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DEBORAH _ The Woman Who Led 10_000 Men Into War When No Man Would · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: For twenty years, nine hundred chariots owned every road in
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Speaker 1: northern Israel. Anything on wheels ruled the valleys, and an
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Speaker 1: entire generation grew up taking back paths through the hills
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Speaker 1: to avoid them. Then a woman sitting under a palm
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Speaker 1: tree sent for the commander of Israel's army a hundred
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Speaker 1: miles north and told him to march. He came, and
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Speaker 1: then he told her he would not go unless she
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Speaker 1: came with him. This is the story of what happened
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Speaker 1: when she did. It ends with a prophecy that everyone
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Speaker 1: in it misunderstood, including the man it was spoken to.
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Speaker 1: To understand why God raised Deborah, you have to see
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Speaker 1: what he had already been doing, because she is not
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Speaker 1: an exception to the pattern. She is where the pattern
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Speaker 1: was going. After Joshua died, Israel fell into a loop
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Speaker 1: that would run for roughly three centuries. The people turned
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Speaker 1: away from the God who brought them out of Egypt.
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Speaker 1: A neighboring power took the land. They suffered, and eventually
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Speaker 1: they cried out. God raised a deliverer. The deliverer won.
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Speaker 1: The land had peace. And then the deliverer died, and
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Speaker 1: the whole thing began again, again and again for 300 years.
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Speaker 1: But look at who God kept choosing. The first was Othniel,
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Speaker 1: a warrior from Judah. the obvious pick, a strong man
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Speaker 1: from a strong tribe. The second was Ehud, and the
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Speaker 1: text goes out of its way to tell you he
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Speaker 1: was left-handed, which in that world was treated as a defect,
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Speaker 1: not an advantage. Ehud used it. He strapped a short
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Speaker 1: blade to his right thigh, the side no guard would
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Speaker 1: ever check, walked into the private chamber of the king
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Speaker 1: of Moab, and killed him there. The third was Shamgar.
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Speaker 1: He gets one verse. Judges chapter 3 verse 31. He
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Speaker 1: struck down 600 Philistines with an ox goad, not a sword,
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Speaker 1: not a spear, a long sharpened stick used to drive cattle,
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Speaker 1: a farming tool. And the text says he saved Israel.
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Speaker 1: Do you see the shape of it? A soldier. Then
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Speaker 1: a man the world considered defective. Then a farmer with
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Speaker 1: a stick. Every deliverer less impressive than the last. By
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Speaker 1: every standard the ancient world measured strength by. And the
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Speaker 1: next name in that sequence is a woman sitting under
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Speaker 1: a tree. Now, the enemy. The book of Judges names
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Speaker 1: him twice over. Jabin was king of Canaan, ruling from Hazor.
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Speaker 1: That name matters. Hazor was not a village with a chief.
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Speaker 1: It was one of the largest fortified cities in the region,
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Speaker 1: with walls, palaces, and the kind of footprint that takes
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Speaker 1: a state to build. This was a genuine power. But
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Speaker 1: Jabin's weapon was not his city. It was his general. Sisera,
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Speaker 1: based at a place called Harosheth Hagoyim, and Sisera commanded
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Speaker 1: 900 chariots. Let us be precise about what that means.
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Speaker 1: because it is the whole military problem of this story.
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Speaker 1: The Hebrew calls them chariots of iron. That almost certainly
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Speaker 1: does not mean vehicles made of solid iron. The weight
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Speaker 1: would have been impossible for horses to pull at speed.
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Speaker 1: It means chariots fitted with iron, rims, axle sheathing, plating
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Speaker 1: on the frame, iron where the stress was. And that
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Speaker 1: detail matters later, so hold it. A chariot in this
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Speaker 1: period was a light, two-wheeled platform pulled by a team,
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Speaker 1: carrying a driver and a fighting man. On flat ground,
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Speaker 1: it was the fastest thing in the world. It could
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Speaker 1: close on a formation of men on foot, strike, and
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Speaker 1: be gone before anyone could reach it. It could break
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Speaker 1: a line simply by threatening to run through it. Now,
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Speaker 1: here is the part that gets misreported constantly, and this
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Speaker 1: channel is not going to misreport it, Israel had swords.
