Row 1 ('God Is All Powerful') lists proof-texts for divine omnipotence — Psalm 115:3, Jeremiah 32:17, Job 42:4, Revelation 19:6, Mark 14:36. Row 8 ('God is Not All Powerful') pairs these against Judges 1:19: 'The Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country but could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron' — read as a direct claim that God tried and failed to defeat an army because it had superior technology, contradicting the omnipotence texts.

This objection fails on both textual and philosophical grounds. **1. The Hebrew grammar of Judges 1:19 does not make God the failed agent.** Read the verse as it is actually constructed, not as an isolated English clause. Judges 1:19 has two clauses with a 3ms verb chain: (a) *way'hî YHWH 'et-Yehûdâh, wayyōreš 'et-hāhār* — 'and YHWH was with Judah, and he [Judah] took possession of the hill country'; (b) *kî lō' lehôrîš 'et-yōshevê hā'ēmeq kî rekhev barzel lāhem* — 'for/because [he] could not dispossess the inhabitants of the valley, because they had iron chariots.' YHWH appears only as the object of the preposition *'et* ('with Judah') in clause (a) — he is never the grammatical subject of a finite verb in the verse. The subject that carries forward into the second verb ('took possession') and continues by ordinary Hebrew narrative subject-continuity into the third ('could not dispossess') is Judah, the tribe that is the explicit topic of the entire chapter (Judg 1:1-20 is a tribe-by-tribe conquest report: Judah, then Simeon, Benjamin, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, etc., each evaluated by whether *they* drove out the inhabitants). This is the reading defended in the standard critical commentaries: Daniel Block, *Judges, Ruth* (NAC), and Barry Webb, *The Book of Judges* (NICOT), both take Judah, not YHWH, as the unstated subject of 'could not,' consistent with the refrain that structures the rest of chapter 1 ('did not drive out,' repeated of Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, Dan in vv. 21-36) and with Judges' own explicit theological verdict in 2:1-3, 20-23 that Israel's incomplete conquest was a consequence of covenant compromise, not a limit on YHWH's power — indeed 2:1-3 has the angel of YHWH explicitly say God is *choosing* not to drive the nations out because of Israel's covenant unfaithfulness, the opposite of an admission of divine incapacity. Some LXX witnesses resolve the ambiguity in the same direction by supplying 'Judah' explicitly as the subject. The 'iron chariots' notice itself echoes Joshua 17:16-18, where Israel raises the same objection about the same enemy technology and Joshua responds that Israel, empowered by YHWH, is *able* to dispossess them regardless — confirming that within the book's own frame, iron chariots are a test of Israel's obedience and faith, not evidence of a divine capability ceiling. **2. Even bracketing the exegesis, the objection trades on an equivocal, philosophically naive definition of omnipotence.** Classical theism (Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* I, q.25, aa.3-4) never defined omnipotence as 'the power to do absolutely anything nameable in a sentence.' It is the power to actualize anything that is logically and metaphysically *possible* — a real object of power. What is self-contradictory (a square circle, 2+2=5, an agent making a true contradiction true) is not a 'hard thing' that a more powerful being could do and a weaker one couldn't; it corresponds to no coherent state of affairs at all. As Aquinas puts it, such things 'cannot be called possible' — they fail to be a describable task in the first place, not a task God flunks. C.S. Lewis states the same point memorably: 'nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God' (*The Problem of Pain*, ch. 2). The famous 'can God make a stone so heavy he can't lift it' puzzle is a textbook case of the fallacy of **equivocation**: it uses 'can' first in the sense of unlimited productive power, then covertly swaps in a second sense — 'can' as applied to an object defined as *unliftable by unlimited power* — and then treats the resulting self-contradiction ('an agent of unlimited power' + 'an object no power can move') as if it were a real dilemma about two independently coherent possibilities. It isn't; it's one incoherent conjunction dressed up as two coherent options (cf. Peter Geach, 'Omnipotence,' *Philosophy* 48, 1973; Edward Feser, *Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide*, ch. on the divine attributes). The Judges 1:19 objection, on the *reading that makes God the subject*, imports exactly this error: it treats a tribe's specific tactical failure as if it were a report about the outer limit of the divine nature. **3. A further, narrower qualification the doctrine has always carried:** omnipotence does not include the power to unilaterally force a *genuinely free* creaturely choice while that choice remains genuinely free — not because God lacks power, but because 'a free choice that is simultaneously unilaterally determined by another agent' is not a coherent state of affairs, on libertarian terms, any more than a square circle is (cf. Alvin Plantinga's free will defense, *God, Freedom, and Evil*). This is irrelevant to Judges 1:19 specifically (a tactical/military matter, not a moral-freedom one), but it forecloses a second, related version of the objection sometimes raised in the same breath (why doesn't God simply overpower human evil) — the answer is the same logical, not power-based, limitation.

Scripture's own vocabulary for omnipotence is precise and, read on its own terms, philosophically sophisticated rather than crude. Jeremiah 32:17 grounds God's power specifically in creation ex nihilo — 'you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power... nothing is too hard [Heb. *lō'-yippālē' mimmekhā kol-dāvār*, 'no thing/matter is too extraordinary/difficult'] for you' — power is predicated of God as the maker of all being, not as the strongest competitor within being. Psalm 115:3, 'our God... does all that he pleases,' likewise asserts unconstrained will, not an ability to instantiate contradictions. Job's climactic confession affirms 'I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted' (Job 42:2 — the omnipotence affirmation proper; 42:4, the reference given on the sheet, is Job quoting God's own prior challenge back to him, but it sits within the same six-verse confession and the two verses should be read together). Revelation 19:6 crowns the canon's eschatology with 'the Lord God Almighty [Gk. *pantokratōr*, 'ruler of all'] reigns' — omnipotence as the ground of final cosmic vindication, not merely local battlefield superiority. And Mark 14:36 is theologically the most careful text of all: Jesus in Gethsemane prays 'Abba, Father, all things are possible for you' — and in the very same breath, 'yet not what I will, but what you will.' Scripture itself places the affirmation of unconstrained divine power directly beside a volitional distinction between what God *can* do and what, given his own will and purposes, he *does* do — precisely the classical distinction between absolute and ordained power that the objection collapses. Judges' own narrative theology (2:1-3, 20-23; 3:1-4) makes the identical move: God could have expelled every Canaanite instantly; he chose a slower, testing providence instead, and the text says so explicitly.