Judges 5 purports to be the "Song of Deborah and Barak". Judges 4 is a prose account of the events this Song describes. The purpose of this study is to mine the textual history of Judges 4 for source material.
I will need to start with a theory of what the Song of Deborah really is, or rather was. Then I will show that Judges 4 is independent of and precedes the Deuteronomist. I will point out Psalm 83 as a witness to Judges 4's finished state. I will show that a source of Joshua 11:1-15 has contaminated the narrative of Judges 4. Only then can I list what truly Deborahan traditions underlie Judges 4.
It has long been noted that whatever oral sources which lie behind Judges 5 are very ancient in origin. (A brief summary of arguments will suffice here: Judah went unmentioned, Manasseh was replaced by "Machir", YHWH marched from Edom, the stars in heaven fought against Sisera, the language is often very archaic &c. &c.) However, it would be simplistic to label Judges 5 "The Song of Deborah" without understanding the nature of a transcribed oral tradition.
Unlike literature, folk ballads are committed to memory. A bard who moves to another town will sing to different people with a different set of priorities. For this reason and others (like forgetfulness and confusion), variants of the song proliferate. Such is what happened to The Iliad in the 5th-4th centuries BCE before textual critics in Alexandria drew up and promulgated the canonical text.
A similar process appears to have occurred for Judges 5. The selection of verses which make up Judges 5 has preserved two separate performance reviews of the Israelite tribes: in 14-17, Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar, and Naphtali(?)1 over against Reuben, Gilead, Dan, and Asher; in 18, Zebulun again and Naphtali.2 In addition, the divisions between stanzas are very abrupt, much more so than those of the Achaean epics.
I concur with the majority opinion insofar that the verses of Judges 5 are echoes of the original Song of Deborah, but it is important to remember that these verses cannot be identified with the Song itself. Judges 5 stems from different poetic traditions which branched from the same event.
Judges 4 and 5 both appear within a larger corpus, collectively known as the "Deuteronomistic History". This particular subdivision of the Bible starts with the Pentateuch, but minus P: passages like Genesis 1 and the whole of Leviticus were not part of that age's Scriptures. The rest of the History is today broken down into Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, and 1-2 Kings. The whole work represents an opinionated survey of world history seen from the eyes of a pious Jew: from the Garden of Eden (JE/Gen 2) down to the Babylonian Exile. Judges 4, at least, was useful to the Deuteronomist's view of history; 1 Samuel 12:9 quotes "Sisera, general of the army of Hazor" as a past villian.
This history was constructed from earlier, smaller sources; the real question is about their exact extent. I posit that Judges 4 can be traced back to an earlier edition of the Book of Judges.
The stories of Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson together appear to have been compiled by a different editor than the one who added, say, Jair and Tolan. Note how the former are structured:
| Phrase: | Oth. | Ehud | Deb. | Gid. | Jeph. | Sam. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3:7; | 3:12a; | 4:1; | 6:1a; | 10:6; | 13:1a. | ||
| 3:8b; | 3:12b; | 4:2a; | 6:1b; | 10:7b; | 13:1b. | ||
| 3:8c; | 3:14; | 4:3c; | 6:1b; | 10:8a; | 13:1c. | ||
| 3:9a; | 3:15a; | 4:3a; | 6:6b; | 10:10a; | - | ||
| 3:9b; | 3:15b; | - | - | - | - | ||
| 3:11; | 3:30b; | 5:31b; | 8:28b; | 12:7a; | 16:31c. |
Four of the six formulaic phrases reflect theological concerns. The editor is interested in explaining how Israel has been punished in the past, yet is always delivered following a plea for help.
YHWH's reasons for his displeasure were not as important. According to 3:7 and 10:6-7, YHWH was angry that Israel went after other gods. In the latter case, the Israelites' plea for help included repentance (10:15-16). But in the majority of accounts (Ehud, Gideon, Samson - and Deborah!), YHWH neither explained His reasons for His anger, nor His motives for responding to Israel's plea.
YHWH's arbitrariness did not escape future readers. One copyist beamed an unnamed prophet back to the age of Gideon in order to explain the situation; this comprises the canonical Judges 6:7-10. This pericope is absent from the earliest text we have, the third-century Qumran fragment 4QJudga. Even 3:7 and 10:6-7 are questionable. The Jephthah story shows signs of Deuteronomistic redaction as much as the Gideon story. In addition, the ending to the Book of Joshua in the Septuagint translation is extended:
In that day the children of Israel took the ark of God, and carried it about among them; and Phinehas exercised the priest's office in the room of Eleazar his father until he died, and he was buried in his own place Gabaar: but the children of Israel departed every one to their own place, and to their own city: and the children of Israel worshipped Astarte, and Astaroth, and the gods of the nations around them; and the Lord delivered them into the hands of Eglon king of Moab and he ruled over them eighteen years.
