The Deborah number was originally proposed by Markus Reiner, a professor at Technion in Israel, who chose the name inspired by a verse in the Bible, stating "The mountains flowed before the Lord" in a song by the prophetess Deborah in the Book of Judges; הָרִ֥ים נָזְל֖וּ מִפְּנֵ֣י יְהוָ֑ה hā-rîm nāzəlū mippənê Yahweh). In his 1964 paper (a reproduction of his after-dinner speech to the Fourth International Congress on Rheology in 1962), Markus Reiner further elucidated the name's origin: