Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 03:2 (May 1941)
Article: The Critic And Deborah’s Song
Author: Burton L. Goddard

WTJ 3:2 (May 1941) p. 93

The Critic And Deborah’s Song

Burton L. Goddard

IN MOST university circles to-day, the modern liberal criticism of the Old Testament is unchallenged. It is taken for granted that the presuppositions and assumptions of the critical scholar are valid. If one should question the conclusions upon which the critics are well agreed, few would take him seriously. Yet now and then a voice is raised, exceptions are taken, charges are made. A Jewish scholar points out certain false claims of liberal writers relative to the meaning and use of various words and expressions in the Hebrew Bible, and we begin to wonder whether “scholarship” which errs in this particular is always correct in its other assertions. A ranking Semitic scholar confesses that he chose a field other than that of the Old Testament because he foresaw the fact that Old Testament scholars would more and more shut themselves up in the little enclosure of their own yard, rest content that only there was the grass green, and play around in circles, refusing to recognize positions at variance with their own and interested more in analyzing documentary sources than in interpreting the revelation of the Word. Is it not, then, in order to examine the methods of the liberal as he applies them to the criticism of the Scriptures? If they are valid, they should be accepted. If they are found unreliable, they should surely be rejected.

For the purposes of this investigation, we take no passage on which the conservative rests his doctrines. Rather, we choose a portion of Scripture for which the critics themselves have high regard. It is the Song of Deborah, the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges. Of this chapter George Foot Moore said, “The representations of the Song agree entirely with the historical situation, so far as we are able from our very scanty materials to reconstruct it.”1 Indeed, few students of

WTJ 3:2 (May 1941) p. 94

the Song doubt in the least but that its composition was contemporary with the events it records. We deal, then, with a passage the genuineness of which is almost universally accepted, by the liberal as well as by the conservative. This is important, because we thus start on common ground, whereas in the case of so many other portions of the Old Testament the critic entirely rejects the authenticity of the record. One might therefore call the criticism found in Deborah’s song a mild type. If, then, it should be shown that in Judges V the critical methodology is unwarranted, it would stand to reason that its more radical application in other Old Testament passages might be open to much question.

Authorship Of The Song

Until recent years there has been but little doub...