Deborah - Genesis 35:6-8

35:6-8 - All the idols have been buried and the people “purified” at least as much as was possible at the time and Jacob and his clan head out to move to a new land, that of Beth-el, which is the place where Jacob had his first major spiritual encounter with God back when he was fleeing from Esau all those decades ago. When they get there, we get an interesting piece of news and that is that “Deborah Rebekah’s nurse died, and she was buried.” I had to stop here and ask myself, “who is Deborah?” Tom Bradford from the Torah Class reminds us that Deborah was Rebekah’s personal nursemaid who went with her when Eliezer brought her back from her father and Laban’s house to Canaan to marry Isaac. I had completely forgotten about her. And Tom asks a valid question, “why does the Torah even mention Deborah, a seemingly minor player in the grand scope of things?” This is a fair question because most women don’t even get mentioned in the Bible, let alone being named, why name her, why mention her death and burial?

Tom suggests, “it is generally thought that Deborah represents a link between Israel and Mesopotamia… a link that God is in the process of dissolving. We have to examine in an earlier lesson that for Abraham and Isaac, and up to this point Jacob, Mesopotamia was, as far as they were concerned, more their homeland than Canaan. But, Canaan was the land God set apart and promised to Abraham and his descendants, and so God wanted to erase any notion of ties between Israel and a ‘foreign’ land…Mesopotamia. So, the death of Deborah is almost a metaphor for the death of any family ties or relationship between Israel and the land of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.” Everything is symbolic, so this makes sense and is a good explanation, especially when we consider how “random” it seems that this information is just thrown in there.

All of this, the gods, Deborah’s death, returning to Beth-el, all of it makes me realize just how long the process is of “un”-apostatizing people is. God meets people where they are in these beliefs and then builds on that until they come to a fullness of knowledge, which doesn’t happen in this lifetime. We look at people who reject the gospel now or leave the church and think, “oh what a shame that this person won’t be saved in the celestial kingdom.” But if it took the great patriarchs three whole generations to even begin to comprehend the vast character of God, then what makes us think that anyone in their singular lifetime is going to be able to make those same connections that took centuries for God’s chosen people, even when they had God hand feeding them manna and surrounding them by pillars of fire and dividing the sea. All these miracles, all this blatant evidence, and even then with all that, people rejected that God and it took centuries, millennia, for people to build up their faith, belief, and understanding to the point where we are today.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people make choices and decisions in this life and just how much of it is based on our physicality, meaning our hormones, trauma, illnesses, etc. Obviously we have our agency, but really how much of that agency is untainted by something from this world, how much do we really make our choices spiritually? All this is to say that the more I learn and the more I think about it, this life, this world is just kind of a free for all, and we need to just mind our own business and be nice, that’s our job.