Clough Judges Lesson 7

Song of Deborah – Judges 5

Judges 5, one of the great thanksgiving hymns in the Old Testament. This particular hymn that liberals and conservatives both agree is probably one of the most ancient documents that was incorporated in the Word of God. In other words, when it was placed in its final form in Samuel’s day or in David’s day the kind of format that we see here is a very ancient format; the vocabulary is ancient and it takes a lot of work to glean the message of this chapter. If you have a King James a lot of this is going to seem out of place because the way the King James is set up you can’t tell when you’re reading it whether it’s prose or poetry. If you have a modern translation you’ll see that it’s written in a poetic form and the translators have indicated it as such. If you have a King James let me remind you that this is poetry, not prose, and it should not be read like chapter 4. Chapters and 5 deal with the same historical event but chapter 5 is poetry and chapter 4 is prose.

When we come to poetry we actually come here to a song and it may strike you as a little unusual that we have a song here, but a song can be located at any point in Scripture. Exodus 15 is a psalm; all the psalms aren’t in the book of Psalms. The book of Psalms is a collection of psalms but it’s not an exhaustive collection. So here we have in this chapter actually a psalm. And when we are faced with a psalm we want to go back and review few categories about psalms. So I’m going to start by reviewing some of the categories of psalms. These categories are helpful in reading a psalm; you don’t just read psalms verse by verse, you read them unit by unit and you’ve got to be alert enough to pick out what the units are. The ASV, I don’t about the new one but the old one does a pretty good job of this; but it depends heavily on your translation. Whenever you deal with poetry in the Old Testament you are dealing with difficult literature and you’re dealing with a problem that puts a tremendous strain on the translators. The translator has two choices before him; he can translate to you what it literally says but the result of that kind of a translation is that it loses the poetic beauty. Or he can try to convey some of the poetic beauty and lose the literal translation. There’s no way to combine the two and every translation is basically trying to work these two conflicting goals. So keep that in mind in the book of Psalms. If you ever want to test or evaluate a modern translation the best place to test is the book of Psalms because it’s the hardest section. Anybody can translate prose, it takes a genius to translate poetry and come out with something in another language.

The psalms in the Hebrew have various categories and these categories are not rigid. Don’t think that all the psalms have got to be jammed, rammed and crammed into these boxes. But, these categories will help you read the Psalms. There are two basic broad categories in the Psalms. One we call the lament; the other we call the praise. Every psalm usually, again I say usually because these are not hard and fast rules, but basically every psalm will fall into one of these two categories. If it is a lament psalm it will tend to deal with a man or a nation in trouble and the emphasis will be on the difficulty and you’ll find a set format, there’ll be an introduction to the thing and there’ll be several sections that follow, and usually you’ll find somewhere in the psalm a description of the problem and a verbatim account of the prayer petition made about this lament. In other words, the focus of the psalm is on somebody’s problem. And lastly, toward the end of the psalm you sometimes will encounter praise. What is praise? Let’s straighten that up; let’s look at the word before we get to the category. What I’m talking about now is not the category, it’s the word praise and at the end of the lament psalm you do have some praise.

Praise in God’s word means a public recital of the acts of God; that’s what praise is. So when you hear these “praise the Lord” things in Christian circles you’re not hearing something that is Biblical because when somebody says that it’s just kind of a Christian lingo that’s developed. But you want to understand that in the Bible there is such a thing as “praise Jehovah,” that’s the word hallelujah, that’s what hallelujah means. Hallelujah is praise to “jah” or to Yahweh. That’s what the word means. And praise of God in the Bible is always a public thing, never private. This is one of the cases where you sit; usually we lay a lot of emphasis on the fact that each person is a believer, each person makes a private decision to receive Christ, not public, a private decision to receive Christ. But there is the other side and praise is a public activity before man.

Let me give you an illustration of this. You may never have thought of this but if you have shared Jesus Christ with a non-Christian, when a non-Christian understands that Christ died for his sins, he becomes a Christian not by being baptized, joining a church, giving money, etc. but becomes a Christian by trusting and receiving the finished work of Jesus Christ, if you have made that clear to someone you have praised Jehovah because you have recited to a person what God has done for him. If you describe your testimony, it could be praise if it is done properly, if you relate objective things that you can point to in your life that God has done, that is praise. There’s nothing wrong with Christian testimonies except what usually happens is that everybody tries to get in the king of the mountain game and outdo the other one and this is what has destroyed Christian testimony oftentimes. But if it is controlled and done from the filling of the Holy Spirit as unto the Lord, then Christian testimony is praise. Praise is simply a public recital of the works and acts of God. It could be a recital of God’s past acts; it could be a recital of His acts in the present. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s past or present or whether it’s in your personal life or someone else’s, anytime the objective works of God in history are recited before men, that in the Bible is praise. Usually, however the praise has more of a spontaneity to it and there is not just the narrative. In other words, the word “praise” also denotes not just a public recital but a public recital that is spontaneous and has for its intention to point men to this act.

So the lament psalms do end in praise; there is some praise in a lament psalm. But the emphasis of the psalm is lament. Don’t go way thinking that a lament psalm doesn’t have any praise in it; it does. And don’t think a praise psalm doesn’t have any lament in it. These elements are packed together. Just think of the fact what is major to the psalm and then you’ll have the two categories.

