The prophetess Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, ‘judged Israel’ at the time of the war. Her name means ‘Bee,’ and a connection has been sought between it and the fact that the priestesses of Apollo at Delphi, of Dêmêter, of Artemis, and of Kybelê, were called ‘bees,’ while the high priest of Artemis at Ephesus bore the title of the ‘king-bee.’[312] We might as well look for a connection between the name of her husband and the ‘lamps’ of the sanctuary. Deborah ‘judged Israel’ because she was a prophetess, because she was the interpretress of the will of Yahveh, whose spirit breathed within her. The ‘judgments’ she delivered were accordingly the judgments of Yahveh Himself, and the indwelling of His spirit was the sign of her claim to the office of ‘judge.’ We hear of other prophetesses in Israel besides Deborah; Huldah, for example, who was consulted by the king and the priests in the reign of Josiah. The position held by the prophetess prevented the Israelitish women from sinking into the abject condition of the women among some of the Arab and other Semitic tribes. In fact, women have played a leading part in Hebrew history. It has long ago been noticed that the mother had much to do with the character of the successive kings of Judah, and Athaliah of Samaria filled a prominent place in the history of the northern kingdom. Prophecy was no respecter of persons; it came to rich and poor, to learned and simple, to men and women alike, and upon whomsoever the spirit of prophecy fell, it made him fit to be the leader and the counsellor of his people. Deborah had been marked out by Yahveh Himself to be the judge of Israel. She dwelt, we are told, under the palm-tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Beth-el in Mount Ephraim. She was, therefore, presumably of Ephraimitish descent, though the conclusion does not necessarily follow, and the palm-tree which was called after her continued to be a landmark on the high-road down to the time when the narrative in the book of Judges was written. There was another tree, a terebinth, and not a palm, which stood within the sacred precincts of Beth-el itself, and also bore the name of Deborah, but this Deborah was said to have been Rebekah’s nurse, whose tomb was pointed out under the branches of the tree.[313] The writers of the Old Testament have carefully distinguished between the two trees; it has been reserved for modern criticism to confound them.