Hilton Head Island, SC – January 17, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Judges 4:1-10; 4:10-24
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And she said, “I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.” – Judges 4:9 (RSV)
If you read about the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites in the book of Joshua, and then you read about it in the book of Judges, you get two quite different stories. In Joshua the conquest comes fairly easily and quickly. In Judges it comes slowly and with great difficulty. Joshua and his army win their battles with relatively little opposition, but in Judges it takes a century and a half with much struggle and bloodshed before the Israelites control all of Canaan.
Today we shall look at two women who became key figures in the earliest battles between the Canaanites and the Israelites. And you need to understand that everything we read in Joshua and Judges is told from the perspective of the Israelites. There is no sympathy shown for the Canaanites at all. It is very much like what happened in what was known as Palestine during the British occupation after World War I up to the partition of the land between the Israelis and the Palestinians by the United Nations in 1947-48. Most Americans are very familiar with the Israeli side of what has happened ever since then, but we have little knowledge or sympathy for the Palestinians. That is politically unfortunate, because for seventy-five years it has made our foreign policy seem essentially anti-Arab and pro-Israeli, but not surprisingly there are two sides to that huge Middle Eastern mess.
Anyway, 3150 years ago or so, according to Judges, chapter four, Israel had not yet defeated the Canaanites. Until they did that, they could not be the masters of all the land west of the Jordan River and south to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. So they needed two women to help defeat the Canaanites, the most consistent enemies of the Israelites. The women were Deborah, a female prophet, the wife of a man named Lappidoth, and Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. You don’t need to remember the names of the husbands, but it was important for Israelites back then to know the husbands’ names. At that time, any women who didn’t have husbands could hardly even manage to get into the biblical record. As it was, it was very difficult even for married women. This was such a male-dominated culture that women almost never made it into the record of what was going on in holy writ.
We first hear about Deborah because people used to come to her for what is called her “judgment.” That is, they wanted her advice about this and that, and to her credit she was a better judge of these matters than most contemporary males. The name Deborah means “Bee” or “Wasp.” If you were an Israelite, she was a bee, buzzing around, handing out all sorts of sound wisdom. If you were a Canaanite, she was a wasp, stinging your fellow kinsmen with her painful venom, as we shall now see.
The king of the Canaanites was a man named Jabin. It says Deborah summoned an Israelite named Barak, and she told him to gather an army. He was to go fight Jabin and his general Sisera at Mt. Tabor, in the northern part of Israel.
So Barak led the Israelite army into battle, and they routed the Canaanites. Sisera, the Canaanite general, knew he had been thoroughly thrashed, and he fled the scene alone on foot, ending up at the tent of Jael. She saw Sisera coming, and went out to meet him. “Turn aside to me, my lord. Have no fear.” If Sisera had not felt so tired and defeated, his ears might have warned him this didn’t sound good at all, and he should have been wary. But he went into Jael’s tent, and lay down to sleep. Jael covered him with a rug. He said she should tell no one that he was there. I guess he figured it was unmanly to be sleeping in the tent of a woman of the enemy Israelites, but he was completely exhausted, and he needed rest after the fierce exertions of the battle.
From what happens next, we can deduce that Sisera liked to sleep on his side. He must also have been sleeping very soundly, because Jael came up to him with a tent peg in one hand and a hammer in the other. Without Sisera waking up, she swiftly drove the tent peg through one temple and out the other one with two or three mighty whacks, like Lizzie Borden took her axe, I guess, and Sisera was no more. Just then, Barak, the Israelite general, came up to the tent, and Jael came out to tell him proudly what she had just done. Another swell biblical story, just like that of Ehud from last week.
Did this happen exactly as we are told? Who knows? But it is a memorable story. And if you were an Israelite, and you thought that God has commanded you to conquer Canaan, this is an amazing chapter in that conquest. A woman, Deborah, told Barak to fight the Canaanites at Mt. Tabor, and another woman, Jael, killed the Canaanite general who fled to her home in defeat after the battle.
For us with our delicate and noble twenty-first century sensibilities, who live over three thousand years after all this happened, it seems terribly duplicitous and brutal. To the people who wrote the Bible, and to those who first read it, it was terrific stuff. However, I don’t want to get into any of that. What I want to do is to note that it is astonishing that the man who wrote the book of Judges, whoever he was, included Deborah and Jael in his history at all. Women don’t play nearly as many roles in the biblical drama as men, especially when it comes to warfare. Yet here are two women who take center stage, if only for a couple of chapters.
Set aside your thoughts regarding the propriety of what they did. Think instead about the singularity of it, that they, as women, played such pivotal parts in the drama. Back then, the Israelites truly believed God demanded the conquest of Canaan, and here, very unpredictably, were two very unlikely actresses in this unlikely history.
Therefore we might ask some questions about this episode. Is this story pro-feminist, or is it anti-feminist? That’s easy to answer --- isn’t it? They made it into the Judges narrative, so it must be pro-feminist.
But wait a minute. Is it proper for women to be advising generals on how to fight wars? Is it lady-like for a peasant woman to take a tent peg and drive it through a man’s skull, even if he is an exhausted Canaanite general? Aren’t women always supposed to be nice, and barefoot, and pregnant? Isn’t that what male chauvinists think? And wasn’t it male chauvinists to one degree or another who wrote most of what is in the Bible?