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Speaker 1: Judges chapter 4 says plainly that Sisera's army fell by
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Speaker 1: the edge of the sword. Israelite swords. They were not
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Speaker 1: an unarmed people. What they did not have was an
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Speaker 1: answer to wheels on open ground. Infantry against chariots on
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Speaker 1: a flat plain is not a smaller army facing a
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Speaker 1: bigger one. It is a target. You cannot outrun it.
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Speaker 1: You cannot catch it. And you cannot hold a line
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Speaker 1: against horses at speed. So for 20 years, Sisera owned
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Speaker 1: the valleys, every road, every flat field, every trade route
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Speaker 1: in the north. And Israel survived in the hills, in
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Speaker 1: the folds of ground where wheels could not follow. The
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Speaker 1: Song of Deborah tells you what that felt like from
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Speaker 1: the inside. In the days of Shamgar, it says, the
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Speaker 1: highways were abandoned. Travelers took winding paths. Village life stopped.
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Speaker 1: Read that again with the name in it. Shamgar had
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Speaker 1: killed 600 men, and the roads still were not safe.
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Speaker 1: That is how deep this went. A deliverer could rise,
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Speaker 1: do something extraordinary, and the highways stayed empty, because the
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Speaker 1: problem was never courage. The problem was the technology, and
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Speaker 1: it was parked in every valley in the north. Then
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Speaker 1: the song says this, Until I, Deborah, arose, I arose,
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Speaker 1: a mother in Israel, not a general, not a judge,
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Speaker 1: not a prophet, a mother. That is the word she
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Speaker 1: chose for herself in her own victory poem about her
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Speaker 1: own war. Remember it. It comes back in the last
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Speaker 1: stanza of that same song. In the last place on earth,
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Speaker 1: you would expect to find it. Judges chapter 4, verses
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Speaker 1: 4 and 5. Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth,
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Speaker 1: was judging Israel at that time. She used to sit
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Speaker 1: under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel
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Speaker 1: in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of
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Speaker 1: Israel came up to her for judgment. Two verses. And
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Speaker 1: there are three things buried in them that almost nobody teaches.
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Speaker 1: The first is her name. In Hebrew, Devorah means bee.
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Speaker 1: In a sequence of deliverers that has already given us
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Speaker 1: a man with a defect and a farmer with a stick,
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Speaker 1: God now raises a bee, the smallest thing in the field,
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Speaker 1: and the one nobody wants to provoke. The second is
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Speaker 1: the phrase, wife of Lapidoth. Most translations take Lapidoth as
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Speaker 1: a man's name, and that is the standard reading. It
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Speaker 1: is what you will find in nearly every Bible you
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Speaker 1: pick up. But there is a minority reading worth knowing about,
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Speaker 1: because the Hebrew word lapidot means torches or flames. The
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Speaker 1: construction can be read not as wife of a man
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Speaker 1: called Lapidoth, but as woman of torches, a description of
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Speaker 1: her rather than a husband. It is a minority position,
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Speaker 1: not a consensus, and this film is not going to
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Speaker 1: pretend otherwise. But if it is right, the text never
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Speaker 1: gives her a husband at all. It gives her a title,
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Speaker 1: Woman of Fire. The third thing is the one that
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Speaker 1: actually changes the story, and it is sitting in plain sight.
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Speaker 1: She holds two offices at once. The text calls her
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Speaker 1: a prophetess, someone who carries the word of God, and
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Speaker 1: it says she was judging Israel. The office of governance,
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Speaker 1: of settling disputes, of leading. In the entire book of Judges,
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Speaker 1: nobody else holds both. The voice of God and the
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Speaker 1: seat of authority in the same person. And there is
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Speaker 1: something else about her that separates her from every other
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Speaker 1: name in this book. Every other judge is raised up
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Speaker 1: after the crisis. Othniel, Ehud, Gideon, Samson. The oppression comes first,
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Speaker 1: the people cry out, and then God provides an answer.
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Speaker 1: They are emergency measures. Deborah is already there. Before the war,
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Speaker 1: before the summons, before any of it, Israel is climbing
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Speaker 1: a hill in Ephraim to bring her their disputes. She's
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Speaker 1: not God's response to Sisera. She is the standing authority
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Speaker 1: of the nation, and she was holding that authority while
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Speaker 1: the chariots ruled the valleys. and notice where she held it,
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Speaker 1: not in a fortified court, not behind a gate or
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Speaker 1: a wall or a guard, under a tree in the
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Speaker 1: open on a hillside, where anyone who could make the
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Speaker 1: climb could reach her. The person with the most authority
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Speaker 1: in Israel had the most open address in the country.
