Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [74]
There are two accounts of Deborah’s leadership in Judges, one in prose, the second in poetry, again reflecting the combination of two separate accounts. In the first, Judges 4, Deborah leads the army and unites her people, but another woman, named Jael, also emerges a hero. When the defeated enemy general Sisera enters Jael’s tent, she greets him. But as the general is sleeping, Jael takes a tent stake and, “drove the tent peg into his temple, until it went down into the ground.”
This episode is followed by the “Song of Deborah” (Judges 5), a poetic return of the story, which is thought to be one of the oldest portions of the Hebrew Bible and is attributed to J, the oldest of the biblical authors described in Part I of this book. J is also the author whom some historians think might have been a woman, and they point to the story of Deborah, one of the Bible’s great heroines, as evidence that J was fond of writing about strong, bold females. In J’s poetic version of Deborah’s victory, the details change. When Sisera’s chariots attack, God sends a downpour that bogs down the chariots. This must have been a reassuringly familiar tale to the Israelites who remembered a story of how their God once sent six hundred Egyptian chariots to a watery grave. Escaping from the battle, Sisera went to Jael’s tent, where she shattered his skull with a mallet. The “Song of Deborah” has been dated to about 1100 BCE and may have written shortly after the event that inspired it took place. The prose version of Deborah’s conquest was probably written about 750 BCE.
If a father kills his daughter, does God mind?
The story of Deborah is followed by those of two more judges, Gideon and Jephthah. Gideon defeats the Midianite kings who had killed his brothers. He then refuses the offer of kingship.
After a time, the Israelites once more did what was evil—this time they not only bow to Canaanite gods but are said to worship the gods of Aram, Sidon, Moab, the Ammonites, and the Philistines. This time, a “mighty warrior” named Jephthah rises up. The illegitimate son of a prostitute, Jephthah was an outcast from his father’s family and became an outlaw, an ancient Hebrew “Robin Hood.” Hardly the image of a “judge.” Jephthah asks God for help, but makes a terrible vow: he will sacrifice whoever greets him if he is victorious. Of course, he wins his battle against the Ammonites and is then greeted by his own daughter, who must be sacrificed. The pious, virtuous girl—who is unnamed—agreeably goes to her death. And you thought old Abraham had wiped out the practice of human sacrifice. So why doesn’t God stay Jephthah’s hand? The Bible doesn’t tell us so. The only conclusion to be reached: Jephthah’s daughter was not as precious as Abraham’s son.
There is a brief follow-up to this story when Jephthah’s men fight with the tribesmen of Ephraim, another Israelite tribe, who apparently did not join Jephthah to help in his battle. Afterward, whenever an Ephraimite came to the river, Jephthah’s men would ask him to say “Shibboleth,” a word that means either “ear of corn” or “flood torrent.” But due to regional dialects, these men couldn’t pronounce the “sh” sound, and said “sibboleth” instead. According to Judges, forty-two thousand men had this speech deficiency and died at the Jordan. In The Harlot by the Side of the Road, Jonathan Kirsch recounts the story from World War II in which Dutch resistance fighters were able to cull out Nazi infiltrators who