I say You are gods: Remnants of an Israelite heroic age in Judges 5

Towards the beginning of the Song of Deborah, the Israelite bard makes the following declaration: yivhar elohim chadashim (Judges 5:8a). Due to the grammatical ambiguity of the verb’s subject, interpreters are divided on the meaning of the sentence. Literally, the text reads “He chose new gods” or “God chose new ones.” If elohim is taken to be the subject, a direct object is supplied by contextual ques: “God chose new leaders” (NET, NIV). If elohim is instead taken to be the direct object, as is most often the case, it must be the people of Israel that chose new gods, that is, new objects of worship (KJV, NRSV, ESV, Robert Alter).¹

Israel chose new gods

This latter reading follows the Deuteronomistic pattern by which Israel’s service of deities other than Yahweh results in foreign oppression. It is the people’s decision to “do what was evil in the Lord’s sight,” after all, that “sells Israel into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan” for two decades (Judges 4:1-3). There is little doubt that this apostasy included the sending up of burnt offerings to other hungry gods. “War (or warriors) at [Israel’s] gates” (Judges 5:8b) predictably ensues. The people turned from the worship of their ancestral god, the storm god Yahweh, to the worship of gods they had not known, the gods of the nations, and therefore God handed them over to their enemies. It is understandable why this interpretive framing has found broad support.

God chose new leaders

According to the other reading, wherein elohim is taken to be the subject rather than the object, God raises up new commanders like Deborah and Barak so that the Israelites might overthrow their oppressors. God takes notice of Israel’s harassed peasantry, abandoned roadways, and lack of warriors (Judges 5:6-7), and sends judges to heal them of their ailment: “My heart goes out to the commanders of Israel who offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless the Lord!” (Judges 5:9). “War at the gates” thus comes not as punishment, with defeat in store for God’s people, but as liberation, an end to Israel’s twenty years of capitulation under King Jabin.²

Contextually, this reading proves quite strong. Deborah’s song is triumphant in its praise of Yahweh and his “friends,” the Israelite villagers and their captains: “When the leaders took the lead in Israel, When the people answered the call to war— Praise the Lord! Hear, O kings! Pay attention, O rulers! I will sing to the Lord!… So perish all your enemies, O Lord! But may your friends be like the sun as it rises in its might.” (Judges 5:2, 31, cf. 5:9, 11, 13). The poet’s soaring tone is unmistakable. The incredible commitment of the Israelite tribes to their God and to their kinsmen, even unto death in a far-fetched revolt, is his theme. For the minstrel, it is not cultic transgression that threatens to sabotage Israel; it is the spinelessness of some of the clans when war was called.

Among the clans of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. Why did you tarry among the sheepfolds, to hear the piping for the flocks? Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan, and Dan, why did he abide with the ships? Asher sat still at the coast of the sea, settling down by his landings… Curse Meroz, says the angel of the Lord; curse bitterly its inhabitants, because they did not come to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.

Judges 5:16-17, 23

What emerges then from a careful reading of the Song of Deborah is not a simple recapitulation of the Deuteronomist’s moralism—the simplistic rhetoric that punctuates so much of the book of Judges. The redactor of the book, rather, has deftly inserted this archaic Hebrew poem into his narrative. The Song comes, therefore, as an independent account of the battle—a decidedly folkish and epic account of the battle. Here, the God of Israel is the lord of war, of tempest, of earthquake, of swelling river. He throws chariots into the waters, sinking them in the muck for the salvation of his people. The farmers and shepherds and fishermen of Israel heeded the rallying cry of their God spoken through the prophetess Deborah, mother of the nation, and fought bravely for their kin. Israel’s cultic betrayal of Yahweh after the death of the previous judge, Ehud, is simply not the poet’s concern. Now is the time of victory, of loyalty demonstrated between God and Israel. In other words, this is nationalistic propaganda—the sort of speech King Saul could have employed when he mustered all the territories of Israel against a grave foreign threat, Nahash the Ammonite (1 Samuel 11:1-13). Unite or die.

Israel chose new godlings

If we have correctly assessed the tenor of the Song of Deborah, I want to also propose yet another reading of the text in question, one which draws upon both of the usual renditions of it.

