As a Military Leader, Deborah is a Rare Biblical Character

But was Deborah real? For decades, Judges has been scrutinized for clues to Israel's history. The book describes a period somewhere between 1200 and 1050 B.C., after the death of the tribal leader Joshua. Fox calls it "the Bible's version of the Wild West," a dark time of chaos and collapse. Over and over again, the people of Israel are defeated in battle or fall into moral decline, only to be saved by charismatic leaders. In the original Hebrew, Fox says, the "judges" of the book's title ( " shofet") translates roughly to "chieftains."

Most scholars today think the stories and songs in Judges were collected and written down hundreds of years after they supposedly took place. Working somewhere between 620 and 580 B.C., the writers carefully sifted through traditional hymns and folk tales and selected certain stories to make their points. According to Brandeis University Prof. Marc Brettler's Book of Judges, the book's first goal was glorifying God; the second, justifying the rule of Israel's kings. "What they took from the past seems to be what was most instructive for the present," Fox says. As a result, the authenticity of the figures who are presented in Judges is impossible to verify and in some ways beside the point.

In fact, the ancient language in the "Song of Deborah" has led some to speculate that Deborah may not have been a person at all. The Bible describes the early history of Israel as a long struggle against the Canaanites, the enemy mentioned in Deborah's story. But a growing school of biblical historians argues that Israelites were in fact Canaanites who converted to a new, monotheistic religion. In her book Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel, Ackerman argues that Deborah may be adopted from Canaanite myths that would have been told around the same time the "Song of Deborah" was written. With its supernatural imagery of stars falling from the heavens and rushing floods, "God isn't just blessing the troops but is quite an actor," Ackerman says. "Deborah might be a sort of demythologized warrior goddess taken from an older mythological tradition."