that without directly controlling the military.
Now, because of that, some people have made the argument that, well look, Deborah is important. Sure. But Barack is the one who goes to war. Therefore, Barack is actually the judge in the story. He's the one whose name should be on the list of the 12.
But actually, that goes specifically against the title, Sheffat, which is given to all of the judges, including Deborah here in the text. More importantly, though, I think it's a misreading, a complete misreading of this authority Deborah holds in Israel. I'm going to argue quite strongly, in fact, that the fact that Deborah is not a military leader who uses military power to hold onto her position and yet is still seen as the one who speaks on behalf of God, who decides in legal disputes, who rules over the nation only serves to further elevate the like wild esteem that this woman seems to have. Do not mess with Deborah in Israel. Okay.
That leaves us with Barak. Now, Barak is the military leader. His name means lightning, which is a good name for a military leader, particularly when the second of the big three Canaanite gods was the storm god, Baal, who is often depicted as lightning. Now, Barak is a Hebrew name. There's no indication that he may have been Canaanite, like we were considering with Shamgar.
It's his name lightning though, and his position as leading the military paints him in a striking opposition to Canaanite foes that surround the nation. Just interesting. Now, by the way, if you're interested, the Canaanites had a very large pantheon, but the big three were Anath, the goddess of war, Ba'al, the god of storm, and El, which was just the generic Semitic term for god who was their creator deity. The Hebrews had a specific that word that word being used for their God as well. All right.
There's our characters. Jabin the king, Sisera the commander, Deborah the judge, and Barak the muscle. So what happens? Well, Deborah realizes that Jabin, through Sisera, is oppressing her people. And she asks Barak to go to war.
And picking up in verse 8, we read that Barak said to her, If you go with me, I'll go. But if you don't, I'm out. So maybe this guy's not so tough after all. But Deborah responds, certainly, I will go with you. But because of the course you are taking, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.' So Deborah went with Barak to Kadesh.
Now, the writer here is setting up the big twist. The beauty of the story here is that the twist is going to be much bigger than we expect at this point. Because Baroc, with Deborah behind him, does attack Sisera. And surprise, he is able to defeat Sisera's chariots and push him back. But Sisera, for all of his bravado, leaves his army behind, and he flees on foot.
And he tries to take refuge in the tent of a man named Hebner, who also has an alliance with Jabin. So Sisera gets there and Hebra's wife, Jael, comes out to greet him. She knows who he is. So she says, Come inside. I'll keep you safe.
She gets him some milk. She puts him to bed. She tucks him in under the blanket. All of there is actually in the text. And Sisera, about to slumber off, says, look.
If anyone comes by, tell them you haven't seen me. And he falls asleep, Except verse 21, J. L. Hebner's wife picked up a tent peg and a hammer, and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep. Exhausted, she drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died.
Just then, Barak came in, in pursuit of Sisera. And Jael went out to meet him. Come, she said. I will show you the man you're looking for. So he went in with her.
And there lay Sisera with a tent peg through His head, dead. On that day, God subdued Jabin, king of Canaan before the Israelites. And the hand of the Israelite pressed harder and harder against Jabin, the king of Canaan, until eventually he was destroyed as well. So what do we do with all of that? We've got wars and chariots, tent pegs and temples.
Fighting pressed harder and harder. And the king of Canaan utterly destroyed. Even all of chapter 5 is Deborah singing a song about this bloody victory. She sings this. Most blessed of woman, BJL.
Most blessed of tent dwelling women. He asked her water. She gave Him milk in a bowl fit for nobles. She reached her left hand for the tent peg, her right for the workman's hammer. She struck Sisera, crushed his head.
She shattered and pierced his skull. How's that for a jaunty little tune? So here's the thing. I have no interest in celebrating the violence in this story. I refuse to hold JL up as a hero to emulate.
Please don't follow her way. But I do see the movement here in the text that makes possible more steps somewhere down the line. There's the hint of a Canaanite savior in the introduction to Deborah. There's the very unexpected leadership of Deborah herself. The authority that's given to her rather than demanded by her.
There's the military commander named for lightning who can't see the way out of this oppression without the foresight of his leader. And then there's the victory, where we have been led to expect it will be Deborah who strikes the crushing blow. That's certainly what the author is leading to. In fact, you expect her to be as bloody and violent as all the other judges in the story. And yet instead, it's another woman, a Kenite woman, a foreigner who recognizes the evil of Sisera and acts decisively to end it.
Like even here, eventually. In the middle of conquest, is it possible that we might be asked to pause long enough to recognize that the very wide brush we often paint our enemy with is incomplete. And sometimes our salvation comes precisely from those we name as foes, Canaanite heroes like Shamgar, foreign women like JL, leaders like Deborah who are happy to give the credit to someone else. Now, does the story get all the way there? No.
Do we land at the peace of Christ today? Okay, no. You have heard it said, hate your enemy, love your neighbor, but I tell you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute And yet, even here in the conquest of Canaan, we're seeing the seeds of a story fall to the ground and hopefully, slowly begin to take root in the narrative. Maybe leadership in our lives can come from unexpected corners of our lives. Maybe salvation in our lives can come from outside the walls that we've built.
Maybe one day, even this story can actually lead us to the one who might give his life away rather than grasp at the power to defend it at all cost. Because all the way along, you and I are being asked to consider possibilities that fall outside of our carefully manicured boundaries. And even here in the story, so are the Hebrew people. And one day, maybe even this gruesome tale could be seen as part of the journey that brings us all the way back to peace. Like a mustard seed, it falls to the ground and slowly creeps its way through all of our lives, expanding into something we never saw coming.
Let's pray. God of peace, in these stories that highlight for us the violence of our human story and sometimes even our personal stories. Would we find the imagination to look back through everything that we see in you and the steps that you took through this world, the ways that you embraced the people around you, the ways that you called us to expand our imagination of what grace and peace could look like. And then when we look back in that light, right? We see the seeds being planted even in the stories that make us cringe and recognize your grace step by step, moving the story forward into something better.
May that trajectory be chased through scripture all the way to you and eventually into our lives so that we might come to see where you are calling us tomorrow into more grace and more peace, into the recognition of the people around us who we might have once have thought as an enemy, but could become our friend and perhaps even our Savior. In that, might we follow your path all the way back to the heart of God. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Hey, Jeremy here.
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