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Speaker 1: Then one day she moved. She did not wait for
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Speaker 1: a commander to come and ask her what to do.
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Speaker 1: She sent for one, Judges 4 verse 6, she sent
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Speaker 1: and summoned Barak son of Abinom from Kadesh in Naphtali.
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Speaker 1: Look at that on a map. Kadesh is far north,
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Speaker 1: deep in the territory Sisera's chariots had hurt worst, near
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Speaker 1: the frontier of Jabin's power. Her palm tree is in
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Speaker 1: the hill country of Ephraim, roughly a hundred miles south.
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Speaker 1: She summoned a serving military commander across the length of
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Speaker 1: the country, and he walked it, In a nation with
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Speaker 1: no central government and no standing army, a woman under
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Speaker 1: a tree sent word north, and the man who commanded
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Speaker 1: fighting men in the most brutalized region in Israel got
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Speaker 1: up and made the journey. That is the measure of
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Speaker 1: her authority, and the text does not have to explain it.
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Speaker 1: It just tells you he came. What she gave him
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Speaker 1: when he arrived was not her own idea. She delivers
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Speaker 1: it as a quotation. Has not the Lord, the God
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Speaker 1: of Israel, commanded you, Go, deploy ten thousand men from
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Speaker 1: Naphtali and Zebulun, and lead them to Mount Tabor? I
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Speaker 1: will draw Sisera with his chariots and his troops to
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Speaker 1: the Kishon river and give him into your hands, into
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Speaker 1: your hands. Hold that phrase. It is an offer and
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Speaker 1: it is addressed to Barak, the victory, the general, the glory,
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Speaker 1: all of it placed into the hands of the man
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Speaker 1: standing in front of her. What happens in the next
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Speaker 1: 60 seconds changes whose hands it lands in. Barak's answer
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Speaker 1: is one of the most quoted and most misread sentences
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Speaker 1: in the Old Testament. If you go with me, I
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Speaker 1: will go. But if you will not go with me,
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Speaker 1: I will not go. For two thousand years that has
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Speaker 1: been preached as cowardice, the commander who was too frightened
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Speaker 1: to march unless a woman came along to hold his hand,
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Speaker 1: it has been used in sermons as a warning about
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Speaker 1: weak men, and it is wrong. And the New Testament
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Speaker 1: itself says so. Start with who Barak actually was. He
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Speaker 1: was a military commander in Naftali. Naftali was in the north.
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Speaker 1: The north was where the chariots ran. This was not
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Speaker 1: a man who had spent 20 years reading about iron
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Speaker 1: in someone else's territory. He had lived under it. He
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Speaker 1: had watched wheels come across his own fields. He knew
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Speaker 1: exactly what 900 chariots looked like from the wrong end.
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Speaker 1: He was not a man short on nerve. What he
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Speaker 1: understood was something the audience has not quite grasped yet.
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Speaker 1: The command he had just been given did not come
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Speaker 1: to him in a dream. It did not come at
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Speaker 1: an altar. No angel appeared to him in a field.
