The Voice of Thunder That Broke the Philistine Line at Mizpah

The Philistines came up at first light, rank on rank, their iron filling the valley below Mizpah with a noise like the sea. Israel had gathered to fast and to pour water on the ground before the LORD, and now the spears caught the sun and the people went cold. They had no answer for iron. They had only a prophet on a hill and a lamb on a fire.

Samuel took up a suckling lamb and offered it whole as a burnt offering. The smoke climbed. He did not stop praying while it climbed. Below him the Philistine line dressed itself for the kill, and somewhere in the smoke a promise older than the prophet was waiting to be kept.

The Lamb on the Fire and the Line Below

The elders had begged him. "Do not stop crying out to the LORD our God for us," they said, "that He may save us from the hand of the Philistines." So Samuel cried out, and the fire took the lamb, and the offering went up entire. There was a held breath in it, the moment before a verdict, the people watching the prophet's back and the enemy watching the people.

Then the sky broke.

It was one voice, a single colossal peal that did not roll and fade the way thunder rolls. It came down on the Philistines like a hand. The LORD thundered with a great voice against them that day, and the iron ranks that had no fear of Israel came apart in blind terror. Men who had drilled for war forgot which way to run. The line that was meant to swallow Mizpah turned and broke against itself, and Israel went out and struck them as they fled.

An Old Promise Heard Inside the Thunder

Long after, the sages turned the verse over, and Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said that in that thunder he heard the keeping of a vow. The Holy One, blessed be He, had pledged to wage three wars of panic for Israel, three times when He Himself would fight, and all three He had waged. The first was in the days of Joshua, when the LORD threw the kings of the Amorites into confusion before Israel and they fled down the pass while stones fell on them from heaven. The third was this one, the great voice at Mizpah, the smoke of Samuel's lamb still rising.

And the second was the worst of the three to face. It was the war of Sisera.

The Warlord Who Toppled Walls With His Voice

Sisera was thirty years old and had bent the whole world under his hand. He needed no ram against a city. He would set his voice against a wall and the wall would fall. He would set his voice on a wild beast in the open field and the beast would freeze where it stood, unable to lift a foot. When he went down to bathe in the brook Kishon, he drew enough fish out of his own beard to feed a crowd. Nine hundred chariots of iron rode behind him. Forty thousand captains came at his summons, and behind each captain a hundred thousand men.

That was the army that came up against Israel at Mount Tabor, and there was no human line that could hold it. So the line that held was not human.

The Stars Came Down to Make War

From the heavens the stars fought. They left their courses and came down upon the camp of Sisera, and the watching world could not take it in. Children of a king's palace had once gone into the forest and killed the lions and the leopards and the bears and hung them at the city gate, and the whole city stood amazed and asked who had trained them to such a thing. So now the people stood amazed, for there had never been a deed like it, that stars should come down out of the sky to make war on flesh and blood.

The stars that descended were burning, and they came down hot. They went into the brook Kishon to cool themselves, and the brook took fire from them. Sisera's chariots churned in a torrent gone to flame and flood at once.

Then the Holy One, blessed be He, turned to the brook and spoke to it as a master speaks to a servant with an old debt. "Go and fulfill your pledge to the sea." For at the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, when the doubting generation feared the Egyptians would climb out on the far shore behind them, the Prince of the Sea had been told to cast the drowned onto dry land, and he had bargained. Was there a servant whose master gives a gift and takes it back? And the LORD had promised him a day when he would receive one and a half times as many men as Pharaoh had brought. Pharaoh came with six hundred chosen chariots. Sisera came with nine hundred.

So the brook Kishon, that ancient brook, that had stood surety of old, paid what it owed. It swept Sisera's army into the sea. The fish rose to the surface as the chariots sank, and they opened their mouths and sang, "And the truth of the LORD endures forever."

Three Times the Sky Fought Israel's Wars

Joshua and the falling stones. Sisera and the burning stars and the brook that kept its word. Samuel and the one great voice at Mizpah. Three times the enemy outnumbered Israel and out-armed Israel and meant to end Israel, and three times no sword of Israel decided it. The decision came down from above the battlefield, as panic, as stone, as fire, as a single peal of thunder that broke an iron line into running men.

Samuel set a stone between Mizpah and the field where the Philistines had fallen, and he named it Even-ha-Ezer, the stone of help, and he said, "Thus far the LORD has helped us." The smoke of the lamb was gone by then. The thunder was gone. The stone stayed.