As with many moral issues, there are a variety of views on war, held by the various authors/editors of the Bible, and each of these authors usually had a God endorse their view. Such aligning of God still happens. The current conflict between the USA, Israel, and Iran is an example. God is said to be on ‘our’ side, and no doubt the eventual victors will claim that their victory is proof of God’s patronage.

For myself, if I visualize for a moment an anthropomorphic deity, then God isweeping. Only those insulated by their power, arrogance, or ignorance think there are victors in war. The experience of American military veterans – with significance numbers suffering PTSD, drug use, and poverty – would, you think, cause the political leaders to at least pause. Their suffering is not something to be reduced to video-game-style messaging.

And for the vanquished, the so-called losers, the perceived injustice of injury, loss, and devastation breeds all manner of resentment, and often in time leads again to more war. War does not bring the security all humans crave. The route thel eadership of Israel and America have taken (not just with Iran) is to lock their countries into a pattern of repeated costly wars; a cost borne disproportionately by the poor and by the ecosystems where the conflict takes place.

I am not trying to minimalize or ignore the suffering and torture of many Iranian people under the theocratic regimes of the last forty years. Democratic mechanisms rarely depose dictators. But open warfare, particularly in the modern age, is a blunt, brutal instrument and seldom achieves a stable and secure transition to peace and wellbeing for all citizens, especially the poorest.

The Bible’s insights into God and war reflect evolving thought with, for example,some writers preferring warrior god than a prince of peace. The Jew Jesus, and those followers who later articulated his teachings, promoted, in the face of the overwhelming violence of the Roman Empire and occupation of Palestine, a form of non-violent activism. Yet they also drew on the Hebrew Bible, as we still do, to deepen their understandings.

Our text today, the story of Deborah’s and Barak’s Canaanite victory, written up in Judges 4 and 5 by at least two authors, can be simply read as “God’s gloriousside” smashing the other. Yet, here there is a subtle message too which criticizes the faith of the Israelites and the violence that permeates their society.

Firstly,some background.

The Book of Judges, 12^th – 11^th century BCE, tells of how the Israelites in taking possession of Canaan reveal themselves be no better caretakers of the land and their community than their predecessors. In part it’s a critique of the Book of Joshua that extolled the great glorious conquest, and slaughter of, the Canaanites.

Thet ribes of Israel in these centuries, without organized government of any sort,maintain a precarious existence surrounded by foes (note: conquering someone doesn’t bring peace!). In times of danger a judge would arise and call out the 12 tribes to repel the foe. Though the judge enjoyed great prestige, she/he was a no sense a king/queen. Their authority was neither absolute, nor permanent, nor hereditary. It rested solely on charisma.

Judges contains stories that illustrate a downward spiral for Israel and its leaders.The first judge, Othniel, is an ideal hero who delivers Israel from an ideal villain. After Othniel, the deliverers are much more ambiguous or flawed. In our story the idea of having a woman, Deborah, rally the troops, while impressive in our gender conscious age, is primarily an unsubtle criticism of Israel's masculine military leadership. Then Sisera, the Canaanite commander is killed by another woman, Jael, who is not even an Israelite!

The next judge Gideon not only insists on one divine sign after another before he’s willing to fight the Midianites but wrecks vengeance on the Israelite cities who do not support his claim. Then there is Jephthah who fights the Ammonites out of a need to show himself superior to the community that ostracized him in his youth. Lastly there is the mighty Samson, he of dreadlock fame, who fights not from theological conviction or regard for his people but rather from jealousy and vengeance that ensues from his infatuation with Philistine women.The author makes it plain that whatever liberation Samson effects for Israel is done in spite of Samson.

Judges 4 & 5 is about a war, again with the previously vanquished Canaanites. The Israelites had managed to entrench themselves in the central hill country but could not oust the Canaanites from the strategic plain of Jezreel (through which ran the trade route from Mesopotamia to Egypt). So long as the Canaanites controlled of this commercial lifeline, they could throttle Israel's economic life. Which they did.

Deborah’s name alludes to Rebecca's nurse, and the author is inviting the reader to see Deborah the judge as nursemaid to a politically incapacitated Israel. Deborah summons Barak and instructs him (after she’s heard a command from her God) to raise an army to fight Sisera, the Canaanite commander. Barak responds cautiously. Is this caution because she’s a woman? Or is it because its strategically naïve (remember Sisera has 900 iron chariots)? Deborah mocks Barak’s hesitancy. “I will go with you, but the path you take will not lead to your glory, for Yahwehwill sell(?) Sisera into the hand of a woman.”

