Woman on Fire
Judges 4:1-10
July 17, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/a-F8eRbhhio
If you only know one story from the book of Judges, it might be the story of Samson who was the strongest man on earth, until his girlfriend Delilah stole his super-power by cutting his hair and turning him over to his enemies. Or you might know about Gideon. He’s the guy who wanted proof that God was really calling him to lead. So, he put a blanket out on the ground one night and asked God to make the blanket wet with dew, but the ground around it dry. God did that. But Gideon still wasn’t convinced, so the next night he put the blanket out and asked God to send dew on the ground all around, but leave the blanket dry. And God did that too.
The book of Judges is full of obscure stories like that. It also contains stories full of violence and trauma which is one reason there isn’t a lot of preaching from this book. Because we aren’t as familiar with this book, I’m going to remind us of the context.
This is the time after the people have left Egypt, after they have moved into the Canaan. This is a generation that didn’t know Moses or Joshua. The pattern of Judges is this:
The people do something evil, God abandons them into the hands of their enemies, they cry out for help, and God raises up a deliverer.[1] This cycle repeats several times throughout the book with things getting progressively worse, until, at the end there is complete moral chaos and civil war.
The Bible is in conversation with itself. What I mean is that some stories seem to contradict other stories, and to get a complete picture, we have to recognize that more than one point of view is represented. We often have the impression that the Israelites came into Canaan and annihilated everyone who was living there. It was a total conquest. They wiped out the original inhabitants and took over the Promised Land. We get that impression from the book of Joshua, which contains the story of the battle of Jericho. That’s the one where they marched around the city for seven days until the city walls collapsed and they took the city. If we only had the book of Joshua, we might think that every battle was like that. But Judges tells another story. Judges reports that many of the cities and territories supposedly captured in the time of Joshua are still in Canaanite hands.
It is beyond the scope of today’s sermon to focus on the attempted genocide or holy war portrayed in the conquest of Canaan. I am not going to defend a theology that justifies war in the name of God. But I note that these stories come from the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. If human beings in our time have not yet figured out that God hates violence in all its forms, then I cannot expect our ancient ancestors to have done so.
We enter the story at a time when one of the Canaanite kings has been harassing the people of Israel for twenty long years. The roads are empty for fear of enemy soldiers who take whatever they want. People who must travel do so fearfully and by cutting across the countryside. Normal life is disrupted. There are no market days, no trade between towns.
It is at this time that Deborah emerges. She is a judge, someone who brings justice by resolving conflicts and offering wisdom to people who seek her counsel. The text identifies her as a woman, but it doesn’t make a big deal of her gender. It seems rather matter-of-fact about it actually, as if it is not unexpected for a woman to play this role.
It says she is the wife or woman of Lappidoth. The Hebrew word for woman is the same as the word for wife. Lappidoth can be translated as flames or torches. That word is found two more times in the book of Judges where it is translated as torch. So she might be the wife of Lappidoth, Mr. Torch’s wife, but there is no other mention of a man by that name elsewhere in the Bible.[2] Lappidoth might be a place name. Or it could mean that Deborah is a woman of flames, a fiery woman. I like that one myself.
Deborah is a judge, but also a prophet, someone who can speak for God. In that role, she sends for Barak and tells him that God has heard the cries of the people and that God will empower him to defeat General Sisera. Barak’s name means Lightning, but apparently he needs Deborah, the fiery woman, to light a fire under him.[3] He says that he will go to battle, but only if Deborah goes with him. Maybe he is scared. Or maybe he trusts that Deborah embodies God’s presence so much that he can only go into battle if she goes too.
If he hesitates, it might be because of the superior technology of his enemy. The Canaanites were the more established, more powerful and richer army. This is just the beginning of the Iron Age. The Canaanites have 900 hundred iron chariots. The Israelites have none. Reading this in 2022, I cannot help but think of parallels with the situation in Ukraine, a smaller nation continually oppressed by a larger and technologically superior military power, and yet the war has continued for almost 5 months now.
