The account of the deliverance of Israel from the Canaanites exists in two versions, one in prose (Jdg_4:1-24), the other in poetry (Jdg_5:1-31). The two agree in the main; the chief actors are the same-Deborah, Barak, Sisera, Jael; the Canaanites are defeated with Jehovah's powerful aid in a battle near the Kishon; Sisera is murdered by Jael in her tent. But there are some striking disagreements; in chap. 4 the oppressor is Jabin, king of Hazor, and Sisera of Harosheth is his general; Deborah is connected with Ephraim, Barak with Kedesh; two tribes only, Zebulun and Naphtali, take part in the battle: Jael murders Sisera while he lies asleep by driving a tent-peg through his temples. On the other hand, Jdg_5:1-31 knows nothing of Jabin; Sisera is the head of a confederacy of Canaanite kings (Jdg_5:19), and is in fact a king; his mother has princesses for attendants (Jdg_5:29); apparently both Deborah and Barak belong to Issachar (Jdg_5:15); the struggle is on a much larger scale, all the tribes are summoned to arms, and for the first time Israel acts almost as a nation (Jdg_5:13-18); Jael fells Sisera with a mallet while he is standing drinking (Jdg_5:26 f). The Song is obviously ancient, and may well be contemporary with the events it describes; it is not only one of the finest odes in the Hebrew language, but it possesses the highest value as a historical document.
1. After a spell of oppression, probably brought on by the expansion of the Israelite tribes in the direction of the Great Plain, the Canaanites, led by Sisera at the head of the local chiefs, made a determined effort to drive the Israelites back into their hills. To resist this formidable movement, and to put an end to an intolerable state of insecurity and humiliation, Deborah roused the tribes.
It was a great day for Israel when Deborah left the shadow of the palm-tree, where she sat as “judge,” and went northward to summon Barak to the defence of his people. It shows the commanding position to which Deborah had attained, that Barak at once responded; and it is a further tribute to the remarkable personal influence of this woman that, when the matter was explained to Barak and the line of action suggested, he refused to enter upon this campaign unless they had the presence and counsel of Deborah. Perhaps he recognized that the very presence of Deborah in the army would be an inspiration to his soldiers which he himself could not supply, because he did not feel it. At all events, by his very attitude to Deborah we get the measure of her greatness; for it means that of all souls in Israel this woman's was the most dauntless, the most resolved and noble.
I would that all those who have suffered at women's hands and found them evil would loudly proclaim it, and give us their reasons; and if those reasons be well founded we shall be indeed surprised, and shall have advanced far forward in the mystery. For women are indeed the veiled sisters of all the great things we do not see. They are indeed nearest of kin to the infinite that is about us, and they alone can still smile at it with the intimate grace of the child, to whom its father inspires no fear. It is they who preserve here below the pure fragrance of our soul, like some jewel from Heaven, which none know how to use; and were they to depart, the spirit would reign in solitude in a desert. Theirs are still the Divine emotions of the first days; and the sources of their being lie, deeper far than ours, in all that was illimitable.1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 92.]
Ochone! to be a woman, only sighing on the shore-
With a soul that finds a passion for each long breaker's roar,
With a heart that beats as restless as all the winds that blow-
Thrust a cloth between her fingers, and tell her she must sew;
Must join in empty chatter, and calculate with straws-
For the weighing of our neighbour-for the sake of social laws.
O chatter, chatter, chatter, when to speak is misery,
When silence lies around your heart-and night is on the sea.
So tired of little fashions that are root of all our strife,
Of all the petty passions that upset the calm of life.
The law of God upon the land shines steady for all time;
The laws confused that man has made, have reason not nor rhyme.
O bird that fights the heavens, and is blown beyond the shore,
Would you leave your flight and danger for a cage to fight no more?
No more the cold of winter, or the hunger of the snow,
Nor the winds that blow you backward from the path you wish to go?
Would you leave your world of passion for a home that knows no riot?
Would I change my vagrant longings for a heart more full of quiet?
No!-for all its dangers, there is joy in danger too:
On, bird, and fight your tempests, and this nomad heart with you!1 [Note: Dora Sigerson Shorter, Collected Poems, 249.]