So those are the two large categories. Both of these can be divided. You can have an individual lament psalm of you can have a national lament psalm. In other words, if an individual person, David is in trouble, it will be an individual lament Psalms. There are several books written on this kind of thing, they are useful because it helps you study some of the vocabulary in the Hebrew. This is largely how a lot of Hebrew grammar and syntax has been discovered, by the use of these forms. You have a national lament; here’s where the nation is in trouble and you find psalms like that. All you have to do is just read the psalm and you can kind of fit it mentally into a category. So similarly you have an individual praise psalm and you have a national praise psalm. An individual praise psalm is when the individual praises God for something that has happened. Now these two categories of praise also are divided. First we have the lament, it can be individual or national; then we have the praise, it can be individual or national but there are two kinds of praise. There are what we call declarative praise psalms and descriptive praise psalms. Declarative praise psalm means that the person declares a specific answer to prayer or a specific act of God done on their behalf. So it is focusing on something that is specific. A descriptive praise psalm is a general thing. For example, you have some psalms that commemorate God is the Creator, we praise God who is the Creator, who causes the sun to set and so on; this kind of thing, that would be a descriptive praise psalm. In other words, the specificness is wiped out and it’s more general.

These are the kind of praise. The psalm that we’re going to see here, just forget we’re in the book of Judges, pretend we’ve gone over to the book of Psalms to adjust your mentality. Judges 5 is a psalm; it is a praise psalm, though of course there will be lament in it, but it is a praise psalm in that it commemorates and emphasizes an act of God on the part of the nation. It is a national praise psalm of the declarative type. Not only that but we can get finer, more detail with it; it is a victory hymn of which we have several in the Bible. Psalms 68 is also a victory hymn; Psalm 18 is a victory hymn, Psalm 18 is 2 Samuel 22. So these are some of the victory hymns in the Word of God, they are declarative because they declare a specific work of God. They are national because the battle was a national battle, they are not individual. And they are praise because they reflect back on this event that has come forth.

Here’s the outline of this psalm; I’ll fill in the details of the outline as I go. We’ll have to follow this, especially if you have the King James, when you get involved in the psalms try to get some other translation. If you take down some of these sections, then reread the psalm out thinking in terms of the sections…remember psalms are to be read by sections, not by verse. The first thing: the first verse is the title of the psalm; basically the title is part of inspired Scripture. The first main section extends from verses 2-8 and it is a proclamation to praise Jehovah or Yahweh. The second main section of the psalm goes from verses 9-30 and this section is the report of deliverance, in other words, this is the historical content that is behind the praise. They just didn’t go around singing praise God, praise God, praise God. They had a specific thing they were praising Him for, a specific act of grace. The third section is the last verse and it is a summary praise section, though it only consists of one verse. So these are the three main sections: a proclamation to praise Jehovah, a report of deliverance and a summary phrase.

Before we get involved in the details, so we don’t lose the forest for the trees, let’s just look at the psalm as though we are just looking at the sections; we are not interested in the details, just the section. Let’s look at verse 1, “Then sang Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam on that day, saying,” and this is their Psalm. [2] “Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves.” Now we’re starting in the proclamation of praise, “Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel…. [3] Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes; I, even I, will sing unto the LORD; I will sing praise to the LORD God of Israel.” And then in verse 4 it’s still continuing the major section, “LORD, when thou went out of Seir,” and so on, and it goes into the details of what happened. Verse 7, “The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.” And that ends the section, the proclamation to praise Jehovah. Think of Psalm 2; Psalm 2 opens a lot this way, Come all ye nations together and praise our God. This, by the way, shows monotheism incidentally because it shows that Jehovah is superior over the other people.

The second section begins in verse 9, “My heart” there’s Deborah speaking again and she goes back to where she started in verse 2, “My heart is toward the governors of Israel, that offered themselves willingly among the people.” Compare verse 9 with verse 2, “Praise ye the LORD for the avenging, when the people willingly offered themselves.” Then verse 9, “My heart is toward the governors that offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless ye the LORD.” So this starts a new section. And it goes all the way down dealing with the details until finally you have the lament in verse 30 of Sisera’s mother. And there’s a very poignant end to the psalm, ending with the word “spoil” in verse 30, and then in verse 31 we have the summary praise, “So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD; but let them who love Him be as the sun when he goes forth in his might. And the land had rest forty years.” “The land had rest forty years” is just a historical notice, but that first part of verse 31 is, you might say, a savage appeal that as Sisera got his brains based in, so Lord, may all Your enemies have their brains bashed in. Now this is the fierceness of the Old Testament and you want to look at this carefully. These people hated iniquity; they loved the Lord and they hated the opposite and this goes back to confirm what I have said again and again, you cannot have love unless you have hate toward its opposite. They both go together; you can’t have one without the other. This sentimental gobbledygook that does around in the name of ecumenicalism, love everybody, the trees, the rocks, the dogs, the cats and everything else, this isn’t love, this is not love at all because it doesn’t distinguish.

Let’s go back and pick up the details now. Judges 5:1 is the title, “Then sang Deborah and Barak, the son of Abinoam, on that day,” it says that they sang it “on that day,” meaning probable that it was composed to commemorate the event. It doesn’t have to literally be on that day because this expression, “on that day” if you check in the concordance means at that time. So it was generally in the time when they had the victory that we studied in the 4^th chapter, that this song was written. Who wrote it? We really don’t know, maybe Deborah herself wrote it, but nevertheless it was written. It was probably recorded in a strange lost book called the book of Jasher.

This is one of those lost books that disappeared from history, nobody has a copy of it, nobody knows where it went but we do know it existed. The book of Jasher is mentioned in Joshua 10:13, other passages in the Old Testament and it always refers to hymns that commemorate God’s victory. It appeared to be a manual that was used by the soldiers in the Israelite army and it appeared to have within it two things, and these two things blow your mind when you think this is a military manual. They had a recitation of what God had done in the middle of previous battles, and the second thing, they had instructions on how to dance. These two things were combined together.

Now lest this seem too strange, Cyrus Gordon has pointed out that it’s precisely the juxtaposition of these two things that characterized this age in history. The Greeks had a very similar thing and all the peoples in the Aegean area had this, a combination of on the one hand fierce military war and on the other hand the drama that accompanied this war. This is known as the age of the epics, or the heroic age. So it’s not at all unusual for these two elements to be combined, though to our way of thinking it’s unusual. You can think of David, David had in possession the book of Jasher; the book of Jasher in 1 Samuel is mentioned as a training manual for the young men; teenagers had to train out of this book. And you recall when David came back and the ark of the Lord came back to Jerusalem he began to dance and his wife thought he was a nut, so she evidently expressed it and God expressed His disapproval of his wife. You can read that little story in 1 Samuel 8. So Samuel book indicates that at least by that time the book of Jasher was still functioning as a military training manual. Apparently this is the source, it’s a guess, but chapter 5, Samuel probably took this from the book of Jasher.

Now let’s look at verse 2, here’s the first section, the proclamation to praise Jehovah. Let’s break this section down. Verses 2-8 is the major section but it can be broken down further into verses 2-3 and verses 4-8. Verses 2-3 is the invitation; and then you have a summary. So this constitutes the first block of the Psalm. The first block of the Psalm is a proclamation to praise Jehovah. The first section, the invitation to praise; the second an introductory summary.

Let’s look at verses 2-3, “Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves.” Now in the Hebrew this is redone and as I said, there will be extensive corrections, that’s the only thing I can do because we’re working out of the King James. “Praise ye the LORD” actually comes last in the sentence. What comes first in the sentence is “for the avenging of Israel,” now it couldn’t be further off than this. It doesn’t say “the avenging of Israel,” the original text says, “for the releasers who released.” This is the way it looks, “on account of,” read the word “for” as “on account of, “because of the releasers,” I’ll explain that in a moment, “because of the releasers who released.” Then parallel to that, also “for” or “because the people willingly offered themselves.”

Now that second phrase, “the people willingly offered themselves” was a phrase that we’ll see again in Gideon. It means people who volunteer to serve in the military. This was a holy war, they did not have a draft because when Joshua finished there was no national camp and Israel, you think of a marvelous thing, how Israel functioned for three centuries, think of it, America has only lasted two centuries, Israel functioned for three centuries without a draft and they depended completely on a volunteer army to be called together in times of crisis. These men, of course, were armed, they kept their guns at home, so to speak, and they knew how to use them. But they came together; the nearest thing we have in this country would be kind of a National Guard or sort of a militia. And this is how the nation fought its battles. It’s a marvelous thing when you think the other countries round about had standing armies. Well, this is one of the great freedoms that’s going to go when the king gets in there. When Solomon sits on the throne they’re going to have conscription, and it’s a giving up. Why do people have drafts? Because people won’t volunteer to serve in the army; it’s as simple as that. And this is what happened in the nation Israel, but at this time the praise here is that in the time of national distress thousands and thousands of people gave their lives, so to speak, for the service. They came voluntarily to serve in the military. That’s what that “the people willingly offered themselves.”

Now what about the “releasers who released.” This is a hard word and we can’t be dogmatic what’s going on here; this is the trouble with this psalm, it’s got a lot of words that only occur once or twice in the rest of the Bible so you’re kind of between a rock and a hard place in finding out what’s going on. But “the releasers” is used for men with long hair; they released their barbers and they let their hair grow long. Now before you vibrate too much let me explain why. The reason why the hair was allowed to grow was because at that time it was considered a vow to God and the hair became typical of a man’s strength. So he would allow his hair to grow, the long hair. Now we realize from Corinthians that long hair is a relative term. The reason why so many people get uptight about long hair today is because ladies are wearing shorter hair than they used to. So before you gripe too much just remember the Bible is laying forth a relative distinction. The only reason the Bible says something in 1 Corinthians about hair length is to keep the sexual differences clear; it’s important in Scripture, and so it lays forth the rule that the man’s hair, on the average, is to be shorter than the woman’s hair. That’s the rule of Scripture. So the reason why some of the men appeared to have long hair is simply by comparison, the ladies have short hair. If the ladies had hair the length they had in the New Testament it wouldn’t be a problem.

So we have long hair, but this long hair is a sacred long hair. It is the long hair of Samson; it is this kind of long hair, the hair that was allowed to grow as an outward testimony to a vow. So these men evidently, “for the avenging of Israel” isn’t this at all, Deborah is asking for praise, praise God for two things. One, that when the people were asked to come to serve in the military to fight against the Canaanites they came, and two, for the long-hairs. And the long-hairs means there were vows made, apparently these men would vow that they would not go back home until the enemy had been defeated. They lived in a day when they fought wars to win, we don’t any more, but that was the day when you could say I will not return home until we win the war. We have this rule back in the Old Testament that the war was to be fought until it was won. And these men vowed.

So that’s the object of the praise and that’s the theme you’ll see recur over and over in the psalm. Deborah is amazed, here she is but a woman and she faces this mass disaster as we saw last time, what’s happening if you picture it geographically is that you have Israel cut in half. There’s the valley of Esdraelon that comes down like this and the river Kishon flows out to the Mediterranean through this. Then there’s another valley over here and you have these various valleys and the actually act as a cut, so that the Canaanites could run their chariots back and forth and essentially sever off this part of the nation. It was cut off. Deborah was in the south and Deborah had to unite the nation and reunite it across this gap and Israel had no weapons that they could use in the field against the Canaanite chariot force. Militarily they were behind the eight-ball, they had no weapon systems that would answer to this thing.

So here’s the disaster: one woman against a great disaster of this sort, and the woman calls upon God, she’s a faithful godly woman and it’s apparently in a day when all the men are hiding in the caves so God calls a woman forth and Deborah gets out there and she says listen, these are enemies of Jehovah and if Jehovah’s promises are as valid in our generation as they were in the past, let’s go get ‘em, and she called for a service, she called for ten thousand men to assemble at mount Tabor. These ten thousand men came and over, apparently forty thousand came in answer to Deborah’s cry. So this is what this woman is giving thanks for. She had no power to conscript, she had no draft board to work through, she had no means whatever except the response of the believers who were concerned about the national destiny. So this is why she has praise.

