Wednesday Bible Study: Picking through Judges Part 3

 

The story in Judges 4-5 is so complex and full of info, that a) I'm going to split this into two posts, and b) it is best told by working through chapter five FIRST (which is Deborah's victory song) rather than 4 (which is the prose account).  So let's dig in...

Right off the bat, Deborah gives us a sense that this was no ordinary battle between early Iron Age peoples...

Jdg 5:3  "Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; to the LORD I will sing; I will make melody to the LORD, the God of Israel.
Jdg 5:4  "LORD, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the region of Edom, the earth trembled and the heavens dropped, yes, the clouds dropped water.
Jdg 5:5  The mountains quaked before the LORD, even Sinai before the LORD, the God of Israel.

As we will find out, this isn't just poetic license.  But now, she goes back to set the stage.  And we will too, by briefly hopping back to chapter 4:

Jdg 4:1  And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD after Ehud died.
Jdg 4:2  And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. The commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth-hagoyim.
Jdg 4:3  Then the people of Israel cried out to the LORD for help, for he had 900 chariots of iron and he oppressed the people of Israel cruelly for twenty years.
Jdg 4:4  Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time.
Jdg 4:5  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.

So here we have the reason, and a bit about the main characters.  But it's a bit antiseptic, and Deborah steps just a bit farther back...

Jdg 5:6  "In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were abandoned, and travelers kept to the byways.
Jdg 5:7  The villagers ceased in Israel; they ceased to be until I arose; I, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel.

With these two verses, we have two more characters, but also a look at how life had devolved... it was no longer possible to travel the main roads of Israel due to the lawless who lie in wait.  Even the mighty deeds of Shamgar, who we studied last time, and, as we recall, was NOT an "official judge", didn't change that.  Nor did Jael- and here's your first curiosity.  Those who know the whole story know what Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite (and thus a relative of Othniel) WILL do at the end of the tale; but this involves some unknown something she had accomplished or was doing PRIOR to this tale.  What that is, we never learn; but it seems likely that it was considered when Deborah gave her this accolade:

Jdg 5:24  "Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent-dwelling women most blessed.

Whatever she did, it was most noteworthy; but it didn't break the power of the highwaymen as Deborah did.  And what she did, she didn't do as a warrior; she did it as a MOTHER.  The verses from for tell us she sat beneath a tree between Bethel (the 'House of God') and Ramah (whose name indicates an idol's high place).  But it wasn't just a tree, and it wasn't called the "tree of Deborah" because of her.  Witness:

Gen 35:8  And Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel. So he called its name Allon-bacuth.

Deborah, the nurse of Rebekah, lived on the order of 500 years before; the name given the tree means "Oak of Weeping".  And as this woman nursed Rebakah's child Jacob (later named by God 'Israel'), this future Deborah became again the nurse of Israel.  So now, you have a better sense of what kind of woman our Deborah was.  The next character that the song brings us is our co-hero, Barak:

Jdg 5:12  "Awake, awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, break out in a song! Arise, Barak, lead away your captives, O son of Abinoam.

Now Deborah means 'honeybee'- she produces sweetness, but has a sting.  Likewise Barak, who appears nowhere else in the Bible but this story, has what will become an ironic name- it means 'lightning'.  Deborah is also a prophet, and God calls on her to call on this Barak to lead the people.  Here we need to look at a little geography, the kind that helps confirm Deborah's song.  Deborah was based well south of Jerusalem, on the fringes of the desert.  Barak was from Kedesh-naphtali, which was near the south shore of the Sea of Galilee.  And the tribes he was called to gather, Zebulon and Napthali, were north yet, among those heavily affected by Jabin's cruel rule.  But now, who was Jabin, and why did his captain, Sisera live away from him, and where did they get the 900 chariots?

Step by step:  These chariots were "iron plated", not MADE of iron.  They are described as "lighter than Egyptian chariots", but still heavier than the local norm.  And they were exclusively driven by nobles, who had to maintain them.  So Jabin is what later years would call a 'king of kings'- the most powerful leader of a group of Canaanite city-states, which was how they rolled back then.  The chariots themselves came from a group of invaders, which your Egyptian history books name the Hyksos, or Sea-Peoples.  The Philistines were also related to these, and not much is historically known about them, other than they dominated Egypt and Palestine for a time,  may have been related to the Minoans who had to leave home in the wake of the Thera eruption (note: MAY), and Sisera was likely one of them.  Linguists believe that Sisera was similar to another name, Sassari, and that name, as the Sea People often did, came from a place name which they have found in ancient Sardinia.  And his hq was in a place whose name means, "carvings of the Gentiles".  So we have a Canaanite 'Great King', his bought and paid for Hyksos general (possibly a mercenary), and 900 chariots, all of which testifies to Jabin's power being from his wealth, which we also can figure came from the fact that his city Hazor dominates a trade route that ran from the cities of Mesopotamia to Egypt.

One last thing I want to hit this round- there are a list of tribes in the song who stood in the battle, and a list of those who dishonorably did not.  Barak managed to gathered, as I mentioned, two of the tribes most severely afflicted, Zebulun and Naphtali, and they bore the brunt of the fighting...

Jdg 5:18  Zebulun is a people who risked their lives to the death; Naphtali, too, on the heights of the field.

But also Deborah brought from her area elements of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Issachar.  However, she had no good words for three tribes:  Reuben, who dwelt to her east and apparently just kept to their fields and 'thought about it'...

Jdg 5:16  Why did you sit still among the sheepfolds, to hear the whistling for the flocks? Among the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart.

Likewise she bashed two tribes who dwelt against the Mediterranean- Asher to the north, and well within Jabin's power, and Dan, closer to herself:

Jdg 5:17  Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why did he stay with the ships? Asher sat still at the coast of the sea, staying by his landings.

This rather tells me that commercial reasons caused these two to turn a blind eye to their non-maritime brothers.  This betrayal would not bode well for them in the future;  But there is a betrayal even greater coming up, and it's complex story- and the rest of this one (I hope), we'll get to next week.