2. Six of the tribes, those immediately north and south of the plain, responded to the summons; the remoter clans, Dan and Asher in the north, Reuben and Gilead (Gad) on the east of Jordan, refused to stir themselves. Judah is not mentioned: it was cut off from Ephraim and the rest by a line of Canaanite strongholds; Simeon and Levi, who are also passed over, seem to have been unable to maintain a distinct existence after the early stages of the invasion. The Israelites assembled on the heights of Tabor. The Canaanites, who had received tidings of the movement, mustered in vast numbers in the plain of Esdraelon, at its foot. Thirteen miles away from Tabor, on a spur of the hills, at the south-west corner of the plain, was Taanach, the outlying fortress of the Canaanites; and to this place their host, with all its warchariots, came; and Deborah, watching from the lofty rock, cried out: “Arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam.” So Barak, with his ten thousand men, all on foot, went out to meet his enemy. While he marched over these thirteen miles, the Canaanites advanced from Taanach to their second fortress of Megiddo, where near at hand a network of streams, merging into four, fell down among the olives to join the Kishon that flowed in the plain below. There at the waters of Megiddo the battle joined on the level ground. It was at this critical moment that (as we learn directly from Josephus, and indirectly from the song of Deborah), a tremendous storm of sleet and hail gathered from the east, and burst over the plain, driving full in the faces of the advancing Canaanites. “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” As in like case in the battle of Cressy, the slingers and the archers were disabled by the rain, the swordsmen were crippled by the biting cold. The Israelites, on the other hand, having the storm on their rear, were less troubled by it, and derived confidence from the consciousness of this Providential aid. The confusion became great. The “rain descended,” the four rivulets of Megiddo were swelled into powerful streams, the torrent of the Kishon rose into a flood, the plain became a morass. The chariots stuck fast in the sodden ground, and the charioteers were slain. The horse-hoofs hammered the soil in flight. The mighty ones who rode the chariots now strove in vain to flee the terror of battle. Half of them struggled downwards to the river through the marshy ground. But the Kishon was now in furious flood, and this part of the Canaanite army was engulfed in its clashing torrent. The rest fled along by Endor, to the east, and perished there.
A remarkable parallel to what happened here was the battle of Crimesus in Sicily when the Carthaginians were defeated by the Greeks. The Greek encampment, like that of Israel, was on the hill above the river. The chariots of their opponents are broken by the Greek Infantry. The violent storm of wind, rain, hail, thunder and lightning, beating in the faces of the Carthaginians but only on the backs of the Greeks; the confusion in the river becoming every moment fuller and more turbid through the violent rain, so that numbers perished in the torrents; the total rout of the enemy and the capture of the chariots, the spoils of ornamented shields-are the exact counterpart of the victory of Deborah and Barak over Sisera.1 [Note: T. E. Miller, Portraits of Women of the Bible, 82.]
3. Sisera abandoned his chariot and ran for his life. He managed to get to “the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite.” Though not herself an Israelite, she belonged to a tribe which had long been associated with the fortunes of Israel. Her husband was a descendant of Hobab, the father-in-law of Moses. But though friendly with Israel and worshipping the God of Israel, the Kenites were at the same time at peace with the Canaanites. “There was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite” (Jdg_4:17). The explanation has been found in the situation in which these people were placed. Hazor was only a few miles from Kedesh, so that it was policy to be at peace with Jabin, seeing they had no power to resist him, though it does not follow that they would not have risen against him if they could. Sisera, therefore, had no hesitation in seeking refuge in the tent of Jael, and had no suspicion of treachery when Jael went out to meet him, and offer him hospitality.
There are, as has already been stated, two distinct accounts of what Jael actually did. When we compare Jdg_4:21 with Jdg_5:26-27, we observe that, according to the prose narrative, Jael waited till Sisera was in a deep sleep, and then murdered him as Macbeth murdered Duncan. And this certainly appears to be a cold-blooded deed of cruelty. But in Deborah's poem a different version is given. Jael offered him milk and butter, and while he was drinking she attacked him with the tent-pin and a workman's hammer, so that “he bowed down and fell at her feet, and where he fell he died.”
No sooner was the deed done than Barak came by, hot in pursuit, and saw with joy his foe lie dead. The same day Deborah met him, and the prophetess changed into the poet. Like a Norse scald, she sang the rising, the battle, and the death of the enemy; and uttered words of scorn and mockery rarely equalled in the literature of war.
Sisera, for all his commanding nine hundred iron chariots, was slain with one iron nail.1 [Note: Thomas Fuller, Pisyah Sight of Palestine.]
