Deborah was a prophetess and judge whom we could call the Joan of Arc of the Old Testament. She was a woman who, in an hour of extreme emergency and crisis, was used of God to rescue her entire nation.
The story of Deborah takes place during the period of the judges. This was a time of transition in Israel’s history. The nation was formed at the foot of Mount Sinai after God had brought the people out of bondage in Egypt, and He formed them into His covenant people and gave them His law. Then they wandered for years in the wilderness before they set about to conquer the promised land. The book of Joshua then records the conquest of the land of Canaan.
After the Israelites came into Canaan, they settled in territories by tribe according to their size. The form of government that they had at that time was not a democracy; it was not a monarchy. It was called amphictyony, with each tribe’s having its own leader. The tribes were organized like extended families, and they were linked together not by any sort of central government but as a kind of loose federation. The only time that there would be any kind of consolidation or unity of the tribes was during a crisis or national emergency.
Leadership over the whole group of tribes was what we call charismatic. This doesn’t mean that the leaders had a lot of charisma, that they were very charming or had great personalities. It also doesn’t mean what some people in the church mean, that they could speak in foreign tongues. Rather, it had to do with how the leaders were selected. The leaders of the nation were chosen by God, not by human ballot or by dynastic succession of kings. Whenever the need arose, God would endow an individual with His Holy Spirit and empower that person to be the leader for the season. During this period, we hear of Samson, whom God raised up and enabled with power from on high to defeat the Philistines. Gideon was a judge, Ehud was a judge, Othniel was a judge, and so on. We have the heroic individuals who were especially gifted. That’s what charismatic means—that they were gifted by God to lead the nation in a time of grave danger.
In the book of Judges, a theme arises again and again. A pattern develops: The people of Israel begin to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord; they begin to get enamored of the local pagan deities and thus depart from obedience to the law that God gave them at Sinai. When they do that which is evil in the sight of the Lord, He punishes them by giving them over to some pagan king who tyrannizes them. Then the people repent and cry out to God, begging Him for deliverance. In response to their cries, God raises up a judge, a deliverer. This judge drives out the pagan princes and Israel rejoices, and then the next refrain is this: “And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” So God again raises up the Philistines and the Midianites and others, and it just goes on and on and on.
As the book opens, this pattern is already established. It has happened two or three times already. By the time we get to the fourth chapter, we read this: “And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord after Ehud died” (Judg. 4:1). Ehud had delivered the people of Israel, but as soon as he died, the people went right back to their old ways.
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. 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. (Judg. 4:2–3)
Throughout the Old Testament, the Israelites repeatedly faced military opponents who had highly developed armor and military weaponry made of iron. The Philistines, for example, were noted for their ironworks. Here we see that the Canaanites had nine hundred iron chariots, while the Israelites had only rough-hewn wooden carts pulled by horses. They didn’t have the same kind of sophisticated weaponry, and they seemed totally impotent against the military power of Jabin, king of the Canaanites.
“Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. 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 to her for judgment” (Judg. 4:4–5). Earlier in Israel’s history, Moses led all the people in the wilderness and God made him the judge over the whole nation. If people had contractual disputes or domestic problems in the law courts of the day, they had leaders over tens and twenties and fifties and hundreds who would solve these little squabbles (Num. 11). But anything that was really significant and heavy came to Moses, who would hear the case, try the case, and make a decision. Moses was like the chief justice of a supreme court, only without the other justices. He sat by himself on the bench of the supreme court, and he made the final decisions. He was not the king; he was the judge. This is the role to which God now calls Deborah. At the time the story opens, the oppression at the hand of Jabin has been going on for twenty years.
To get a better understanding of what has been happening, it is helpful to turn to Judges 5. There we find the song of Deborah, wherein she poetically and prophetically lays out what has taken place during her reign as judge.
Deborah says something fascinating here. She notes that in the preceding twenty years, the main streets and highways of Israel have been deserted. The highways are controlled by Jabin, the king of the Canaanites, and so for all intents and purposes, commerce in Israel has ceased.
Deborah goes on to explain what else has happened: “When new gods were chosen, then war was in the gates” (Judg. 5:8a). The Jews have started embracing the pagan deities, and the Jews are so intimidated by the Canaanites that we read the following: “Was shield or spear to be seen among forty thousand in Israel?” (Judg. 5:8b). Deborah reports that she looked at forty thousand healthy, strong military men among the Jews, and she didn’t see a single spear or a single shield. None of them would lift a finger to resist the oppression and the terrorism of Sisera, the leader of the Canaanite army. Deborah asserts: “My heart goes out to the commanders of Israel who offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless the Lord” (Judg. 5:9). This is a reference to those who are willing to pitch in, and chief among those is a general named Barak.
Let’s look back at Judges 4:6–7:
She sent and summoned Barak the son of Abinoam from Kedesh-naphtali and said to him, “Has not the Lord, the God of Israel, commanded you, ‘Go, gather your men at Mount Tabor, taking 10,000 from the people of Naphtali and the people of Zebulun. And I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the river Kishon with his chariots and his troops, and I will give him into your hand’?”