Barak says, “I will only go if you go with me.” Deborah says “For sure I will go, but God will give General Sisera into the hand of a woman.” We might think she is speaking about herself. Barak and his ten thousand warriors prevail. They rout the army of Sisera, but Sisera himself escapes and hides in the tent of an ally. Or so he thinks. It turns out that a woman named Jael, whose tent it is, waits until he is asleep and then kills him. Jael and Deborah and Barak share the credit for the victory, but interestingly, the author of Judges says “on that day God subdued the King of Canaan.”
So what do we make of this story? Does it have anything to offer to people who live in a time like ours?
This text has a fascinating history of interpretation. Deborah has been held up as a Biblical defense for women’s rights to vote and to hold political office. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of American women felt called to preach the gospel. Many men and women argued for the validity of that call using Deborah as an example. In fact, there are liturgies going back to before the fourth century which name Miriam and Deborah and Anna in the prayers for the ordination of women deacons.
On the other hand, there is a consistent assertion that God only allowed women to prophesy in times when men were cowards or abandoning their proper role. These interpreters say that women only acted as they did to shame the men into stepping up. With a quick search of the internet, I found several contemporary sermons along those lines.
The fact that the issues faced by Deborah are contemporary is demonstrated in this example. In 2008, when Sarah Palin campaigned for the American vice-presidency, magazine and internet articles by Pentecostal and evangelical supporters valorized Palin as a Spirit-inspired leader who, like Deborah, was raised up by God to do battle on behalf of biblical values.
But not everyone agreed. Following the lines of those who argued that God had chosen Deborah as a reproach to the fearful, godless men of Israel who were not up to the task of leadership, Brian Abshire, a Reformed Presbyterian minister, argued that the candidacy of Sarah Palin was “living proof that the Republican party is gutless, effeminate and cannot find a godly man willing to take a stand on pivotal moral issues….”[4]
I don’t find anything in the text that suggests Deborah’s gender is out of the ordinary for leaders at her time. But if we want to press on that issue, we might notice two things. We might notice that the text says that God raises up a deliverer and that God subdues the king of the Canaanites. The implication being that God works through people who respond with faithfulness, and those people may not be the ones we expect. We also might notice that, in contrast to some of the male judges presented in the book, Deborah is portrayed as wise and totally trusting in God, without the kind of personal agendas that lead to the downfall of some.
God’s actions are largely portrayed through war and that is troubling, as I have already said. But through Deborah’s leadership, the land has rest for forty years. When the people return to the covenant with God, there is peace for forty years. The people are continually called back to the ways of God which bring peace and justice. It is when they abandon God’s ways that chaos and upheaval result. What we see in the pattern of judges is God’s continued mercy. God repeatedly forgives them as each generation seems to need to relearn the what the one before it did.
Finally, I would suggest that this story is particularly relevant in light of the ongoing violence suffered by women and girls across the world. Jacob Wright is professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University. In 2008, he won the Templeton Prize, the largest prize for first books in religion. In other words, he has strong credibility as a Biblical scholar. This is what he says about the book of Judges. The book “begins with a woman as a judge and after this woman’s reign as judge, her period of ruling, everything goes downward. And, when we look through the whole Book of Judges, the downward spiral is mapped out on how these guys, how Israel actually treats their women. Women are strong at the beginning and then they become the objects of violence at the end; and so they use women to show that in great periods of time, women were treated well, but also governed, were leaders of society and at the end, it goes down toward the masculinity, the typical chauvinistic type of attitude emerges and that goes hand in hand with an abuse of women. And when the biblical authors imagined how Israelite society could be depicted in a bad way, they show women being abused.”[5]
When the biblical authors imagined Israelite society depicted in a bad way, in direct disobedience and violation of the covenant, they show women being abused.
Those with ears, may we hear.
[1] Mark McEntire, The Internal Conversation of the Old Testament, (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2018), p. 100.
[2] Douglas Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us, (New York: HarperOne, 2012) p. 60
[3] J. Clinton McCann, Interpretation Commentary: Judges (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2003) p. 107
[4] Joy Schroder, Deborah’s Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford Unveristy Press, 2014) , p 220.
[5] https://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/video-gallery/g/gender-issues-judges-wright#