Then in Judges 5:3 she turns to the kings of the world, “Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes;” this is the universal appeal, the God of Israel will become the God of the nations and so the nations better listen to what kind of a God Israel has, “Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes, I, even I, will sing unto the LORD; I will sing praise to the LORD God of Israel.” By the way, that’s an example, for those of you who like to study literature, that’s an example of what they call stair-like parallelism. In other words, in Hebrew poetry you have maybe a sentence like this, it’s plus, plus, plus, and you have a sentence minus, minus, minus, that’s opposite, in other words you have a parallel, thus, thus, thus, and then they deny it here, it’s a contrast; this is contrasting parallelism. There is also a parallelism where you have two plus statements like this, but this statement is what they call stair light and it goes like this, each sentence gets longer and longer, it’s a literary effect that is being used in this psalm.

So she says “I will sing,” and then it’s a short sentence, “I will sing praise to the LORD God of Israel,” she says, and the word praise there is the word translated as song, and it means, with all due apologies to people who don’t like it, it means singing with a musical accompaniment. That is the name of the root, that’s what the root means, sing to a musical accompaniment. That’s exactly what the verb means and you can check it in any Hebrew lexicon. So the music, she calls for the band in other words, she calls for the musical instruments to come forth and lead in this hymn.

Now in verses 4-8 we have the introductory summary. Verses 4-8 can also be subdivided. This is why I advise you to mark this in the margins of your Bible or something as we go along. We’ve had the large section, verses 2-8, that’s the first section of the Psalm; we’ve broken that down into verses 2-3, and 4-8. Verses 2-3 was the invitation to praise; verses 4-8 is the introductory summary but this is made in turn of several sections: verses 4-5 and 6-8. Verses 4-5 deal with what God did; verses 6-8 what the need was. So you have here the act of God and here you have the need of man. Notice how this is pitted together. Here’s grace, grace all the way in design of the Psalm. All right, what did God do?

Verses 4-5, “LORD,” it turns, by the way, we don’t know how this was done, whether the Levite priests did this or not, but it appears that they would sing, they would do this by choirs and they would sing in shifts, choirs that would represent the kings of the earth. Verse 3, “Hear, O ye kings,” and then whoever was doing the singing would shift and either face the tabernacle of face something that would represent Jehovah. Maybe they would turn up, open their hands to heaven, so at this point it shifts, her address in verse 3 is to the kings. Now she says, “LORD,” “O LORD,” she’s saying, “when You went out of Seir, when You marched out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water.” There’s that stair light parallelism again, the heavens dropped, it doesn’t say what they dropped but then the next sentence extends it, yes, the clouds dropped water. [5] “The mountains melted from before the LORD, even that Sinai from before the LORD God of Israel.” What she’s doing here is linking the Theophany of Mount Sinai, when God came down to give the Law, with the deliverance of her generation, and she says you came forth in mighty [can’t understand word].

We don’t know what form the Lord assumes, but there are numerous hints in this psalm that a natural catastrophe was used to defeat the Canaanites, and she, in verses 4-5 is commemorating this. And she sees in the natural catastrophe God Himself coming out of Edom. Edom on this chart would be here; here’s Israel, here’s the Dead Sea, Edom is down here. When Arnold Fruchtenbaum was here remember what he said about Christ coming not to Jerusalem first but coming to Pizza first, this is another one of those evidences when God, when He comes, is always depicted as coming from the southeast into Israel, and here it is again, “LORD, when you went out of Seir,” in other words He was in the southeast, He came out of that and came from that place to Israel. And He was accompanied by tremendous things, “the earth trembled, the heavens dropped water, the mountains melted, here again we’re up against a vocabulary problem but the better translation being “the mountains streamed,” it doesn’t mean the rock melted, necessarily, it means that the mountains just took the torrents of water that were coming down out of the end of verse 4, “the clouds dropped water,” and as a result all these wadis, remember this is in the dry season, and I said that Judges 4 was that when Sisera deployed his chariot force into this wadi he wasn’t deploying it in the rainy season, he would have been a nut to do this because the chariots would get stuck in the mud. Well, he didn’t do that; he deployed all his chariot force down into the wadi. Now what is a wadi? A wadi is a stream that only operates during the rainy season, and so he was safe, there’s this smooth bottom and so on and they used this for the chariots. Well, he committed his total chariot force to this wadi, and now that’s why this verse is given. What He did is He drew Sisera to get all of his chariots in this dry river bed and when he had them all in there then God dropped the rain down, and here it comes, it streams down the mountains and catches his entire chariot…wipes his whole chariot force out. So this is what the mountains melting means, the mountains literally streamed with the water that was coming down from them.

Now Judges 5:6-8, here’s the need, verses 4-5 gave you a quick introduction to what God did, verses 6-8 is why he had to do it. “In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travelers walked through byways. [7] The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.

[8] They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: was there a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel?”

She describes in these three verses the national crisis. The first thing she says in verse 6 is that “the days of Shamgar,” he was the guy mentioned in Judges 3:31, this is the man that kind of ministered between Ehud, who was one of the judges who had a very spectacular ministry and the next one, Deborah. So Shamgar is living, but Shamgar does not affect national deliverance nor does Jael, this woman, though she’s going to be commemorated for what she did in this hymn. “The highways were unoccupied,” this is the word that means the main avenues of commerce and it means that economically the nation was strangled. They couldn’t ship produce and goods along the main highways because the Canaanites controlled them, they had their chariot forces along the main road. And so food could not be exchanged, goods could not be exchanged; linen, clothing and other articles could not be exchanged. So we have here the complete economic disruption of the nation, that’s what it means. “…the travelers walked through byways.” It means that if you wanted to go from point A to point B you had to go through the woods, you couldn’t go on the main routes, you had to sneak around. And this was the condition; the Canaanites in the northern sector had complete access to all the highways, all the avenues of commerce. It completely tore up the nation economically in their commerce.