Deborah goes to the chief military leader of the Israelite armies and tells him that she has a prophecy for him: that he is to go into battle against Sisera and that God will deliver him.
Barak responds: “If you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go” (Judges 4:8). This response appears to overturn the idea of chivalry, wherein the knight rides up on his horse and assures his fair maiden that she has nothing to worry about, that he will protect her. Instead, the male champion of Israel refuses to go unless the female leader of the nation goes with him. Deborah therefore replies: “I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman” (Judges 4:9a). The mighty man of valor will not have the honor of the victory; it will instead go to a woman because of his cowardice.
The song of Deborah in chapter 5 continues:
Tell of it, you who ride on white donkeys, you who sit on rich carpets and you who walk by the way. To the sound of musicians at the watering places, there they repeat the righteous triumphs of the Lord, the righteous triumphs of his villagers in Israel. Then down to the gates marched the people of the Lord. (Judges 5:10–11)
Now the song is becoming a song of celebration, a song of victory.
Awake, awake, Deborah! Awake, awake, break out in a song! Arise, Barak, lead away your captives, O son of Abinoam. Then down marched the remnant of the noble; the people of the Lord marched down for me against the mighty. From Ephraim their root they marched down into the valley, following you, Benjamin, with your kinsmen; from Machir marched down the commanders, and from Zebulun those who bear the lieutenant’s staff; the princes of Issachar came with Deborah, and Issachar faithful to Barak; into the valley they rushed at his heels. (Judges 5:12–15b).
Deborah is celebrating the fact that she has told Barak to make the sound of the trumpet, which is the signal to all the tribal leaders to rally to the cause of the nation.
This is their moment of liberation. Barak is going to raise the standard and march against Sisera. But remember, there is no standing army. There is no conscription. There is no central government. There are only tribal militias. The trumpet is blown in times of distress, and you just have to hope that volunteers show up. And the praise and the glory of this is that at the call of Deborah and then Barak, the rallying comes from Issachar, Naphtali, Zebulun, and so on.
Verse 19 tells us that “the kings came, they fought.” These are the kings of the Canaanites, now under the leadership of Jabin. “Then fought the kings of Canaan, at Taanach, by the waters of Megiddo” (Judges 5:19). This battle takes place at the Valley of Megiddo, also known as the plain of Jezreel, very close to Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus. This area was extremely important in the ancient world. Caravan traffic had to go through that plain to travel north and south through the region. Because of its commercial and strategic importance, many crucial battles took place there. Whoever controlled that pass, whoever controlled that plain, controlled the commerce going between Africa and Asia.
Because of the area’s place in the history of warfare, the book of Revelation uses its name to speak about the last cosmic battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good. The battle of Armageddon (Rev. 16:16) draws its name from the Hebrew Har-megiddo, the Valley of Megiddo. This is where the battle is to take place between Deborah and her general, Barak, on one side and the kings of Canaan on the other. Yet the kings of Canaan “got no spoils of silver” (Judg. 5:19). They rally and expect to utterly destroy the Israelites and to take the spoils of victory home with them, but instead “from heaven the stars fought, from their courses they fought against Sisera” (Judges 5:20).
The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly what happened in the battle, but it makes very clear that at that moment of confrontation, God miraculously brings deliverance to the Jews, probably through some kind of storm that flooded the river Kishon. That area features many wadis, or deep ravines, and when a sudden rainstorm comes up, these wadis fill up quickly and become conduits for raging flash floods. In the midst of such floods, chariots of iron don’t have a chance. The Israelites are waiting for their enemy, and God opens up the heavens miraculously and delivers the armies of Jabin into the hands of Barak.
Yet Sisera, the general for the Canaanites, escapes. Barak pursues him, but Sisera flees into some obscure place under treaty arrangements with the Canaanite kings. He comes to the tent of a woman named Jael. There he asks for refuge and hospitality according to the Semitic law. She goes out of her way to give him sanctuary, invites him into the tent, puts him down on the finest skins, covers him up, takes care of him, and gives him milk. She calms him down, she soothes him, and he falls sound asleep because he is exhausted from the battle. As soon as Sisera is asleep, Jael takes a hammer and one of the pegs used to keep the tent up and drives the peg through his head and into the ground. She literally nails his head to the ground. So in the celebration, who gets credit for vanquishing the mighty general Sisera? This woman, Jael. It is Deborah, who is the leader, and this woman Jael, who is not even a soldier, who kills the opposing general. With that, the prophecy of Deborah comes to pass.
Deborah was a woman who believed God, a woman who was faithful to God, and a woman who was willing to go up against nine hundred chariots of iron, up against a standing army, in spite of the fact that when she did what God told her to do and gave the call of alarm among her people, the leading tribes of the nation did not rally around her. The politicians avoided her, but she said, “We’re going, and God will bring us victory.” Under the impetus of the Spirit of God, Deborah led the people to freedom.
Ligonier Ministries