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11From there they went against the inhabitants of Debir. The name of Debir was formerly Kiriath-sepher. 12And Caleb said, "He who attacks Kiriath-sepher and captures it, I will give him Achsah my daughter for a wife." 13And Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, captured it. And he gave him Achsah his daughter for a wife. 14When she came to him, she urged him to ask her father for a field. And she dismounted from her donkey, and Caleb said to her, "What do you want?" 15She said to him, "Give me a blessing. Since you have set me in the land of the Negeb, give me also springs of water." And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the lower springs.
The second anecdote interrupting the author's military report in Judges 1 concerns the conquest of Debir (Kirjath Sepher). This short account may seem puzzling at first sight. What is it doing here? Like the tale of the Lord of Bezek, this mini-narrative too casts a long shadow forward towards the body of the work and introduces an important theme in Judges. This book is one in which women are featured more prominently than in any other OT historical book (perhaps with the exception of Ruth). The cycles of the judges will often speak of women assuming dominant roles. Manoah's wife is smarter than her spiritually dim-witted husband (Judges 13), Deborah is more courageous and wiser than Barak, and, in a negative sense, Samson is outwitted by women, and that not only once.
Although there is nothing sinister about the account of 1:11-15, it belongs to the same complex of ideas. The real hero of this story is neither Caleb nor the fearless warrior Othniel, but Achsah, Caleb's daughter. She is smarter than the male counterparts, because she sees what they do not seem to have thought about. The land that Caleb promises Othniel is desert land and thus useless. What good is the land if you cannot live on it? So Achsah recognizes that the key to her and her husband's future is water, and mildly protests the inadequacy of her father's gift. But she never oversteps the boundaries of what was considered appropriate for a daughter in ancient Israel. She is practical, she is smart, and she shows resourcefulness and vision. Although she does not wield a sword, she is not a passive object of men's deals in a patriarchal society. She stands out against the characters of both Caleb and Othniel, and this portends some of the following narratives in the book.
In many ways, Judges is about how Israel's moral and spiritual chaos turns their world upside down. In the end, Canaanites will dominate Israel, not vice versa, and women rule as men are shown to be unfit. As I indicated, the story of Achsah does not yet contain the sinister elements of later stories in the book, but the text sets an important signal. It does not have a postmodern feminist agenda (though many would affirm the opposite), it simply shows that God works through the initiative of those who otherwise may not have much to say in the world. God's wisdom is persuasive and cannot be promoted by force or oppression. May God give us ears to hear it, for he often speaks to us through those whose input we are tempted to turn a deaf ear to. This is specially true in times of spiritual darkness.
The author of these devotionals, the Rev. Martin Emmrich, is an ordained OPC minister (Westminster OPC, Corvallis, Oregon) as well as the author of Pneumatological Concepts in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a book on the teaching of Hebrews on the Holy Spirit. We are happy to make these devotionals on Ecclesiastes and other passages of Scripture available to you.
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