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Speaker 1: It came through her. The word of God for this
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Speaker 1: war was being carried by the woman standing in front
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Speaker 1: of him. and Barak had done the arithmetic that most
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Speaker 1: people in this story had not. Ten thousand swords against
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Speaker 1: nine hundred chariots on open ground is a slaughter, and
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Speaker 1: it is a slaughter in Sisera's favor. The only thing
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Speaker 1: that changes the equation is God, and God, in this moment,
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Speaker 1: was speaking through Deborah. So his condition is not fear,
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Speaker 1: it is precision. If the word of God is going
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Speaker 1: onto that field, I am going. If it is staying
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Speaker 1: here under this tree, so am I. And scripture settles
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Speaker 1: the argument for us. Hebrews chapter 11 lists the heroes
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Speaker 1: of faith. Gideon, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and Barak's name
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Speaker 1: is among them. The New Testament does not hold him
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Speaker 1: up as a cautionary tale. It holds him up as
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Speaker 1: an example of faith. Barak did not lack courage. He
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Speaker 1: lacked arrogance. He knew precisely what his sword was worth
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Speaker 1: without God behind it, and the answer was nothing. Deborah
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Speaker 1: agrees to go, and then she says something that will
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Speaker 1: not make sense for another 12 minutes. Judges 4, verse 9,
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Speaker 1: I will surely go with you. Nevertheless... The road on
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Speaker 1: which you are going will not lead to your glory,
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Speaker 1: for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of
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Speaker 1: a woman. Now every single person who hears that line
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Speaker 1: makes the same assumption. Ancient listeners made it. Modern readers
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Speaker 1: make it. Barak, standing right in front of her, almost
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Speaker 1: certainly made it. She is the woman. Obviously, she is
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Speaker 1: the woman. She is the prophetess. She gave the order.
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Speaker 1: She is about to walk onto the battlefield. Who else
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Speaker 1: could it possibly be? She never says it is her.
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Speaker 1: She does not claim it. She simply states what will
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Speaker 1: happen and lets the man in front of her draw
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Speaker 1: the wrong conclusion. And the Hebrew is worth slowing down for.
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Speaker 1: The phrase is biyad isha, into the hand of a woman,
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Speaker 1: not through a woman, not by means of a woman,
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Speaker 1: into her hand, a hand that holds something. The film
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Speaker 1: is not going to tell you what for another 12 minutes. 10,000
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Speaker 1: men answered the call out of Naftali and Zebulun, and
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Speaker 1: they climbed Mount Tabor. But the song of Deborah records
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Speaker 1: something the narrative leaves out, and it records it permanently,
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Speaker 1: by name, in a poem that would be sung for centuries.
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Speaker 1: Not everybody came. Ephraim came. Benjamin came. Mashiach and Issachar came.
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Speaker 1: Zebulun and Naphtali, the song says, risked their lives on
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Speaker 1: the heights of the field. And then the list turns.
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Speaker 1: Reuben did not come. The song says that among the
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Speaker 1: clans of Reuben, there were great searchings of heart. which
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Speaker 1: sounds noble until you understand what it means. They discussed it.
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Speaker 1: They weighed it seriously. They considered the situation at length,
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Speaker 1: sitting among the sheepfolds, listening to the flocks. And then
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Speaker 1: they stayed home. Gilead stayed east of the Jordan. Dan
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Speaker 1: stayed with the ships. Asher sat on the coast among
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Speaker 1: his harbors. And a town called Meroz is not merely noted.
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Speaker 1: It is cursed by name for not coming to help.
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Speaker 1: Three thousand years later, the excuses are still on the record.
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Speaker 1: That is what it means to be written into a song. Now,
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Speaker 1: the ground. Mount Tabor is a steep, dome-shaped hill rising
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Speaker 1: out of the Jezreel plain. Its slopes are far too
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Speaker 1: steep for wheels. That makes it excellent ground for men
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Speaker 1: on foot and impossible ground for chariots, and that is
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Speaker 1: not an accident. The instruction Deborah delivered was militarily precise.
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Speaker 1: Put the men where wheels cannot reach them, then wait.
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Speaker 1: Sisera did exactly what the plan required. He gathered his
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Speaker 1: full force, 900 chariots and all his men, and deployed
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Speaker 1: along the Kishon River, on the floor of the Jezreel Valley. broad, flat, open,
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Speaker 1: the ground where chariots kill, the ground he had owned
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Speaker 1: for twenty years. On paper, this was not a battle.
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Speaker 1: Ten thousand men with swords stood on a hill. Nine
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Speaker 1: hundred chariots were arrayed on the plain below, and standing
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Speaker 1: among the infantry was a woman carrying no weapon at all.
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Speaker 1: Then Deborah spoke, Go, this is the day the Lord
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Speaker 1: has given Sisera into your hands, Has not the Lord
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Speaker 1: gone ahead of you? One word, go. No war council,
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Speaker 1: no delay, no second opinion. And here we should be exact,
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Speaker 1: because it matters. Barak led that charge. Deborah did not
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Speaker 1: command troops in the field. He did, and the text
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Speaker 1: says so. But nobody on that mountain moved until she spoke.