Now Judges 5:7, “The inhabitants of the villages ceased,” this refers to an agricultural disaster, in other words, on the open plain of the farms the Canaanites had run their chariots over and controlled that farmland. And so it meant that the peasants who had farmed the land had gone up into the hills, because at that time the hills were forested, and they were rocky and the Canaanites stayed out of them, the Israelites probably ambushed them and so on. But the farm was seen dismantled, so not only do you have your commerce in a bad way, you have your farm produce knocked out. So the nation is in a problem, a tremendous disaster here. Don’t pass this by when you read verses 6-7 and just say oh, isn’t that sweet, they had a few problems. Verses 6-7 spell national disaster; everything is going, food is going, business is going, the economy dropped because of this thing. So at that time, this is when the nation turns to God.

But she adds, Judges 5:8, “They,” and here’s her explanation to what happened, “They chose new gods,” that’s what happened, Deborah says, and “then war was in the gates.” The word “gates” is an economy for the city, the urban areas. The gates would refer to the city council, the mayor so to speak, and the city council was done in the gates. So when you see the gates, for example if you’ve ever sung Handel’s Messiah, “Open, O ye gates, and Messiah, the King of Glory shall come in,” it’s not talking about the literal gate on the wall, he’s talking about the fact that the people that are in charge of the gates open the city up and declare their allegiance to the coming Messiah; that’s what that’s talking about. So here again you have these gates. “…there was war in the gates,” in other words the war was against these villages and towns. The peasants had come in from the field to make a last ditch stand in the towns. But she says, “Was there a shield or appear seen among forty thousand of Israel?” Again we have this same recurrent theme that they did not have adequate weapons. There are two schools of thought on why; the Philistines may have disarmed them. Another idea is that they themselves just got sloppy, they were like Americans they are today, do everything you can to undermine and destroy the military. This is what the National Council specializes in and all the liberal theologians, just tear apart the military. So here we have the lack of weapons. This is why Shamgar, when he finally goes to fight the war he has to use an ox goad, an eight foot long thing and he hangs about 300 Philistines on the end of it. It sounds kind of gruesome but you have to realize that that’s all the weapons he had. That’s the way we’ll be when they get through with all the gun legislation. So this is what happened there and this is the problem, they had an economic disaster due to foreign military pressure and they could not fight back because they had no weapons, and probably no will. Mental attitude played a role here too.

Now in Judges 5:9 we have the beginning of the next section. And this section goes on quite regularly, all the way down to verse 30. This is the report of the details of a deliverance and you want to notice here the principle of grace. God does what they can’t do; that’s the lesson in the book of Judges, that’s the lesson that you can appropriate in your life. If you have a problem in your life as a believer, is God a different God than He is here? Don’t you worship the same God that the judges worshipped? Is God different in 1971 in Lubbock than He was back then in the nation Israel? Is God the same God? He can do today what He did then, and He does it easily when believers get at the end of their rope and realize that they can’t do it; that’s the time when God moves. So in verse 9 we have the start of the section. The first subsection of this are the first three verses, verses 9-11 and it’s a brief summary of exhorting the listener, in other words starting in verse 9 she’s going to go into all the details and some of these are going to be kind of gory details, but that’s epic literature again; this is the heroic age.

In verses 9-11 she’s saying look, when you listen to these details listen carefully. So Judges 5:9-11 is directed to listeners. “My heart” Deborah says, “is toward the governors of Israel,” the word “governor means military commanders, these are the men that commanded the troops when they fought against the Canaanites, she says “my heart,” in this hymn of victory, “is to those military officers that offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless ye the LORD. Now that’s where her heart is and that’s why she says this. And in verse 10 she turns right around to the citizens of the nation, and she says, “Speak, ye that ride on white asses,” that means those of you who are in the upper class, “ye that sit in judgment,” it’s not sit in judgment, “you who sit in your homes,” this would be the middle class, “and walk by the way,” the low class. In other words, I don’t care, she says, what economic strata you have, you owe something to those men who purchased your freedom. This is a tremendous victory hymn; it’s a hymn of praise to the military. And she says every strata of society owes it to those men, and she’s going to chew out some people like you never saw people chewed out so far in the book of Judges, because they failed to volunteer their services to the military.

Here in Judges 5:9-11 she is preparing them and she’s saying look, I want you, I don’t care who you are she says, I don’t care where your economic station is in life, you owed it to those men that got out there when you were sitting at home, they went out and they offered their lives for your freedom. Verse 11, “They are delivered,” now that’s not the problem there, the best meaning of verse 11 is this: “from the noise of archers in the places of drawing water,” what does this mean. It means that the soldiers are home and they’re involved in the domestic pursuit of drawing water and farming, and she says you can hear the voices of those soldiers, they’re back home, the war has been won and they are back home. So she says that…[tape turns] … because of this, “there shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the LORD,” in other words, the soldiers who have returned home from the battle, who are now at the place of drawing water, they’re the archers in the army, by the way, this shows you one weapon they had, bows and arrows, that was the one weapon system that they relied on.

She says those people, who went out and fought, are now back, they won the battle, they’re back, and wherever they go they tell the citizens, do you know what God did for us in that battle, do you know what He did? And instead of exploiting the human heroics they exploit the divine heroics. And these warriors would come home telling all these tails of how Jehovah helped them in the middle of battle. These warriors are coming home and they’re actually praising Jehovah for how He helped them in the middle of battle, there, at the places where they’re drawing the water in verse 11, “there shall they rehearse,” the word “rehearse” means to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat “the righteous acts of Jehovah.” “The righteous acts of Jehovah” refers to His assistance in the middle of the battle. “…even the righteous acts of the inhabitants of his villages in Israel,” it’s not “toward the inhabitants,” it means the righteous acts that were directed for the salvation and freedom for the nation, “then shall the people of the LORD go down to the gates.” What’s that referring to? It means that because God has given them the victory the soldiers have come home; the enemy no longer has control of the lowlands. Now you all who are trapped in the forest, come on down to your gates and once again get your freedom that was purchased for you by these brave men who went into the service for you; that’s what she’s saying, “for then shall the people of the LORD go down to the gates,” they’ll come down from the highlands, go down into the valleys, and once again control the roads, build their economics, build their commerce, build their farms again because they have freedom.

