DEBORAH dĕb’ ə rə. Heb. דְּבֹרָה׃֙, prob. derived from the root, דְּבﯴרָה֒, H1805, meaning a honey bee, as in Psalm 118:12, et al. It appears as the name of three characters in the OT in its fem. form. 1. Deborah, the nurse of Rebekah, the mother of the patriarch Jacob who was buried under an oak at Bethel which was then named. “Allonbacuth,” “The Oak of Weeping.”

2. Deborah, the judge and prophetess (Judg 4). She is said to have been the wife of a certain Lappidoth, a name which because of its fem. form has always been the subject of much speculation. She is described as a “woman, a prophetess,” the only judge thus described (4:4). Centuries later a giant palm which stood between Ramah and Bethel was called “the palm of Deborah.” In the time of the oppression of the loosely knit tribes of Israel by King Jabin of Hazor, Deborah summoned Barak the son of Abinoam from Kedesh-naphtali and gave him the command of the Lord to gather 10,000 soldiers from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and marshal them at Mount Tabor. When Barak requested Deborah to go with them to the battle with Jabin and his host at the river Kishon, she replied that God would deliver Jabin into the hand of a woman to be slain, thus rebuking the cowardice of the men of Israel. When Jabin’s military chief, Sisera, heard of the Israelite preparations for battle he obliged by setting off for the battlefield. When Deborah gave the command, the battle was begun and Israel was victorious, and Sisera fled the battlefield to be slain by Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. Thus was Deborah’s prophecy fulfilled, and Sisera was put to death by a woman. The next ch. (Judg 5) contains the magnificent psalm, The Song of Deborah, an original piece extant from the 13th cent. b.c. This piece of ancient poetry is one of the oldest fragments of the Heb. language in the Heb. Bible. It has beautiful lyric parallelism and contains many precise expressions drawn from Ugaritic and possibly other, older lits. It is difficult to tr. and exegete because of its antiquity and obscurity. However the joy of Israel’s deliverance is stated gloriously in such lines as: “Awake, awake, Deborah; Awake, awake, Sing thou a song, Rise up Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam,” or the often cited phrase, “From heaven fought the stars, the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” The victory of Jehovah’s righteousness is inspired by the prophetess, Deborah. Her psalm ends with the prayer, “So perish all thine enemies O Lord—.”

3. Deborah, the mother of Tobit’s father, who raised her grandson after his father’s death (Tobit 1:8).