Judges 4
The prophetess Deborah summons Barak to battle against Sisera's iron chariots; the victory is given into the hand of a woman, as Deborah prophesied.
Summary
The people do evil again. The Lord sells them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, whose general is Sisera, commanding nine hundred iron chariots from Harosheth-hagoiim. Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, is judging Israel from under her palm tree in the hill country of Ephraim. She summons Barak son of Abinoam and delivers the Lord's command: take ten thousand men from Naphtali and Zebulun to Mount Tabor; the Lord will draw out Sisera with his chariots to the Kishon and deliver him into your hand. Barak replies that he will go only if Deborah goes with him. She says she will go, but the road will not lead to his glory — the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.
Barak musters ten thousand men at Kedesh; Deborah goes with him. Heber the Kenite has separated from his clan and pitched his tent by the oak of Zaanannim near Kedesh. Sisera is told that Barak has gone up to Mount Tabor. He gathers all his chariots and all his men and moves to the Kishon. Deborah commands: up, for this is the day the Lord gives Sisera into your hand. Barak comes down from the mountain. The Lord throws Sisera and all his chariots and army into a panic. Sisera gets down from his chariot and flees on foot while Barak pursues. Sisera comes to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. She comes out to meet him, invites him in, gives him milk, covers him. He tells her to say, if anyone asks, that there is no man here. He falls asleep. Jael takes a tent peg in one hand and a hammer in the other and drives the peg through his temple into the ground. When Barak arrives in pursuit, Jael shows him Sisera dead with the tent peg through his head. Jabin is subdued and destroyed.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.