The Song of Deborah is a masterpiece. This is not my opinion, it is the opinion of scholars and experts in ancient Middle Eastern poetry and literature. They say that the poetry is “magnificent, featuring many examples of climactic parallelism and onomatopoeia.” I had to look up “onomatopoeia,” and it is a word that imitates the natural sounds of a thing. It creates a sound effect that mimics the thing described making the description more expressive and interesting. Of course since we are not reading the poetry in the original Hebrew we are not experiencing the magnificence of the onomatopoeia, but even in English it is a magnificent poem.

Scholars believe that Deborah wrote the song, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also no way to know what the music the song was sung to sounded like. I can imagine that modern musicians could put the words to opera music, country-western, rap, hip-hop, rock ‘n’ roll, four-part harmony, or classical music. At this point, some well-meaning person might opine that a Christian song cannot be rock ‘n’ roll because that’s the devils music. I would remind them that we stand on the solid rock and the roll will be called up yonder. Some of our brothers and sisters in Christ would tell us that we could not sing this with any instrumental music. This raises an interesting question, “What makes music, Christian music?”

I realize up to this point nothing I have written comes directly from the text. So let me clarify that this is mostly an opinion piece. It is my opinion that Christian music is not determined by the magnificence of the lyrics. It is not been determined by the style of the music or even the instrumentation used to play the music. What makes a song Christian is the meaning found in the words of the song. Christian songs teach Christian beliefs. The Song of Deborah is a Christian song because it teaches Christian theology. I will explore that theology next.