In Joshua, the MT is plus-heavy relative to LXX. Whence this minus? Also, Judges 1:1-3:6 is little more than a flashback of Joshua, and 3:7-3:11, concerning Othniel, is less a story than a Deuteronomistic archetype. The Septuagint hints at a time when Judges 1:1-3:14 had only just appeared in Judges, and Joshua had not yet caught up.
Judges' primitive picture of a temperamental God can be seen as early as the Stele of Mesha (exact date unknown, but between 840 - 600 BCE): "Omri was the king of Israel, and he oppressed Moab for many days, for Kemosh was angry with his land" (line 5); and again: "And Omri took possession of the whole land of Mehdeba, and he lived there in his days and half the days of his bnh ('son'): forty years. But Kemosh restored it in my days" (line 8). While Mesha did not organize his thoughts as well as the author (or redactor) of proto-Judges, his memorial at least shows that much of Judges's editorial activity may be pre-Deuteronomistic.
Of course, "pre-Deuteronomistic" in this case really means "proto-". Pre-Deuteronomistic theology claims that history is the result of God's changing moods. The Deuteronomist attempts to explain those moods with reference to Hebrew ethical and cultic conduct.
Judges 4-5 largely avoids Deuteronomistic theory; indeed, it often flouts it. Chief among these is Jael's betrayal of Sisera, for which she is "blessed among the women who dwell in tents". Another problem with this would-be heroine is that she is the "wife of Heber the Kenite" (4:17, 21; 5:24). According to Num 24:22 (in the JE source used by Deuteronomy), the Kenites were a foreign tribe. This meant that Jael, heroine of Israel, was either a gentile or an Israelite who married a gentile - and, according to Deut 7:3, marriage to a foreigner is forbidden to Israelites.
The canonical Judges 4-5 avoids the first problem, but does in fact confront the second. Judges 4:11 reads in full: "Heber the Kenite had cut himself off from the tribe of Kain and the clan of the sons of Hobab, the father-/ brother-in-law of Moses, and he had pitched his tent at Elon-Bezaanannim near Kedesh".
Robert H. O'Connell, in Rhetorical Concerns of Judges as a Literary Form, claimed that 4:11 was "strategically positioned to give the reader an impression of lapsed time", in the "centre of a symmetrical presentation of Barak summoning troops... then ascending with Deborah; and of Sisera receiving the report that Barak had ascended... then himself summoning troops". But all this shows is that the verse was well-placed. O'Connell was not able to explain why the verse's data were necessary in the first place; in fact, he undercut his own argument by asserting that the Kenites were "a marginal clan of Judah" (p. 139). Of course, neither the despised Kenites nor Judges 4:11's Hobab had anything to do with Judah.
On the contrary. A Hobab, presumably the same one, is "son of Reuel the Midianite, [Moses's] father-in-law" according to Num 10:29-32. Reuel, in turn, appears in Ex 2. The Hobab/Reuel tradition is associated with the J source of JE,3 which was in turn the background to the book of Deuteronomy,4 which kicked off the ensuing History.5 Hobab was traditionally not a Kenite, but a Midianite; J, JE and the Historian normally call Kenites "sons of Kain" (JE/Num 24:22). This is the only time the sons of Hobab appear in the Bible.
Judges 4:11 described Heber's tribe and clan ties by the cunning expedient of announcing that he had renounced them. The verse first stated that Heber was a member of the Kenite tribe, which may or may not imply blood relation; but then it contrasted that with Heber's blood kinship with the Midianite relatives of Moses. Even then, Judges 4:11 had Heber disown his fellows and move near Barak at Kedesh: specifically, near the oak of Zaanannim. This oak appears only one other place in the Bible: in the Masoretic text of Joshua 19:33 as part of the allotment of Naphtali at Kedesh. (The Greek Joshua calls it "Besemiin", implying a "from Zaanannim" in the original with no oak.) The author took great pains to transplant Heber from the Kenites to the Naphtalites; from Sisera's ha-goyim to Dvorah's loyal Israelites.