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Speaker 1: The authority was hers. The sword was his, and neither
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Speaker 1: one was enough on its own. 10,000 men came down
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Speaker 1: off Tabor into 900 chariots. The prose account is almost
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Speaker 1: brutally short. The Lord rooted Sisera and all his chariots
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Speaker 1: and all his army. It is the poem that tells
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Speaker 1: you how. From the heavens the stars fought. From their
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Speaker 1: courses they fought against Sisera. The river Kishon swept them away.
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Speaker 1: That ancient river, the river Kishon. The Kishon swept them away.
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Speaker 1: Here is what that means on the ground. The floor
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Speaker 1: of the Jezreel Valley is heavy alluvial clay, the same
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Speaker 1: soil that makes it one of the most fertile plains
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Speaker 1: in the region. In heavy rain, that clay does not drain.
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Speaker 1: It holds water and becomes deep, clinging mud. And the Kishon,
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Speaker 1: which is a shallow stream most of the year, floods
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Speaker 1: across the valley when the rain comes hard. Now put
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Speaker 1: a chariot in that. Remember the iron. Iron rims, iron fittings,
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Speaker 1: a heavy frame, narrow wheels, and a team of horses pulling.
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Speaker 1: In waterlogged clay, a vehicle like that does not skim.
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Speaker 1: It sinks, and the harder the horses pull, the deeper
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Speaker 1: the wheels dig themselves in. The thing that made it
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Speaker 1: lethal on dry ground is exactly what buries it on
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Speaker 1: wet ground. To be honest with you about the evidence,
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Speaker 1: nobody has excavated a chariot out of that mud. This
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Speaker 1: is not an archaeological discovery. It is the geography of
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Speaker 1: the valley lining up precisely with what the oldest poem
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Speaker 1: in the Bible says happened there. And it lines up
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Speaker 1: so well. that the poem's claim is entirely plausible on
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Speaker 1: physical grounds alone. God did not send a larger army.
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Speaker 1: He did not send chariots of his own. He sent weather,
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Speaker 1: and the whole equation inverted inside a few minutes. 900
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Speaker 1: vehicles that could not move, horses thrashing in the mud.
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Speaker 1: Crews stranded on stuck platforms in the open, and 10,000
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Speaker 1: men arriving on foot at close quarters into exactly the
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Speaker 1: kind of fighting where a sword works and a chariot
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Speaker 1: is furniture. All the army of Sisera fell by the
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Speaker 1: edge of the sword. Not a man was left, not
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Speaker 1: a man was left, except one. Somewhere in that collapse,
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Speaker 1: the most feared general in Cairns, climbed down off his
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Speaker 1: chariot and ran he went north on foot toward a
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Speaker 1: tent before we follow him there the text does something
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Speaker 1: strange in the middle of the battle narrative it stops
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Speaker 1: and gives you a piece of genealogy Judges 4 verse
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Speaker 1: 11 now Heber the Kenite had separated from the other Kenites,
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Speaker 1: the descendants of Hobab, Moses' father-in-law, and pitched his tent
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Speaker 1: near the great tree in Zananim near Kadesh. Almost every
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Speaker 1: retelling of this story skips that verse. It is the
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Speaker 1: key to everything that follows. The Kenites were the people
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Speaker 1: of Moses' father-in-law. That is not a distant connection. Moses
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Speaker 1: married into that family. When Israel came out of Egypt,
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Speaker 1: the Kenites were bound to them by marriage and by
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Speaker 1: a shared journey, a tie roughly 200 years old by
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Speaker 1: the time of this story. And Heber had broken away
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Speaker 1: from his own clan and made a separate peace with Jabin,
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Speaker 1: king of Canaan. So when Sisera runs to Heber's tent,
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Speaker 1: he is running to an ally. He is not stumbling
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Speaker 1: into enemy ground. He is going to the one door
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Speaker 1: in the north he has every reason to believe is safe.
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Speaker 1: And the woman standing in that doorway is holding two loyalties,
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Speaker 1: her husband's new treaty with the enemy of Israel and
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Speaker 1: her family's ancient bond with Israel running back through Moses himself.
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Speaker 1: The text tells you this before you watch what she does.
