Day 70. Judges 4-5

In our reading for today we see the pattern we alluded to yesterday, a pattern that continues throughout the Book of Judges. First the Israelites do "what is evil in the sight of the LORD" (4:1). As a result, the LORD allows the Canaanites to get the upper hand over them (4:2). The Israelites cry out to the LORD (4:3), who remembers his covenant and sends a judge to deliver them—this time a "prophetess" named Deborah (4:4).
At the beginning of our narrative, she is literally a judge, an arbitrator of disputes. "The Israelites came to her for judgment" (4:4) we are told. But the crisis calls her to a more active military role, and she summons Barak, who is a commander of the army of Israel, and calls him to action. Barak is from the tribe of Naphtali. (Some tribes seem to be engaged more actively than others in this effort—this time Israel does not present a united front—see 5:14-18.) Barak, recognizing her charismatic authority, refuses to go to war without Deborah (4:8), and she does indeed come with the army—a remarkable thing in itself for a woman in this period and place.
The LORD, the Divine Champion, does goes before the army of Israel, and, as Deborah has promised, the enemy army is defeated. Its general, Sisera, flees before a victorious Israel. But the glory of victory, as Deborah has predicted, goes not to the army or its captain Barak, but to a woman—a certain Jael "wife of Heber the Kenite." (These nomadic people were related to Israel by marriage—Moses' second wife belonged to the Kenite clan.)
Jael welcomes the fleeing and exhausted Sisera into her tent, and offers him traditional Bedouin hospitality (4:18-19). But when he falls asleep she murders him by driving a tent peg through his head (4:21).
We do not meet a lot of them, but the women of the Old Testament we do encounter have very little need of female empowerment—they are redoubtable in the own right. It is Jael who is the true hero of the song that Deborah sings in chapter 5, a song in which natural forces and cosmic powers fight on the side of Israel and its God to give them victory—"The stars fought from heaven, from their courses they fought against Sisera" (5:20-21). But it is the courage of women—Jael and Deborah herself—that the song celebrates. The drama of Sisera's assassination is celebrated in dramatic verse—"He sank, he fell, he lay still at her feet; at her feet he sank, he fell; where he sank, there he fell dead" (5:27).
The song ends with an affecting human picture of the mother of Sisera waiting in vain for her son's return and comforting herself with false hope (5:28-30). It is very remarkable literary work in itself, which we can readily imagine being sung or chanted for the evening's entertainment around a campfire.
We need to remember that the traditional material found in the books of Joshua and Judges was transmitted orally, as stories and songs, sometimes set to music, for a very long time—hundreds of years—before it was written down. Travelers carried these songs and stories with them from place to place and recited them from memory. We get a little picture of how this happened in chapter 5, where the song says—"Tell of it, you who ride on white donkeys, you who sit on rich carpets and you who walk on the way. To the sound of musicians at the watering places, there they repeat the triumphs of the LORD, the triumphs of his peasantry in Israel" (verses 10-11).
Having recued Israel, Deborah disappears from the stage, but her triumph secures the peace of Israel for forty years (5:31)—a generation's span. This peace, however, is not so long as the one won by Ehud (3:30). Things in the Israelite confederacy are not getting any better.