Indeed that was the verse's sole purpose. Judges 4:11 looked to JE as background and to Moses as founder. It was also aware that the Oak of Zaaninnim and Kadesh were near neighbours. That the author made Heber and not Jael an honorary Israelite shows that the author was concerned more about the possibility that Jael had married a gentile than that Jael was a gentile herself. It was probably written at a time when "the wife of Heber the Kenite" was too well established to be deleted, and so had to be explained; that is, a later time.
In Psalm 83, Jabin fell with Sisera and "Midian" at Kis(h)on (verse 9, if superscript not counted as a verse). Either:
The first cannot be true. Judges 4 and 5 contradict an earlier chapter of the Deuteronomistic History. The History includes Joshua 11:1-15, which credited Joshua with the defeat of Jabin of Hazor and his Canaanite coalition, ending with the sack of Hazor. Judges 4-5 forces the Israelites to repeat this arduous task until Jabin is "utterly destroyed" again. Not only does this require a lot of special pleading to iron out, it also flies in the face of the archaeology of Hazor, which prior to the United Monarchy was sacked only once.6 Also, Hazor is some distance north of Taanach on the Kishon, the "waters of Megiddo". Finally, Jabin is not mentioned at all in Judges 5 and stays out of the action in Judges 4; in fact there never was such a thing as a "king of Canaan". I am not the first to note these points; I doubt that Jabin was native to the Deborah and Sisera epics.
That leaves three other options whose proof relies upon chronology. The psalm was written prior to the reign of Josiah, because Israel's enemies wished to take the "dwellings (plural) of God"; Josiah enforced the Deuteronomistic rule that YHWH have only one dwelling, in Jerusalem. More specifically, these enemies included Amalek, and "Assur" last of all. This would fix it to the time of the Assyrian invasions, and before Amalek had yet been "blotted out from memory under heaven" as predicted (by hindsight?) in JE. The Deuteronomist only knew that Amalek was gone and attributed their end to Saul's kingdom. Finally, Psalm 83 is a "Psalm of Asaph" in a very north-kingdom dialect (Holladay p. 32), and in the "Elohist Section" (42-83) to boot. The meagre evidence at our disposal points to a date of authorship around the time of the Assyrian invasions of Ephraim.
Moreover, Judges 4 did not stand alone in that psalm. Psalm 83 is a poetic conflation of Judges 7:25-8:3 and 8:4-8:21, the doublet accounts of Oreb / Zeeb and Zebah / Zalmunna (11-12). Isaiah alludes to an important victory over Midian at Oreb's Rock (Isaiah 10:26), which may make him an additional witness to 7:25-8:3.
The psalmist named Jabin / Sisera, Oreb / Zeeb, and Zebah / Zalmunna in the order they occupy in Judges. The psalm's purpose was to curse the surrounding tribes for allying themselves with Assyria. Correspondingly, the three couples suggest a history of Midianite conspiracies which, for all the psalmist cared, included the Canaanite Jabin. This means that the merging of Jabin and Sisera, and their connection to the other two Midianite conspiracies, is fixed in the psalmist's mind. The psalmist writes as if he were paraphrasing a pre-Deuteronomistic book or epic which shared subject matter and order with Judges 4 and 7:25-8:21.
This thesis is not without its difficulties. The psalm made reference to En Dor (not in Judges 4-5) and the quotation "Let us take for ourselves possession of the Dwellings of God" (not in Judges 7-8). I do not see a prose account leaving out such important material, so dependence must point from the prose to the verse (if at all). Until more evidence is forthcoming, I propose that Judges 4 (and 7:25-8:21) had other traditions associated with them which contaminated the psalmist's work. I am aware that this is a weak proposal and the critic is encouraged to come up with a better idea.
It should now be clear that Judges 4 is early in date. It is now time to push the envelope even further. How faithful is Judges 4 to the Deborah tradition?
As has been implied above, the very question of when and how this History was written is far from settled; texts like Judges 6:7-10 and 1 Samuel "11:0" were inserted and deleted, respectively, over a period of centuries. From a minimalist standpoint, I believe one can at least show that the author of Judges 4 did not have the received text of Judges 5 in front of him. A preponderance of discrepancies between the two should bear this out.