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Speaker 1: That is deliberate. It wants you to know which choice
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Speaker 1: she is making before she makes it. Jael comes out
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Speaker 1: to meet him. She does not wait inside. She walks
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Speaker 1: out to the running man and says, Come in, my lord.
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Speaker 1: Come into me. Do not be afraid. He goes in.
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Speaker 1: He asks for water. She gives him milk. More than
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Speaker 1: he asked for. The gesture of a host doing better
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Speaker 1: than duty requires. She covers him with a rug. She
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Speaker 1: makes him comfortable. She makes him feel safe. And then
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Speaker 1: he gives her an order. Stand at the door of
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Speaker 1: the tent, and if any man comes and asks whether
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Speaker 1: anyone is here, say no. The most powerful soldier in
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Speaker 1: Canaan posts a woman as his sentry, tells her to
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Speaker 1: lie for him, and closes his eyes. He is exhausted.
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Speaker 1: He has run for miles. And he sleeps. Judges 4,
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Speaker 1: verse 21. But Jael, wife of Heber, took a tent
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Speaker 1: peg and took a hammer in her hand. Then she
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Speaker 1: went softly to him and drove the peg into his
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Speaker 1: temple until it went down into the ground while he
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Speaker 1: was lying fast asleep from weariness. So he died. Now,
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Speaker 1: the tool. In a semi-nomadic household, pitching and striking the
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Speaker 1: tents was women's work. The men handled the livestock and
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Speaker 1: the trade. The women raised the poles, drove the pegs,
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Speaker 1: pulled the pegs, and moved the camp. The peg and
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Speaker 1: the mallet were what Jael handled every day of her life,
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Speaker 1: the way a farmer handles a plow. She did not
22:56
Speaker 1: take a sword off the wall. She did not borrow
22:59
Speaker 1: a man's weapon. She picked up her own, the one
23:03
Speaker 1: tool in that entire camp that no soldier on earth
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Speaker 1: would have thought to guard against, and she used it
23:09
Speaker 1: on the most wanted man in Canaan. And now, go
23:12
Speaker 1: back 12 minutes to a woman under a palm tree
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Speaker 1: telling a commander that the Lord would sell Sisera into
23:19
Speaker 1: the hand of a woman. Every listener assumed she meant herself.
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Speaker 1: Barak assumed it. You probably assumed it. She never said it.
23:27
Speaker 1: It was not Deborah. It was Jael. A Kenite, not
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Speaker 1: an Israelite. A woman from a household that had a
23:35
Speaker 1: peace agreement with the enemy. A woman who does not
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Speaker 1: appear anywhere in this story until the moment she is needed.
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Speaker 1: the least likely hand in the entire account, and the
23:44
Speaker 1: prophecy pointed at her the whole time. Barak arrives, still
23:48
Speaker 1: in pursuit, still hunting the man who got away, and
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Speaker 1: Jael walks out to meet him and says, Come, and
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Speaker 1: I will show you the man you are looking for.
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Speaker 1: He goes in. Sisera is on the ground with a
24:00
Speaker 1: tent peg through his skull. Nine hundred iron-fitted chariots could
24:05
Speaker 1: not hold the valley. A wooden peg held a general
24:08
Speaker 1: to the earth. Now, Something this channel is not going
24:12
Speaker 1: to do is hand you a tidy resolution when the
24:15
Speaker 1: text does not provide one. And this is one of
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Speaker 1: those moments. Jael invited a man into her tent. She
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Speaker 1: gave him milk. She covered him. She told him not
24:24
Speaker 1: to be afraid. Then she killed him in his sleep.
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Speaker 1: In the ancient Near East, the obligation of a host
24:31
Speaker 1: was close to absolute. To take a man in and
24:34
Speaker 1: then take his life was, by every human standard of
24:38
Speaker 1: that world, a betrayal of something sacred. And the Bible
24:42
Speaker 1: does not explain it. Judges chapter 4 reports what she
24:46
Speaker 1: did and moves on without a word of comment. No praise,
24:49
Speaker 1: no condemnation, nothing. The song in chapter 5 goes the
24:54
Speaker 1: other way entirely and blesses her. Most blessed of women,
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Speaker 1: most blessed of women in tents. The same shape of
25:02
Speaker 1: blessing that returns centuries later at the Annunciation. So the
25:07
Speaker 1: poem celebrates her. The narrative never explains her. And that
25:12
Speaker 1: gap has been argued over for 2,000 years. Some say
25:17
Speaker 1: her covenant obligation to Israel overrode the convention of hospitality.
