Deborah

Deborah is an interesting character in the Bible. We don’t actually know much about her, other than she had a lot of spunk. But I’ve got a couple of theories. Actually, they are more like suppositions than theories. One is that the reason she was a judge was because the men weren’t doing their jobs. That’s not to say that she was wrong to do what she did, but Judges is written about a time when the Jews had turned away from God. They weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. They weren’t worshiping God like they should have been. They weren’t following the leaders they were supposed to follow. I suspect there was a man who God had called to be a judge but was not doing his job.

That leads me into the next supposition. Deborah was a prophetess because her husband was a prophet, not because she was called to be a prophet. Consider the wife of Isaiah. She was called a prophetess because she was his wife, not because she was getting messages from God. So it could be that Deborah’s husband was supposed to be doing what she was doing, but he wasn’t for some reason. Any message she got from God might have come to him first.