Not all divergences from canon pose a problem; Deborah's speech in 4:14, for instance, is a standard literary device in ancient historiography/storytelling: like Thucydides's Melian Dialogue, or Tacitus's "they create devastation and call it peace". I do wonder about some of Judges 4's omissions. Judges 4 did not relate the fortunes of any tribes but Zebulun and Naphtali (the roster of 5:18); it is as if he had not even heard the roster of 5:14-17. Judges 4 also left out the curse of Meroz (23) and Sisera's mother (28-30). One would expect Judges 4 to provide at least a midrashic explanation for these stanzas.
On their account of Sisera's demise, Judges 4 and 5 flatly contradict one another. In Judges 4, Jael covered him in a rug and gave him a skin of milk (4:19). Then Sisera lay down, and Jael murdered him in his sleep (4:21b). As for Judges 5, Jael gave Sisera a bowl, "fit for a chieftain" (5:25). When Sisera died, he "tumbled / sank down" (5:27), which implies that he had been upright and presumably conscious. Needless to say, there is hardly any of the word-for-word correspondence one would expect from textual dependence.
Yet Judges 4 was not totally independent of the Song:
| Event: | Judges 4 | Judges 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4:14 | = 5:4-5. | ||
(5:12a adds 'Deborah') |
4:6-9, 14 | = 5:12b-13. | |
| |
4:10 |
= 5:18. |
|
| |
4:13 |
= 5:21. |
|
(probably rkb/chariots; c.f. 5:28) |
4:15-16 | = 5:22. | |
(variant) |
4:17-22 | = 5:24-27. |
Even within Judges 5, there are discrepancies. Dan is (famously) "by ships" - the coast, next to aggressive Philistines - but in its context the line situates Dan to the north, whither he/they had migrated by the time of Omri. (Z Kallai, 1997, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 23/2, pp. 35-45, "DAN WHY ABIDES HE BY SHIPS" - AND THE RULES OF HISTORIOGRAPHICAL WRITING")
The easiest way to explain this, is that Judges 4 is a harmony of those versions of the Song of Deborah which the author knew, probably from memory. The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 is a compilation of earlier sources ordered according to later geographic reality. I suggest Judges 4 did not know Judges 5.
Although I knew that Judges 4 did not have the actual text of Judges 5, I was still surprised to find 5:19-20 absent from Judges 4. What happened to Taanach, Megiddo's waters, and the kings of Canaan? For that matter, where in Judges 5 is Jabin of Hazor?
In Judges 5:19-22, "kings of Canaan fought ... they took no plunder." Since Judges 5 is a victory song, the audience understands this verse to mean that the kings of Canaan were fighting Deborah. Immediately following, in 5:20 "the stars of heaven fought against Sisera". 5:24 and its analogue in 4:17 bless Jael for slaying Sisera; in the Deborah tradition, Sisera was fighting on the side of Canaan, against Deborah and the hosts of heaven. 5:19 and 5:20 therefore link the kings of Canaan to Sisera in parallel verses. Also, the battle occurred "by the waters of Megiddo", which of course refers to the Kishon (5:19).
Hazor was a northern site very close to biblical Canaan ("Phoenicia" to the Greeks). Its Judges 4 king, Jabin, appears in Joshua 11:1-15 as the leader of a coalition, among them "Jobab the king of Madon,... the king of Shimron, the king of Ahsaph and the kings in the northern highlands and in the valley south of Chinneroth, and those of the lowlands and the hillsides of Dor westward" (11:1-2). The Book of Joshua is quick to add, "eastward and westward lived the Canaanite" first among the peoples in the area. In Joshua, Jabin of Hazor is an implicitly Canaanite king with influence over other implicitly Canaanite kings. These kings had chariots like Sisera's (11:4, 6). Finally, Joshua ambushed and defeated Jabin in the waters of Merom (11:5, 7).
To us, these parallels do not suggest any dependence between Judges 5:19-22 and Joshua 11:1-15. They can be explained as common features of Israel-versus-Canaan warfare, in which Israel used geography to nullify Canaan's technological advantage. But by his time of Judges 4 and Psalm 83, the oral tradition had diffused somewhat. I explain the material in Judges 4 otherwise exclusive to Joshua 11:1-15 (that is, Jabin of Hazor) in this way: (a) Judges 4 knew 5:19-22, (b) Judges 4 preceded the Book of Joshua's link between Jabin and Joshua, and (c) Judges 4's composer was sufficiently confused by the parallels between the two tales that he fashioned his own link, between Jabin and Deborah.
2 The southern tribes of Levi, Simeon, and Judah were not important enough then.
3 Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Summit Books, 1987) p. 252.