25:21
Speaker 1: Some say she acted as an instrument of judgment she
25:24
Speaker 1: did not fully understand. Some point back to Moses and
25:28
Speaker 1: the older loyalty. The text offers none of those answers.
25:33
Speaker 1: It tells you what she did, it tells you the
25:35
Speaker 1: poem blessed her, and it leaves the weight of that
25:38
Speaker 1: in your hands. We are not going to close what
25:42
Speaker 1: Scripture leaves open. What comes next is the reason this
25:46
Speaker 1: story survived. Judges chapter 5 is a poem, the song
25:51
Speaker 1: of Deborah, sung by Deborah and Barak on the day
25:54
Speaker 1: of the victory. And most scholars date it very early.
25:58
Speaker 1: to around the 12th century before Christ, which would make
26:01
Speaker 1: it one of the oldest substantial pieces of Hebrew poetry
26:05
Speaker 1: anywhere in the Bible. Older in its form on that
26:08
Speaker 1: reading than much of the written Torah as we have it.
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Speaker 1: Sit with that for a second. A woman's voice, a
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Speaker 1: woman who called herself a mother in Israel, is embedded
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Speaker 1: in the deepest layer of scripture we have, not a
26:22
Speaker 1: footnote to the record, part of its foundations. The song
26:26
Speaker 1: does what victory songs do. It praises the tribes who came.
26:31
Speaker 1: It shames the ones who stayed. It curses Meroes. It
26:35
Speaker 1: tells the battle, the stars fighting from their courses, the
26:39
Speaker 1: river sweeping the chariots away, the earth shaking. It blesses
26:43
Speaker 1: Jael in her tent. And then, in its final stanza,
26:48
Speaker 1: it does something ancient war poetry almost never does. It
26:52
Speaker 1: turns away from the battlefield, and it looks at a window...'
26:55
Speaker 1: Through the window peered Sisera's mother.' Behind the lattice she
26:59
Speaker 1: cried out,' Why is his chariot so long in coming?'
27:03
Speaker 1: Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?' A woman
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Speaker 1: in Hazor, at a lattice, watching a road.' Her son
27:10
Speaker 1: is late, and her ladies-in-waiting comfort her.' They tell her
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Speaker 1: he must be delayed because he is dividing the plunder,'
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Speaker 1: and the word they use for the captured women is
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Speaker 1: deliberately coarse.' It reduces them to bodies to be shared
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Speaker 1: out among the men.' a girl or two for every soldier.
27:28
Speaker 1: That is how the enemy's court talks about Israelite daughters
27:32
Speaker 1: while it waits for the army to come home. The
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Speaker 1: ugliness of the word is the point, the poet chose it,
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Speaker 1: and the irony is total. Sisera is not dividing anyone.
27:43
Speaker 1: Sisera is lying in a tent with a peg through
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Speaker 1: his temple, killed by a woman with a hammer. His
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Speaker 1: mother will stand at that window until someone finally tells her,
27:53
Speaker 1: and she will never understand why the chariot was late.
27:56
Speaker 1: Now look at what Deborah has done as a writer.
28:00
Speaker 1: She called herself a mother in Israel. That was her
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Speaker 1: own word in her own poem at the top of
28:07
Speaker 1: this song, and she ends the same poem by putting
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Speaker 1: you inside a house in Hazor at a window beside
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Speaker 1: a different mother who The mother of the man who
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Speaker 1: terrorized her nation for twenty years, and making you watch
28:20
Speaker 1: her wait for a son who is not coming. One
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Speaker 1: mother stood up and fought, one mother sat down and waited.
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Speaker 1: The song holds both of them, and it does not
28:30
Speaker 1: look away from either. Ancient victory poetry does not usually
28:34
Speaker 1: do this, it counts the dead. It lists the plunder.