As I’ve argued, the context of the Song itself favors viewing Judges 5:8a as an expression of God’s partiality toward Israel: “God chose new [leaders for Israel], then war was at the gates.” However, that the writer did not make explicit what kind of “new ones” God chose is a great weakness for this reading. Why leave this unclear? Why not say “new leaders”?

My proposal is that the poet hasn’t actually left this implicit. The interpretation defended above has the correct meaning but not the correct syntax. Elohim is, indeed, the direct object of the verb yivhar: “He chose new gods.” Yet elohim does not always refer to foreign deities like Baal or Chemosh. As elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, elohim here refers to those Israelites exalted to positions of glory.

Scholars generally agree that the anthropic use of the word el occurs in at least a few passages in the covenant code of the book of Exodus (21:6, 22:8-9, 22:28). In these texts the elders and judges to whom the people appeal for legitimation are designated elohim. Likewise, Psalm 82 condemns corrupt human rulers who, though they are called elohim by God Most High, must fall by the sword like mortals (cf. John 10:34-36). Psalm 45 identifies the Israelite king as an elohim enthroned over the nations by God (cf. Ezekiel 28:2, 9). One Hebrew seer awaits the birth of a king who will be called both “mighty god” (gibor el) and “god with us” (immanuel) to resolve the Assyrian crisis (Isaiah 7:14-17, 9:6). Even the prophet Samuel, albeit in his ghostly state, appears as an elohim coming up out of the earth (1 Samuel 28:13). This is a rare but present usage of the word—one that Ancient Near Eastern literature corroborates. It shouldn’t be discounted.

Here then are the relevant verses when translated with this semantic possibility in mind:

Warriors were scarce; they were scarce in Israel, until you arose, Deborah, until you arose as a mother in Israel. He (i.e. Israel, but perhaps God) chose new godlings; then there was war at the gates!… My heart goes out to the commanders of Israel who offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless the Lord.

In this case, the heroes of the Battle of Mount Tabor might be compared to the “champions” (gibor) of old, the great warlords born of the sons of God and women (Genesis 6:4). Like them, they were gods—men godlike in their dominion over the people and over the field of battle, saviors of Israel. It is, of course, fitting that such human deities should fight alongside the stars of heaven, the Kishon River, the Angel of the Lord (cf. LXX Judges 4:8), and Yahweh himself, who shakes the earth as he marches off to war (Judges 5:4-5, 20-21, 23). And Deborah, a woman anointed by God with the spirit of prophecy and of judgment so as to revive the ancestral blood pact of the tribes of Israel, cannot be excluded from this divine council. She alone became the mother of Jacob’s estranged sons, birthing the people anew, from death into life, the many into one.

Mythological Israel

It should go without saying that Christianity has largely exchanged ancient Israel’s mythic understanding of God and tribe for theological abstraction. The unapologetic celebration of Yahweh as pater familias of a particular ethnos, his anthropomorphization into a blood-soaked man-of-war, and the deification of his warrior princes is seen not only as theologically backwards, but as morally disturbed. Yet for the people who preserved the Song of Deborah,³ religion was inseparable from the folk. Survival at the margins of powerful, propagandizing empires required the construction of mythological covenantal identities.

For this specific ancient people, the battle that took place between the Israelites and the Canaanites in the Kishon Valley was an important inflection point in Israel’s Heroic Age, an age of godlings who walked upon the earth. A nation resigned to vassalage and eventual ethnic dissolution was rescued by decisive divine intervention. God raised up new gods.

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1—The NRSV and the ESV choose to supply no subject at all, and instead artificially shift the sentence into the passive voice: “When new gods were chosen…” (NRSV, ESV). The implication is the same: Israel adopted the deities of foreign peoples.

2—This is also Josephus’ interpretation of the text: “So when [the Israelites] finally became penitent, and were so wise as to learn that their calamities arose from their contempt of the laws of God], they sought out Deborah, a certain prophetess among them to pray to God to take pity on them, and not to overlook them now that they were ruined by the Canaanites. So God granted them deliverance; and chose them a General; Barak” (Antiquities V.5). Deliverance comes by way of repentance.

3—And the rest of Israel’s most-ancient poetic corpus (e.g. Genesis 49, Exodus 12, Numbers 23-24 Deuteronomy 32-33, Psalm 29, Habakkuk 3).