David VanDrunen ties the natural law concepts found in both the Old and New Testaments to a sense of conscience. The notion of natural law appears early in the Old Testament, in God’s covenant with Noah. God instructs Noah that, for example, the killing of an innocent must be recompensed (thereby indicating that innocent people must not be wantonly killed). While there is not one Hebrew word for conscience in the OT, it does identify the “heart” (leb) and “kidneys” (kelayot) as the mechanisms by which the wise and discerning person applies what he knows to be true about the way the world works. In the New Testament, conscience is the “subjective human faculty that recognizes right and wrong and thus bears witness to a person’s standing before the law.” The Apostle Paul’s discussion of natural law in Romans chapters 2 and 3 reveals that although not all receive God’s express law (as did God’s people on Mt. Sinai), all people everywhere have an innate sense of moral rectitude to which their consciences testify. All persons everywhere therefore are subject to God’s righteous judgment.

This first chapter of Part IV considers the structure of the book of Judges, its place within the wider national narrative of Genesis-Kings, and compositional issues and emphases in the prose version of the account of Deborah and Barak. It demonstrates that conventional approaches that distinguish between an older source and its later integration into the narrative are deficient inasmuch as the first iteration of the account appears to have been much more succinct and may have been composed as an early addendum to the exodus-conquest narrative. The account grew dramatically as scribes downplayed the role of Deborah’s general by attributing the crowning feat to a woman who lived on the margins of Israelite society.