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Walking Together in the Age of AI Oracles: A Practical-Theological Reading of the Deborah Narrative (Judg. 4-5)

  • Korean Journal of Old Testament Studies
  • Abbr : KJOTS
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.305~333
  • DOI : 10.24333/jkots.2026.32.2.305
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Old Testament Studies
  • Research Area : Humanities > Christian Theology
  • Received : April 30, 2026
  • Accepted : May 20, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

Ha Kyungji 1

1서울한영대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the Deborah narrative (Judg. 4–5) as a practical-theological resource for the era of artificial intelligence, with the aim of diagnosing the reductive pressure that algorithmic modes of thinking exert upon personhood, relationality, and human interiority in contemporary pastoral and ecclesiastical contexts. The study adopts intercontextuality as its governing methodological framework, placing the ancient biblical text in dialogical tension with contemporary AI discourse. It provisionally introduces AI Criticism as a hermeneutical instrument, distinct from AI-assisted textual analysis and from technology ethics, by deploying three conceptual categories developed within AI discourse, namely algorithmic mode of thinking, black box, and alignment failure, as interpretive lenses through which to illumine the meaning structure of Judges 4–5. The analysis proceeds from a synchronic, canonical-critical reading, treating the prose account (ch. 4) and the poetic Song (ch. 5) as a unified literary and theological whole. The study applies this framework to three figures. Deborah’s prophetic authority (Judg. 4:6–7) is distinguished from algorithmic prediction by its origin in the personal God of Israel, and her self-designation as 'mother in Israel' (Judg. 5:7) embodies a relational authority grounded in shared communal responsibility rather than in informational monopoly. Barak's conditional request (Judg. 4:8), examined through its double-conditional syntactic structure, is read not as a failure of faith but as a theological claim that grounds victory in personal presence rather than in data certainty. Jael’s tent is interpreted as a dual black box: an external black box marking the epistemological failure of Sisera's classification algorithm, and an internal black box marking Jael’s interiority as irreducible to any data system. The contrast between Deborah and Sisera’s mother further illumines the opposition between covenantal relational authority and pattern-dependent algorithmic cognition. The study proposes three conceptual frames, dual black box, holy inefficiency, and theology of the margin, as practical-theological categories for the AI era, and derives three corresponding pastoral principles: communal leadership, incarnational accompaniment, and care for those at the margins. What the Korean church, long oriented toward efficiency, must recover in the AI era is a theology of walking together.

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