Prophet, judge, and the one who gave the battle plan. The Hebrew calls her a mother in Israel and the Hebrew means female chief, and the translators knew the grammar.
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Judges 4 and 5 give her three titles in two verses, and none of them is domestic.
Nebi'ah, prophetess, one who speaks for God. Shophet, judge, the office of Israel's leaders before the monarchy. And wife of Lappidoth, which some read instead as eshet lappidot, woman of torches, because lappidot is an odd form for a personal name.
And the direction of travel is in the text. The Israelites came up to her for judgment, which is to say she did not travel to them: they ascended to where she sat.
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SHE GAVE THE BATTLE PLAN
God spoke through her to Barak, and what she delivered was not encouragement.
She named the position, Mount Tabor. She specified the troop count, ten thousand from Naphtali and Zebulun. She named where the enemy would be drawn, the river Kishon, and she promised the outcome.
Barak's answer: if you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go.
The general of Israel refused to march without the woman prophet beside him, and she agreed and attached a prophecy to the agreement: the road he was going on would not lead to his glory, because the LORD would sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.
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WHAT MOTHER IN ISRAEL MEANS
In the Song she says the rulers ceased in Israel, they ceased, until she arose, a mother in Israel.
The phrase is regularly sentimentalized into a nurturing image. Bushnell is direct: the word means, according to Semitic usage in this connection, female chief, a female ruler of the tribe of Israel.
And the parallelism in the Hebrew is what carries it rather than the assertion. The rulers ceased in Israel stands against until I arose, a mother in Israel, so the mother occupies the position the rulers vacated. She is not a different kind of leader from the ones who ceased. She is the leader who arose when leadership had failed.
[See KATHARINE BUSHNELL]
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WHAT SISERA WAS DOING
The war has a subject the commentaries pass over, and the Hebrew is explicit about it.
Judges 5:30 puts the words in the mouth of Sisera's mother, waiting for a chariot that will not come, imagining the spoil: racham rachamatayim l'rosh gever. A womb or two for every warrior.
The word is racham, womb. Not maiden and not girl. The same root that gives rachamim, the womb-compassion the prophets use for God's own mercy, used here to count captured women by the part of them the captor wanted.
So this was a war of sexual predation, and Bushnell describes Sisera as a man who besides oppressing Israel generally was like a sleuth-hound in pursuing and capturing Israel's maidens.
And two women ended it. Deborah began the war and Jael finished it.
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THE GRAMMAR OF ERASURE
Judges 5:1 reads, in English, then sang Deborah and Barak.
The Hebrew verb is vatashar, and it is feminine singular. Then sang she, Deborah, and Barak. The verb is hers and Barak arrives after it as an addition, so the song is hers and the English levels it into a duet.
Bushnell notes that no Hebrew scholar could be ignorant that this is a feminine form, and that so far as she could learn no translator had ever indicated it.
The same happens at 5:6, where the English gives the highways were unoccupied. Bushnell reads orchot as the feminine plural participle of wandering, the female wanderers, and unoccupied as a word meaning to cease which is translated that way nowhere else in the Bible. Her sense: women had ceased altogether from going about, and men went only by crooked bypaths where they would not be seen.
Which is Deborah describing the country before she arose. Women could not travel because Sisera was hunting them, men kept to the back roads, and no ruler arose to stop it.
[See TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS]
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ONE READING THAT SHOULD BE MARKED AS CONTESTED
Bushnell also reads Judges 5:2, the Song's opening line, as for that freeing women freed Israel, on the ground that the subject is a feminine plural participle of the same verb as the predicate.
Read on its own it is persuasive, and it is not settled. That reading is hers and it is a minority one, and the entry marks it rather than carrying it as the plain sense. The line has defeated translators in every direction: a revelation was revealed, in the leading of the leaders, for the avenging of Israel, for that the leaders took the lead. The verb para means to loose, to let go, to set free.
And the case for Deborah does not need this verse and is not weakened if the majority reading holds, which is the reason to mark it. The feminine singular at 5:1 and the womb-count at 5:30 are not contested at all, and they carry the argument on their own.
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THE THREE DEFENSES
Each one concedes what it is offered to explain away.
The moon. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown hold that as a moon in relation to the sun, so woman shines not so much with light direct from God as light derived from man. Judges 4 runs the other way: God speaks to Deborah, Deborah speaks to Barak, Barak obeys Deborah. Bushnell's question is the whole of it. Why did God send Deborah to show Barak his duty, and not Barak to show Deborah.
The exceptional circumstance. That God used her because no men would lead. The text says otherwise: Barak was available and simply would not go without her, and forty thousand were available and had not lifted a spear or a shield. The problem was not an absence of men. It was an absence of leadership, and she supplied it.
The name. Deborah is a bee, and the bee is made charming. Bushnell keeps the sting: there was something of a sting in this woman, for evil-doers. Bees sting, and this one commanded armies.
[See THE GREAT HOST]
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BARAK'S REFUSAL IS THE CONFESSION
Read as weakness it is a puzzle, and read as recognition it is not.
Barak was about to lead ten thousand men. He would not fight God's war without God's prophet, and God's prophet was a woman, so his condition is not cowardice but an accurate reading of where the mandate sat.
Which makes his refusal the strongest witness in the chapter, because it comes from the man the restriction would have put above her.
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THE HUNTER RUN TO EARTH IN A WOMAN'S TENT
When Sisera fled he ran to the tent of Jael, and Bushnell catches the shape of it: a man out capturing women, in danger of being captured, runs to a woman for protection.
She gave him milk and covered him and drove a tent peg through his temple while he slept, and Deborah sings that Jael shall be blessed above women in the tent.
And miles off, his mother is still asking why the chariot delays, and her ladies answer that they must be dividing the spoil, a womb or two for every warrior.
The hunter of women is killed by a woman, and the song that records it was composed by the woman who commanded the war.
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She was prophet, judge, commander and poet at once, over all Israel, with no caveat from the narrator and no rebuke from God.
The chain runs God, then Deborah, then Barak, then the army. No man stands between God and her, no man filters her word, and no man permits her authority, which is why she cannot be processed as a woman whose authority was derived.
She is not the exception. She is the evidence, and what she is evidence of is that the restriction was never the design.
[See EXOUSIA · AUTHENTEIN]
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