28:38
Speaker 1: It praises the king and humiliates the loser. Almost none
28:42
Speaker 1: of it stops at the height of its own triumph
28:44
Speaker 1: to show you the grief on the other side of
28:46
Speaker 1: the field. This one does. The woman who won the
28:50
Speaker 1: war gave her enemy a mother. That is extraordinary writing
28:54
Speaker 1: in any century. In the 12th century before Christ, it
28:57
Speaker 1: is close to unbelievable. Then the land had peace for
29:02
Speaker 1: 40 years. 40 years. An entire generation grew up walking
29:07
Speaker 1: the main roads without checking the ridgelines because a woman
29:11
Speaker 1: under a tree said go, because a commander was honest
29:14
Speaker 1: enough to say not without you, because God sent rain
29:19
Speaker 1: instead of reinforcements, and because a woman in a tent
29:23
Speaker 1: picked up the tool she used every day of her life.
29:26
Speaker 1: And the pattern did not stop with her. The next
29:30
Speaker 1: name after Deborah is Gideon. A man found threshing wheat
29:35
Speaker 1: inside a wine press, hiding from raiders who ends up
29:39
Speaker 1: sent against an army with 300 men carrying torches inside
29:43
Speaker 1: clay jars the left-handed man the farmer with the ox
29:48
Speaker 1: goad the woman under the tree the man hiding in
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Speaker 1: the wine press Not because God had run short of
29:56
Speaker 1: strong men, because God kept making the same point in
29:59
Speaker 1: a different form every time the cycle turned. Here is
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Speaker 1: what that means for you. Israel had 10,000 armed men.
30:09
Speaker 1: It had commanders, tribes, elders, the whole apparatus of a nation.
30:15
Speaker 1: And for 20 years, every one of them waited for
30:18
Speaker 1: somebody else to move first. Reuben searched their hearts and
30:22
Speaker 1: stayed with the flocks. dan stayed with the ships asher
30:27
Speaker 1: sat on the coast they were not evil men they
30:30
Speaker 1: were reasonable men with reasons and the thing that broke
30:34
Speaker 1: 20 years of occupation was a woman with no sword
30:38
Speaker 1: no army no chariot and no permission who stood up
30:44
Speaker 1: she did not wait to be qualified she did not
30:47
Speaker 1: wait to be asked she stood and ten thousand men
30:50
Speaker 1: would not move until she did Now look at what
30:53
Speaker 1: she did not have. No throne, no army, no inheritance,
30:58
Speaker 1: no title given by any king, and no permission from
31:02
Speaker 1: any man. She could not have raised a single soldier
31:05
Speaker 1: by force if she had wanted to. What she had
31:09
Speaker 1: was a tree on a hillside and a nation that
31:12
Speaker 1: came up the hill because they believed God had said
31:16
Speaker 1: something to her. That is all it was. And it
31:20
Speaker 1: was enough to move 10,000 men. If you have ever
31:24
Speaker 1: thought God cannot use you because you have no position,
31:27
Speaker 1: no platform, no title, and nobody appointed you to anything,
31:32
Speaker 1: the woman who broke 20 years of occupation had none
31:36
Speaker 1: of those either. She was not put in charge. She
31:39
Speaker 1: simply started telling the truth in a place where people
31:43
Speaker 1: could reach her. And it turned out that was the authority.
31:47
Speaker 1: God is not looking for the strongest hand in the room.
31:52
Speaker 1: He is looking for the willing one. 900 chariots held
31:56
Speaker 1: a nation for 20 years. God ended it with rain,
32:00
Speaker 1: a bowl of milk, and a tent peg. The iron
32:04
Speaker 1: is in a museum. The song is still being sung.
32:08
Speaker 1: If this is the first time you have heard Deborah's
32:11
Speaker 1: story like this, not the children's version, but the prophetess
32:15
Speaker 1: whose voice sits in the oldest poetry in the Bible,
32:19
Speaker 1: then you are in the right place. Bible Origins goes
32:24
Speaker 1: to the Hebrew, to the ground, and to the text itself,
32:28
Speaker 1: including the parts nobody tidies up for you. Subscribe so
32:33
Speaker 1: you do not miss the next one. And if you
32:36
Speaker 1: want the whole story, every book of the Old Testament,
32:39
Speaker 1: from Genesis to Malachi, laid out in one place, There
32:43
Speaker 1: is a video on the screen right now. Share this
32:46
Speaker 1: with someone who needs to hear it. God bless you,
32:49
Speaker 1: and we will see you in the next one.