This Weeks Question (9)

A Brethren IN CHRIST said:

Gideon
Judges 6:15 my family is poor I am the least in my father house

won a battle blowing a trumpet! the enemy died fighting among themselves



shamgar killed 600 men with an ox goad judges 3:31


jephthah was cast out of family since a half brother from a harlot nineth judge yet God used him.

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BT said:

I'll reword it again.

God often uses the most unlikely people for His purposes. Prove it, from the OLD TESTAMENT Judges.


Looking at the Old Testament Judges, show how God used some unlikely people to be His instruments.

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2Timothy2 said:

I have an answer (probalbly wrong ) but I answered one of last weeks bonus questions. Can I try this one? Huh? Huh?

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BT said:

I'll reword it again.

God often uses the most unlikely people for His purposes. Prove it, from the OLD TESTAMENT Judges.


Looking at the Old Testament Judges, show how God used some unlikely people to be His instruments.

Click to expand...

2Timothy2 said:

Ehud, lefthanded.

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At last, the Israelites cry out to God for salvation and, in typical biblical fashion, their cry is answered with the appearance of heroic individuals—in this case, the prophetess and judge Deborah and the warrior Barak.
I call Barak a warrior, but the text portrays him more as a wimp. When Deborah bids him to lead the Israelite troops into battle, Barak responds: “If you will go with me, then I will go; and if you will not go with me, then I will not go” (Judges 4:8). Deborah counters: “I indeed will go with you, except that your glory will not be on the way that you go, for by the hand of a woman the Lord will deliver Sisera” (Judges 4:8).

The reader has every reason to believe that the woman referred to in this passage is Deborah; she’s the only woman mentioned so far. But such an ending to the story would be flat literarily, and, as we shall see, it would not allow the author his ultimate intention.

So it turns out that the woman is not Deborah at all, but Yael, whose husband, Heber, has a treaty alliance with Jabin. When the battle begins to turn against Sisera (okay, Barak must not have been a complete wimp, but of course he also had God on his side), Sisera flees on foot to the tent of Yael, expecting to find refuge there. But then the unexpected happens. When Sisera requests water, no doubt to revive himself, Yael gives him milk instead—a soporific, especially if it is the lukewarm milk that tent-dwelling bedouin drink. While Sisera sleeps, Yael grabs a tent peg in one hand and a mallet in the other, and she drives the peg into Sisera’s temple. Barak appears within a few minutes in hot pursuit, but Sisera already is dead, killed by the hand of a woman.

Why is glory taken from Barak so that Sisera meets his death by the hand of a woman? And if it has to be a woman, why is it Yael, a non-Israelite tent-dwelling woman, rather than the Israelite heroine Deborah? It is because Yael best represents the nation of Israel, even though she herself is not Israelite. Israel was a nation on the margins, a nation struggling to get underway, a nation without the natural gifts that descended on the people of Egypt with the Nile, Assyria with the Tigris and Babylonia with the Euphrates. Accordingly, in the Bible, it is the lowly people who represent Israel. Among the lowly are the tent-dwellers, and among the lowliest of the tent-dwellers are the female tent-dwellers, living on the margins of the margins of society.

Deborah, in the end, is just a literary foil. As prophetess and judge, she is simply too powerful to represent Israel. In her place, lowly Yael will be remembered, in the words of the poet, as “the most blessed of women in tents” (Judges 5:24), a fitting heroine for Israel’s national story and its collective destiny.

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