Judges5chapter 5

Judges 5:1-3

Chapter 4 tells the battle in prose and chapter 5 sings it, which is the shape Exodus 14 and 15 already used for the Red Sea. Deborah is the singer and Barak sings with her, and Judges 4:4 had already called her a prophetess, so the woman who gave the order composes the record of it. Verse 3 turns outward and addresses kings and princes rather than Israel, which puts the song in the same class as the psalms that summon the nations to listen.

Judges 5:4-5

God is described coming up from the south country rather than down from the sky, out of Seir and the field of Edom, and the same march appears at Deuteronomy 33:2, Psalm 68:7-8 and Habakkuk 3:3. Sinai is named in verse 5, so the song reaches back past Joshua to the mountain itself and treats this battle as the same God on the same road. The weather in these two verses is doing work later in the poem, since dropping heavens and clouds of water end at a flooded river in verse 21.

Judges 5:6-8

In the days of Shamgar: Shamgar is the man of Judges 3:31 who killed six hundred Philistines with an ox goad, and Jael is named here before the song tells what she did. The conditions given are the ones a trader would notice first, main roads left empty, travellers keeping to side tracks, and the open villages abandoned for walled towns. Verse 8 sets cause beside effect, new gods chosen and then war in the gates, and asks whether a shield or a spear was to be seen among forty thousand, a state of disarmament close to what 1 Samuel 13:19-22 later describes under the Philistines.

Judges 5:9-11

The willing offering of verse 2 returns at verse 9, and it is the thing the song praises rather than the size of the victory. Verse 10 names two classes and tells both to speak, the men who ride white asses and sit in judgment, and the men who walk the road on foot. Verse 11 appoints the place for the telling, the watering places where women and herdsmen met every day, so the song is built to be rehearsed at the well until the children of the villages know it by heart.

Judges 5:12-13

The song calls on itself to wake, four imperatives inside one verse, and then turns and calls Barak by his father's name. Lead thy captivity captive is the phrase Psalm 68:18 uses of God ascending on high, and Paul quotes that psalm of Christ at Ephesians 4:8. Verse 13 says the remnant was given dominion over the nobles, so the force that won was the smaller party and the poem states it rather than hiding it.

Judges 5:14-15

The tribes that came are called by old family names rather than the standard list, so Machir stands for Manasseh as it does at Genesis 50:23 and Numbers 32:39. Ephraim is set against Amalek, whose people held hill country inside Ephraim according to Judges 12:15, and Zebulun sends men that handle the pen of the writer, read either as the officers who mustered troops or as men carrying a marshal's staff. Barak is sent on foot into the valley at verse 15, and the valley is exactly where the nine hundred chariots of iron of 4:13 had the advantage.

Judges 5:16-17

Four groups stayed away and each is named with the thing that held it, Reuben with the sheepfolds and the bleating of the flocks, Gilead beyond Jordan, Dan with ships, Asher on the sea shore. The divisions of Reuben draw the sharpest line in the poem, repeated at the close of verse 15 and again at the close of verse 16, great thoughts of heart and great searchings of heart, which is long deliberation that produced no men. Judah, Simeon and Levi appear nowhere in the roll, praised or blamed, and the song gives no reason for their absence.

Judges 5:18-19

Zebulun and Naphtali are the two tribes Barak was ordered to call at 4:6 and did call at 4:10, and they are the two the song says staked their lives. The kings of Canaan fought at Taanach by the waters of Megiddo, and the clause that they took no gain of money means they carried off no plunder from a battle they expected to win. The plain of Megiddo is the ground a long line of writers connect with the name at Revelation 16:16, and that identification belongs to them rather than to the verse itself.

Judges 5:20-21

Chapter 4 says only that the Lord discomfited Sisera at 4:15, and it never mentions a river. The song supplies what the prose left out, that they fought from heaven and that the Kishon swept the army away. Readings of the line are old and are held by serious men, that a storm broke over the plain as the hailstones fell at Joshua 10:11, that the host of heaven is meant as at 2 Kings 6:17, or that the stars name the powers ranged behind the battle. Taken together the two chapters account for what became of nine hundred chariots of iron in flat country that suited them, because a river in flood takes wheels out of the reckoning.

Judges 5:22-23

Horsehoofs broken by their own prancing is what a chariot line looks like from the ground once it is mired and the teams begin to panic. The curse of Meroz is spoken by the angel of the Lord, the same speaker who brought the charge at 2:1, and it falls on a town of Israel for staying home rather than on Canaan for fighting. Meroz occurs nowhere else in Scripture and its site has never been fixed, so the one place the song curses by name is the one place in it a reader cannot find on a map.

Judges 5:24-25

The blessing on Jael runs close to the words spoken of Mary at Luke 1:42, and Matthew Henry is among the writers who set the two lines side by side. She is a Kenite, outside Israel by descent from the father in law of Moses according to 4:11, and the song puts its highest blessing on a foreign woman living in a tent. The prose at 4:19 has Sisera ask for water and Jael open a bottle of milk, and the song keeps that exchange and adds the lordly dish.

Judges 5:26-27

The song says she smote off his head and struck through his temples, while 4:21 says she drove the nail through his temples into the ground while he slept. Both accounts stand in the canon and neither corrects the other, the poem heightening the blow where the prose gives the mechanics of it. Verse 27 slows the whole song to one body going down, bowed and fell and lay down, said three times over, and it is the last thing Scripture says of Sisera. The crushed head under a woman's hand is read back to Genesis 3:15 by named writers, and the New Testament makes no such link, so it stands on their authority and on no text.

Judges 5:28-30

The song ends the enemy's side indoors, with a woman at a window counting the minutes and answering her own question. Her ladies reply with the arithmetic of plunder, a damsel or two for every man and dyed needlework for Sisera, and the Hebrew word behind damsel is a coarse one for the women taken. Deborah had called herself a mother in Israel at verse 7, and the poem closes on a second mother, waiting for a son who is already lying in Jael's tent.

Judges 5:31

The closing line asks that enemies perish and that those who love God go out like the sun in its strength, which Matthew 13:43 takes up of the righteous shining in the kingdom of their Father. Then the land had rest forty years, and that formula has now fallen three times in the book, at 3:11, 3:30 and here. It never appears again. Everything after Deborah records deliverance without rest, and the loss shows in the vocabulary before it shows in the story.