Tanach Thoughts

 A quick thought I had last night, before getting on to part 2 of the Barak/Devorah posts: I've been troubled in recent months as I realized that I was moving away from my old comfort zone of favoring both P'shat and Drash in understanding Tanach, and moving towards almost an entirely P'shat mentality, grounded in archeological findings and word etymologies, among other things. I was bothered by this because it felt like I was beginning to see the aRDeS part of PaRDeS (P'shat, Remez, Drash and Sod) as meaningless, which I know it's not. But in a sense, it felt like I no longer saw any point in these aspects. Well, I'm still making my through this forest, but I wanted to share a thought I had last night: I was listening to a class on the story of Palti ben Laish and Michal. The question is an oldy: How could Palti marry a married woman (it doesn't say that David divorced Michal) and how could David take back Michal, after all, a man cannot take back his wife ...

 This'll be a two-part series on a theory I had about two and a half years ago. While gathering info on the minor judges (the ones we know little about from p'shat Tanach), it occurred to me that we also know little about Barak's background as well, even though he's one of the better-known judges. After that, it occurred to me that we know little about Devorah as well. As you may have realized from the title, I eventually came up with the hypothesis that both of them may have been Levites. In this post I'll I'll talk about Barak, and Devorah will be the subject of the second part. I will also do my best to explain why this is totally different from when Ben Tzion Luria claimed Shmuel was from the tribe of Binyamin . Barak: Master Warrior of the Galilean Levites Point A: The midrash ( Yalkut Shimoni on Nach 42:7 ; Tanna Devei Eliyahu Rabbah 9:1 ) says that Barak was also known as Lapidot, and that his real name was Michael. He was the husband of Devorah and an A...