Now in Judges 12-15a we have second subsection. It’s a log of the register of the tribes who obeyed; in other words, those who did answer the call to come and serve in the service are going to be duly recognized in this section. “Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song: arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam.” Apparently these are intended to be the words of God Himself addressed to both Deborah and Barak. If I read this to you in the Hebrew you’d see how staccato it is, very, very quick, very short words over and over, this occurs in this, very quick, it’s very staccato and very quick, it excites them, and I imagine this was done through grammar also when this song was sung. “Awake, awake” doesn’t mean she’s sleeping, “awake, awake” in the Hebrew means to start moving, that’s what it means. In other words, Christians you’ve got your promises, now for heaven’s sake start moving, don’t just sit there, use them. That’s what “awake” means. “Awake, awake,” and in this case what you’re supposed to so is utter a song. “Arise Barak, and lead thy captivity captive,” that is an expression which means parade your prisoners of war. In other words, show the people the fruits of victory, let them have an empirical evidence of what I have done for you, “parade the prisoners, thou son of Abinoam.”

Judges 5:13, “Then he made him that remaineth have dominion over the nobles among the people,” now this is really something else here, what it means is that God, Jehovah, has given him the command, and it is a grace command because remember in chapter 4 what Barak’s attitude was? “Oh Deborah, if you’ll go with me I’ll go, but if you don’t go I’m not going,” a real brave man, and so he brought Deborah along as kind of a good luck charm. Deborah went along with him but the point here in verse 13 is … [words missing, end of verse says: “the LORD made me have dominion over the mighty.”]

Judges 5:14, “Out of Ephraim was there a root of them against Amalek;” the first tribe that was obedient was Ephraim, Ephraim is located right here, and here’s the sight of the battle so Ephraim is close, Ephraim was there; “a root of them against Amalek” simply means that this was at one time the territorial headquarters of Amalek, Ephraim was just known by this, the people whose roots is Amalek. After Ephraim a second tribe that was obedient that answered the call, “after thee, Benjamin, among thy people; out of Machir, came down governors,” this is west Manasseh, Benjamin is down here, you have Manasseh split, remember the half-tribe of Manasseh, one on the left side of the Jordan, one on the right side, east and west, like East and West Germany, and Machir is the name for west Manasseh, that’s the third tribe that was loyal and faithful, “and out of Zebulun they that handle the pen of the writer.” Zebulun is one of the tribes in the north.

So these are the tribes that are immediately affected, and they did come out of the trees and out of the forest literally to gather together to do battle. The laws word, “they that handle the pen of the writer” is an expression for the quartermaster, the man who keeps the records in the army and so on; this is just a poetic way of saying it. In verse 14 you have Ephraim and it’s a poetic edge, what is Ephraim characterized by? Well, that’s the place where Amalek once had his headquarters. And Machir, you came down and you contributed your military commanders, and Zebulun the quartermasters. Now it doesn’t literally mean, necessarily, that all the quartermasters came out of Zebulun. It just simply is a fact of recognition that these tribes, each one contributed something to the war.

Judges 5:15, “And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah;” and this is another tribe that was loyal, “even Issachar, and also Barak: he was sent on foot into the valley.” Notice he didn’t even have a horse to ride, he had to go on the byways too to assemble his troops. “For the divisions of Reuben,” now that’s the end, the period of the end of valor, that’s the end of the commemoration of the tribes that were obedient, that answered the call to serve in the military. Now beginning in the last half of verse 15 and running down to verse 17 we have her chew out the tribes that failed to answer her call for military service. “For the divisions of Reuben there were great thoughts of heart.” It apparently means, we’re in a vocabulary difficulty again, it means the irrigation ditches.

Where is Reuben? Reuben is on the other side over here, he isn’t immediately affected, Reuben is over here some place, and so is Gad and east Manasseh; you have these three tribes over here and they’re nice and comfortable, they’re not being harassed by the Canaanites, why should they risk their necks to go help their brethren. But what is the unity of the nation Israel? The unity of the nation Israel is a spiritual unity defined by the will of God. And it means that every Israelite has an obligation to his brother to come to his aid. But notice the reasons here, and these same reasons that will plague you in your Christian life so pay attention to them. In other words, these are the same kind of reasons that will hinder you and you can give all sorts of reasons why you don’t want to do what God wants and you don’t want to step out by faith and be challenged and lead an exciting life for Christ, you just want to stay at home. Well, this is some of the reasons, “For the divisions of Reuben” or actually “in the ditches,” in other words, these are farmers over there, they are growing grain because most of the beef from Israel came from this area, it’s ranchland and also some farmland over there. So they were over there on their farms and they were giving “great thoughts of heart,” this is sarcasm, oh you Reubenites, you sat there, you had nightly debates about whether you were going to come help me; meanwhile these men went out without debate and they won the war, and after the war you’re still wondering whether you should go. Probably had all the news commentators describing how they should and how they shouldn’t.

Judges 5:16, “Why abode you among the sheepfolds,” Deborah asks, “to hear the bleatings of the flocks?” See, it’s absolute sarcasm, what were you waiting for, and it’s double sarcasm because what was the call in the ancient world to come fight? It was the bleating of the trumpet and so she says what were you waiting for, the sheep to call you? It’s tremendously intense sarcasm here. In other words, they were sitting back and having these great discussions about the profound defeats of the war between Canaan and Israel and she is just sarcastic, she says why don’t you wait for the sheep to call you, maybe they’ll blow some trumpet [can’t understand word]. “For the divisions of Reuben there were great searchings of heart.” Now there’s not a one to one correspondence with today’s service problem, don’t get me wrong. There are problems for the Christian in the military and how he handles the problem, but in this case there wasn’t; they had a clear mandate from the Word of God, absolutely no question whatever.