There’s another factor here, however, and I didn’t read any of it earlier in the service. There is a long poem that consists of the entire fifth chapter of Judges, except for the first verse. And that verse says, “Then sang Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam on that day…”, and with that introduction the two launched into the Song of Deborah.
It’s interesting: the song has always been known as the song of Deborah, even though it says it was sung by both Deborah and Barak. Nonetheless, this song has always been called The Song of Deborah. “Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; to the Lord I will sing. I will make melody to the Lord, the God of Israel” (5:4).
In our Old Testament class in seminary we were taught that the two oldest writings of the Old Testament are Judges 5 and Exodus 15. The latter may (or may not) refer to the actual exodus out of Egypt. It begins with the opening lines, “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and the rider he has cast into the sea” (Ex. 15:1). If you were an expert in Hebrew (which I most certainly am not), you would know that Ex. 15 and Judges 5 are really old Hebrew. You would recognize it in the same way that, if you were a Ph.d. in the evolution of English, you’d know that Beowulf or Chaucer or Shakespeare were written centuries before Ogden Nash: “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” Chaucer and Shakespeare and whoever wrote Beowulf would never write anything like that.
Was the song of Deborah written to commemorate the victory of the Israelites over the Canaanites, and the stratagem of Jael in the slaying Sisera, the Canaanite general? The poem mentions Deborah, Jael, Barak, and Sisera, so was the poem written about four figures at the time the events that are recorded actually happened, and the book of Judges was written centuries later? And did these things actually occur? Does the poem add to the prose which describes the battle, or does the poem inspire the prose?
All I know is this: Deborah, Barak, Jael, and Sisera are in Judges 4, and the story, while somewhat far-fetched, seems at least plausible, and perhaps even probable. Judges 5:7 – “The peasantry ceased in Israel, they ceased until you arose, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel.” Judges 5:24 – “Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent-dwelling women most blessed.” We learn that Jael was a Bedouin, a wanderer, a nomad.
But the real point of the Song of Deborah is its last verse: “So perish all thine enemies, O Lord! But thy friends be like the sun as he rises in his might” (5:31). Still, none of this would have occurred were it not for our text: “And (Deborah) said, ‘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 hands of a woman’” (4:8).
When Deborah and Jael were alive, Israel was not yet a nation. Instead, it was twelve separate and unequal tribes. It desperately needed to coalesce into a unity if ever it was to become a recognizable country and a light to the Gentiles. From Genesis through II Samuel, Israel is struggling to become a nation, an ethnos. It wasn’t easy. It was painful and exasperating and difficult, and it took a long, long time until they had a monarchy which was fully functional. The patriarchs were long gone, Moses and Joshua had died, and there was nothing at the center - - - no Jerusalem, no temple, no institution of lasting significance. The century and a half of the Judges is the In-Between Time, between Joshua and the first of the kings.
The English poet William Cowper wrote a hymn, “God moves in a mysterious way/ His wonders to perform;/ He plants His footsteps in the sea/ And rides upon the storm.” Surely God did not approve of everything the Israelites did in their early history, but they were the only people on earth who opened the door when God came knocking. Nobody else seemed willing to receive God’s guidance. Deborah and Jael were like the ladies of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong.” There are no mothers like Jewish mothers. Don’t mess with them, if you want things to run smoothly. King Jabin and General Sisera of Canaan discovered that to their everlasting sorrow.
All people have a hard time accepting other kinds of people: black/white, rich/poor, Jews/Christians, Jews/ Muslims, Muslims/Christians, Northerners/Southerners, Old World/New World --- all of us have a tendency to separate ourselves from all the others for one reason or another, or for no apparent reason at all.
It is Rodney King all over again. Remember Rodney King? He was the black man pulled over by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Apparently he did nothing wrong, or if he did, it certainly didn’t warrant his being beaten nearly to death. The incident was recorded on a never-to-forgotten nationally broadcast video. It prompted an extensive violent riot. Rodney King was George Floyd of Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor of Louisville and Jacob Blake of Kenosha. After he recovered, and apparently with no malice to those who had assaulted him for no reason, Rodney King respectfully asked, “Can’t we all just get along?”
Well, can’t we? If there is no strong central authority, if regulations are not clearly defined, if government is intentionally or unintentionally weak, bad things happen. Between the lines, the book of Judges is saying that if there is not a strong central government, anarchy is likely to reign. On January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC, it was cynically concluded that no one ultimately seemed to be in charge, and with the encouragement of one particular man, chaos reigned supreme.
When there is chaos, there will be Aaron Burr and Billy the Kid and Al Capone and Huey Long. God surely is both gravely disappointed and painfully angry when people not only allow chaos but actively promote it. But if there is an Ehud or Deborah or Jael or Gideon or Samson, things might eventually sort themselves out. It takes time, but it will happen, if we are careful in how we proceed.
Last Wednesday, the United States Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, presented a superb poem she had written for the presidential and vice-presidential inaugurations. You heard Patsy Brison read it earlier in the service today. The last lines in her poem were these: “When day comes, we step out of the shade/ Aflame and unafraid./ The new dawn blooms as we free it./ For there is always light/ If only we’re brave enough to see it/ If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
(- William Cowper)