Why Deborah’s Different
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Footnotes
See Lawrence E. Stager, “The Song of Deborah—Why Some Tribes Answered the Call and Others Did Not,” BAR 15:01.
For a fine study of the “judges” who do not “judge,” see Ellis Easterly, “A Case of Mistaken Identity: The Judges in Judges Don’t Judge,” BR 13:02. However, Easterly makes the same mistake most do when he says “only one judge—Deborah—in only one reference, judges in a legal sense.”
Endnotes
George Foote Moore, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Judges, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1895), pp. 112–113.
For a bibliography, see Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth, New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999), pp. 185–186.
This is an abbreviated and modified version of an earlier, more detailed study: Block, “Deborah Among the Judges: The Perspective of the Hebrew Historian,” in Faith, Tradition, and History: Old Testament Historiography in Its Near Eastern Context, ed. Alan R. Millard, James K. Hoffmeier and David W. Baker (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), pp. 229–253.
Deleting v. 5 as secondary, Moore found the weight of this evidence so convincing that he argued for translating
This is an expression used by Marc Brettler (“The Book of Judges: Literature as Politics,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 [1989], p. 407).
For Ugaritic, see F. Charles Fensham, “The Ugaritic Root
For a detailed comparison of Samuel and Deborah, see Block, “Deborah Among the Judges,” pp. 237–238.
See Block, “‘Israel’-‘Sons of Israel’: A Study in Hebrew Eponymic Usage,” Studies in Religion 13 (1984), pp. 301–326.
James S. Ackerman (“Prophecy and Warfare in Early Israel: A Study of the Deborah-Barak Story,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 220 [1975], p. 11, following Robert G. Boling, Judges/Introduction, Translation and Commentary [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975], pp. 81, 95) has argued convincingly that the action described in v. 5 represents an exposition on v. 3a, “the Israelites cried out (
Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967), p. 380. For a detailed study of the Urim and Thummim, see Cornelius Van Dam, The Urim and Thummim: A Means of Revelation in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997).
In the last instance, the narrator adds an explanatory note concerning the reason why they went to Bethel: The Ark of the Covenant was there in those days, and Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, Aaron’s son, “stood before it.”
For a more detailed discussion and a bibliography on this subject, see Block, “Deborah Among the Judges,” pp. 247–249.
The generally more sermonic tone of Pseudo-Philo’s version of the Song of Deborah (32:1–18, esp. v. 14) and a concluding farewell address (33:1–6) lend support to this “prophetic” interpretation of Deborah’s role. For a translation of these texts, see Daniel J. Harrington in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 345–348.