The proper analogy of verse 16 in our Christian life is when you know what God wants you to do, there’s no ifs, ands or buts about it, it’s perfectly clear, and you wonder, well I wonder whether the Bible really means this, and we go through all the eisegesis to try to flip the text to mean something it doesn’t mean, and God would have this answer given to us, what are you waiting for, the pages to come up and write themselves on your eyeballs. Sarcasm!

Judges 5:17, “Gilead abode beyond Jordan:” in other words again, here’s Gilead, and that’s east of Jordan and they’re comfortable, they’re not being bothered by the Canaanites, so don’t get involved, stay at home, you’re safer at home. They could think of a lot of things, after all, if we don’t stay at home there’ll be no food grown. You can imagine the excuses that came up. “… and why did Dan remain in ships?” This is a materialism lust, Dan had a few ports down here along the Mediterranean and he was engaging in trade; in fact some of the Greek documents indicate that the [can’t understand word] came over and had contact with the Greeks, whether they are actually the tribe of Dan or not is something else, but nevertheless, they had a thriving merchant import-export business going. Get involved in a war… I’ve got my business, what’s going to happen to my business if I go to war. Don’t get involved. So “why did Dan remain in his ships. Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his breaches.” Here you have just complete sarcasm, complete sarcasm.

Judges 5:18, now we skip to the tribes who were obedient, once again, just a brief notice, two in particular deserve our merit. Verses 18-22, the next section, his deals with the battle itself and we’re introduced to the battle with two key tribes. Why? Because of Judges 4:6, these were the tribes that sacrificed; these were the tribes that really contributed the main core of men. “Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field.” Do you see the poetic irony of this thing; here’s Reuben over there having his discussions whether he should get involved, and Gad’s over there, and Dan’s down having his export business going on, etc. Meanwhile there are men dying on the battlefield and more of them will probably die because they are not being supported. So you can see right here in the book of Judges what’s happening to the unity that we saw in the book of Joshua? It’s fragmenting. It’s falling apart, and when that spiritual unity dissolves at the end of this book, what is the spiritual unity going to be replaced by? An absolute dictatorship. The political and social freedoms will have been dissolved because, please note, the political freedoms are a result of spiritual freedoms. And if you go into spiritual bondage you must go into political bondage; the two go together, always and any way, and here’s a key illustration of it, the book of Judges. Zebulun and Naphtali risked their lives on the battlefield.

Judges 5:19, here come the kings, “The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo; they took no gain of money.” That’s a notice put in there because these kings were very greedy; see in the ancient world you couldn’t pay all your soldiers, so how did you pay them? You paid them by the booty that you’d collect in the battle, and so they came down there expecting this, and so what she’s saying is they didn’t get a dime. They came down there, oh boy, are we going to wallop these dumb Jews, we’re just going to clobber them, they can’t get all their tribes up here and we’ve got our whole chariot force right here in the wadi; we’ll just mow them down; you’ve mowed the lawn before, we’re going to mow the Jews down right here. Then when we mow them down, Jews have money and clothes, you’re going to take it. So this is a notice that they took no gain of their money.

Judges 5:20, “They fought from heaven;” here’s the epic cosmic edition, “They fought from heaven,” this is poetry and it has to be read as such, “They fought from heaven, the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” In other words, this is a reference to supernatural help that God gave the army at the critical hour, just like that long day of Joshua in Joshua 10. And this is characteristic of holy war in the Old Testament, the principle is when believers are faithful to go into battle with what they have got, God makes up the difference. That’s a rule that many of you can give testimony to in your personal life. When you step out by faith with the confidence that’s where God wants you to be, God takes up the slack, and here God fought from heaven. There was an astral and kind of cosmic dimension of this battle; He gave them certain nature forces on their behalf. That’s very important, by the way, because the pagans worshiped these forces. And so Jehovah was the one who controlled the nature forces.

Judges 5:21, “The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon.” And the word “sweep away” is a very graphic word, it’s literally used to sweep dirt out of a building, and so here this pictures the water come cascading down at the crucial moment of the battle, all the chariots are in the wadi, they’re trapped in the wadi, and then boom, cloudburst, and then here comes the river streaming down and it just sweeps the chariots and bye-bye Sisera. “O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength. [22] Then were the horsehoofs broken by the means of the pransings, the pransings of their mighty ones.” The point of verse 22 is there was utter panic in the ranks of Sisera’s mounted force. When they saw the waters coming they had tried desperately to get out of the way and they had horses going 360 degrees, all over the place, just an absolute mess, catastrophe, chaos, and this is what God did, verses 18-22. He gave them the victory.

The next section, verses 23-30, the destruction of Sisera. Please notice, I want you to notice the proportion of the verses; notice which gets the proportion, that’s important. The last section is the one that gets the proportion and that is characteristic of this kind of literature, in other words, all the gory details of the slaughter of the enemy is described, and we’re going to have it. First in verse 23 she has somebody else to chew out, “Curse ye Meroz,” Meroz was a city, it was a city located near the sea of battle and apparently what had happened was that the water came cascading down this wadi and Sisera was able to get out of the way, and he went right by this time, and she says why didn’t you people in Meroz come out and kill him, you let him go right by your town.