Sisera hears of Barak’s forces gathering and, in his haste and arrogance leads his 900 chariots down the dry riverbed to attack them. He doesn't listen to the weatherforecast!  With the chariots stuck in the mud Barak’s forces swarm down the steep banks for the kill, or rather the slaughter. The God of the victors is praised for directly intervening and winning the day.

Note:God who created the universe, the whole world, humanity and morality in Genesis1 & 2 is now reduced to a tribal deity, who manages the weather, and slaughters the tribes’ enemies. It’s not unlike what the American President’s religious sycophants are trying to do to the God of Christianity – that is reduce God into the image of their tribal prejudices and needs.

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Sisera escapes on foot to the tent of Jael, a Kenite’s (read Blacksmith’s) wife. The Canaanites with their iron chariots and the blacksmiths have a mutualistic relationship. Jael, however, like many civilian women in war, knows now that change is upon her. To survive she needs to realign. To harbour Sisera will invite her own death and that of her family. So she does what survivors do.

The advancing Israelites laud her with praise, and more importantly guarantee her security (at least for now).

In the song’s description (Judges 5) her feat becomes larger than life. The song views Sisera’s demise as poetic justice. It does this by quickly switching the scene from Jael to Sisera’s mother awaiting his return. As soon as the listener is captured by the poignancy of a mother awaiting her son’s return from war,sympathy is wrenched away by attributing to the mother the comment that Siserais probably delayed because his soldiers are collecting the spoils - includingeach soldier raping a woman or two!

Onthe one hand, the speech makes explicit what has been implicit in the wholestory, that is the threat to women of war. Women on the losing side can expectto be raped if not killed. Hence the poetic justice regarding Sisera’s demise:the one who has threatened woman has himself been pierced by a woman. On theother hand, by a tributing to Sisera’s mother such a casual approval of rape,the Israelite singers are wanting to say that the Canaanites deserve what they are got because they were going to do it to us.

However,while the text seemingly approves of the Canaanites getting what they deserved,the editor is more subtly drawing our attention to the difference between Israel and Canaan being not so vast after all; Israel is not morally superior. The mother Deborah who pushes her children to war easily invents the callous Canaanite mother. One mother, Sisera’s, reduces her enemy to a ‘womb’; the other, Deborah, reduces her enemy to a caricature of moral insensitivity. Each mother has justified the violence of her children by dehumanizing their victims.

And this is what war does. It deals in caricatures. It manufactures and promotes false narratives and dichotomies. We don’t want to think our enemy is like us.  War purposefully dehumanizes others, and inthe process, by desensitizing and distancing, dehumanizes us. War degrades us.

The mesage of Judges 4 & 5 alerts us to the ambiguous nature of heroes and heroines. Deborah, a leader of her people who hears the call of her God to battle the Canaanites, is also portrayed as one who condones the slaughter and rape ofher enemies. She and her people are morally no better than the Canaanites. Barak, the mighty general who leads the Israelites into battle against daunting odds, is skeptical of winning, of divine intervention, and female leadership.Deborah and Barak are both portrayed in our text as flawed.

Secondly,throughout the whole of the book of Judges, and again in this text, although there are great military victories, this is not primarily due to the faithfulness of the Israelites to their God, but due to the faithfulness of their God to the Israelites. Their warring success is not due to their merits. Indeed their merits since the days of Moses – Moses who repeatedly argued withGod about morality – have diminished.

In my reframing, I would say their success (the chariots getting stuck in the mud)was due more to good luck than good strategy. As with many things in ancient wars where weather played a significant role. Further, in attributing the weather to God, God is reduced God to a fickle and unpredictable force (hot one day, cold the next?). Who would want to follow a God like that?

Lastly,the message of Judges 4 & 5 is about morality in war. Like most of the writings of ancient Israel, it does not question that the Israelites should fight. But it does ask what acceptable behaviour for the victors is. In particular, it draws our attention to women in war.

Deborah is characterised as a mother sending her sons to battle and, as always, the tension between the perceived need to fight and the possibility/likelihood of sons dying his present. Jael is characterized as a survivor, a victim of her husband's profession and alliance, who as a faithful mother murders in order to save herself and her family. Sisera’s mother's is characterized as a loser who gets what her son and his troops were going to dish out.

By the prominence of these three women and their situations, the reader is alerted to the editor’s disquiet regarding the morality of war. Mothers become murderers and victims. Winners exhibit the violating behaviour of losers.

Could not, by the accident of birth, one woman be in the shoes of the other? Could not all who engage in war, by the accident of birth, be on the winning side or the losing? If God loved the world, the whole world, not just your tribe or people but all tribes and peoples, then God both wins and loses every war, and God suffers with every war, and God is left broken, fractured, hanging on the cross of our tribalism, our immorality, and our arrogance and ignorance.

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