So she says, “Curse ye, Meroz, said the angel of the LORD, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof;” the angel of the Lord is the informant between God and Deborah, it’s actually the preincarnate Christ, and so the instructions from God to Deborah, Deborah expresses it but this shows you the source, means a curse, and you say isn’t this rather severe? Not at all, what was the will of God? To annihilate the Canaanites, and these people from materialism lust, that was Dan, laziness and other reasons refused to follow the will of God. They just sat there and other believers had to take up the slack and go out there and get their knocks. So Sisera comes trotting by, they probably offered him Kool-Aid on the way, so she says “Curse ye, Meroz, said the angel of the LORD, curst you bitterly the inhabitants thereof,” and this “curse bitterly” is the Hebrew verb with the infinitive absolute after it, and whenever you have this construction it intensifies the main force of that verb, the main mood, and so when he says “curse you” this means curse as you can’t curse, in other words, curse to the limit, “because they came not to the help of the LORD, to the help of the LORD against the mighty.”

There’s a treasure here in verse 23 and you want to be able to see it. Notice who is being helped, literally. It’s the soldiers, but notice who is replaced by the world soldier here in verse 23: the word “Lord.” You see how closely God identifies Himself with believers who are actively doing His will. Remember what Paul did to the believers before he became a Christian, and what did Jesus say on the Damascus Road. Saul, why do you persecute believers? No, Saul, why do you persecute Me. And so here again we have the absolute identity between God and the faithful; you “came right not to the help of Jehovah, you came not to the help of Jehovah against the mighty.”

Then in Judges 5:24, what Meroz missed, you see, this is irony here, Meroz was a city of Jews and they could have had that wonderful thing, it could have happened to them where they could have gotten credit for killing Sisera, but no, they blew it and so one woman, who is not a Jew, is going to obtain the credit. And in verse 24 she received a blessing, “Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.” For some of you this may come as a shock but that same expression, verse 24, is used of Mary in the New Testament. So if you’ve been used to thinking that Mary was a woman that was this pious saint, that couldn’t be anything else but blessed, you have a rude awakening. That’s not what this means; this woman was, if anything, kind of crude actually, Jael, she’s a liar and she’s a deceiver, and an assassin. And notice what she said, “Blessed is Jael,” because she accomplished the will of God in spite of all the rough edges, in spite of the fact that this woman had a sin nature, in spite of the fact that she probably couldn’t darken a church door because she’d be thrown out for her crudity. Nevertheless it’s this woman that’s blessed above the women. Why? Because in the critical hour it was this woman who obeyed the Word. [25, “He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.”

Judges 5:26, “She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples. [27] At her feet he bowed,” it actually means he collapsed, the word “bowed is collapsed, “he collapsed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he collapsed, he fell,” and in the Hebrew I can’t denote this thing but it’s staccato, here’s one of these staccato things, very quick, you can get a little bit of it in the English. See how small sentence fragments here, “At her feet he collapsed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he collapsed, he fell, and where he collapsed, there he fell down” and the last word is not dead, the last word is passive and it means violently destroyed. In other words, you might say there’s a savage spirit of exultation in this, there he is, there’s our enemy, there’s the man that ruined the north, there’s the man that was responsible for destroying our business in the highway, there’s the man who was responsible for destroying our farms, there’s the man who was responsible for depriving us of our freedom and there he sits, crushed in his head, lying at her feet. There’s a tremendous savage spirit of exultation, happy to see this man killed.

Now in Judges 5:28-30 there’s a poignant close to this whole exultation; it’s a very clever close and it goes back to a little phrase in verse 7. Do you know how Deborah introduced herself? She said “I, Deborah, arose, I arose a mother in Israel.” Now she evidently was a literal mother, an older woman and she knew what a mother thinks in battle, and now in verse 28, very cleverly she reproduces how the mother on the other side felt. So from verses 28-30 you have a lament, it’s kind of a psalm within a psalm. And it’s a lament about the mother of Sisera; and as a mother she knows how a mother feels when her son is in war, so she places this, again to underscore the savage history that they attained over Sisera.

Judges 5:28, “The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice,” and the word means screamed, “Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariots?” In other words, she has an omen that her son is never going to come back to see her again. [29] “Her wise ladies answered her” these are her counselors literally, these are, you might say the court psychiatrists come by, and they say oh calm down, you just need a few downers and you’ll be all right, “her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself.” And this is the counsel they give, they’re going to suggest to her, don’t get upset, [30] Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey;” in other words the reason your son isn’t back yet is they’re out there dividing up the prey, “to every man a damsel or two;” this is for sex, this is what the word means, they’re having their parties out in the field, “to Sisera a prey of divers colors,…”

Now notice the emphasis in verse 30, you can tell it’s the mother that’s involved here, it’s a woman’s perspective, the main thing a man would be thinking about is the damsel, you know, who’s going to get who, blondes, brunettes, and so on. So that would be things from a man’s perspective but from a woman’s perspective it’s the cloth, oh that sweet embroidery of the Jews, I can get some of that now, I can get some of that and so on, and they play this up to her, think of it, he’s going to come home with all these wonderful clothes, colors of needlework on both sides, and so on, “a prey of divers colors of needlework, of divers colors of needlework on both sides,” and the last thing is a confused section which is very difficult to translate: “meet for the necks of them that take the spoil.” So the end of this section, the end of verse 30, is the destruction of Sisera and this ends that large section that began in verse 9. From verse 9-30 is the historical account of the deliverance of God. God did it, that’s what verse 20 is about; God did that. And remember from last week what also did God do? Remember in Judges 4 when Barak said oh Deborah, if you go with me I’ll go but if you don’t go I won’t, remember what Deborah said back to him? I’ll go but you are going to lose out on wiping out your opponents because he’s going to be wiped out by a woman, and here you have the playing out of God’s providence in the middle of this battle.

And finally the summary phrase, and this is still part of the psalm, “So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goes forth in his might.” It’s an appeal for judgment. And we conclude here because the book of Judges is going to start a new thing with Gideon; Gideon is going to face the same kind of thing but never again after this 5^th chapter will you ever meet the Canaanites in force again; this is the end of the Canaanite force. Basically they exist in small enclaves after this but the main force has been broken and shattered in this tremendous and violent climactic encounter. “And the land had rest forty years.”