Composing the Song of Deborah: Empirical Models

Alan J. Hauser, “Two Songs of Victory: A Comparison of Exodus 15 and Judges 5,” in Directions in Biblical Hebrew Poetry, ed. Elaine R. Follis, JSOT Sup 40 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1987), 265–284 [p. 265]. See also Steven Weitzman, Song and Story in Biblical Narrative: The History of a Literary Convention in Ancient Israel, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 31–32.

For a dissenting view (which I do not find persuasive), see Serge Frolov, “Dating Deborah,” TheTorah (2017).

Note especially how the participle is never used as a predicate, and the imperfect yiqtol is used as a present progressive (הֲלֹא יִמְצְאוּ יְחַלְּקוּ שָׁלָל) and a historical present (שָׁם יְתַנּוּ צִדְקוֹת ה' צִדְקֹת פִּרְזוֹנוֹ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל אָז יָרְדוּ לַשְּׁעָרִים עַם ה'). See more generally Tania Notarius, The Verb in Archaic Biblical Poetry: A Discursive, Typological, and Historical Investigation of the Tense System (Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 68; Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Mark Smith, Poetic Heroes: The Literary Commemorations of Warriors and Warrior Culture in the Early Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014).

Lawrence E. Stager, “Archaeology, Ecology, and Social History: Background Themes to the Song of Deborah,” in Congress Volume Jerusalem 1986, ed. John A. Emerton, VT Sup 40 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 221–234; J. David Schloen, “Caravans, Kenites, and Casus belli: Enmity and Alliance in the Song of Deborah,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 55 (1993), 18–38.

See the classic collection edited by Jeffrey H. Tigay, Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). The significance of this is enhanced by the recent collection, Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism (ed. Raymond F. Person Jr. and Robert Rezetko; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016). See also Seth L. Sanders, “What if There Aren’t Any Empirical Models for Pentateuchal Criticism?” in Contextualizing Israel’s Sacred Writings: Ancient Literacy, Orality, and Literary Production (ed. Brian B. Schmidt; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014), 281-304.

While an empirical model can never prove anything about a particular text in the Bible, it can suggest what is and what is not plausible, and thereby help us think carefully about the ways in which biblical literature reached its present form.

There is no rigid definition, but in the qaṣīdā a theme is developed over the course of a long(ish) exposition. On the genre generally, see C.-H. De Fouchécour, ḳaṣīdā, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, and Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126.

Abdullah Sowayan, Nabaṭi Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 191-192, discussing James Monroe, “Oral Composition in Pre-Islamic Poetry: The Problem of Authenticity,” JAL 3 (1972), 1-53, and Michael Zwettler, The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry: Its Character and Implications (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), both of whom apply Parry-Lord categories of oral literature to pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Some scholars have compared oral poetry in Norse, Scottish, African, and other cultures, with the Arabic: M. V. McDonald, “Orally Transmitted Poetry in Pre-Islamic Arabia and Other Pre-Literate Societies,” Journal of Arabic Literature 9 (1978), 14-31.

See Somwayan, 67-87, and Bailey, Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 413-416: poetry about battles, including comparison with Exodus 15 and Judges 5.

Allen, 146, calls this “one of Arabic’s greatest ceremonial panegyrics.” See also M. M. Badawi, “The Function of Rhetoric in Medieval Arabic Poetry: Abū Tammām's Ode on Amorium,” Journal of Arabic Literature 9 (1978), 43-56.

Andras Hamori, “Al-Mutanabbī,” in Abbasid Belles Lettres (ed. Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 300-314 (including discussion and partial translation of the poem to Sayf al-Dawlah following the battle of al-Ḥadath). For an analysis of the poem, see Derek Latham, “Towards a Better Understanding of al-Mutanabbī's Poem on the Battle of al-Hadath,” Journal of Arabic Literature 10 (1979), 1-22.

Allen, 151-152.

Bailey, Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev, 275-276.

This is the end of poem 29 in War Songs by ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, translated by James E. Montgomery with Richard Sieburth (Library of Arabic Literature; foreword by Peter Cole; New York: New York University Press, 2018), 89. For the authorship question of this poem, known only in medieval tellings of the story of ‘Antarah, see Montgomery’s introduction, lii-liv.

Clinton Bailey, “The Narrative Context of the Bedouin Qaṣīdaḫ-poem,” in מחקרי המרכז לחקר הפולקלור 3 (1972), 67-105. See also Bailey, Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), and the discussion in Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 167-203. See also his contribution to TheTorah.com: https://www.thetorah.com/article/abraham-and-lots-bedouin-style-hospitality.

This is the basic approach to the relationship between Judges 4 and 5 of scholars such as Baruch Halpern, “The Resourceful Israelite Historian: The Song of Deborah and Israelite Historiography,” Harvard Theological Review 76 (1983), 379-401.

Lichtheim studied under the great Egyptologist and linguist H. J. Polotsky in the Hebrew University, then served for many years as the Near East librarian at the University of California of Los Angeles for decades. She eventually retired back to Israel, and passed away in 2004. See her autobiography, Telling it Briefly: A Memoir of My Life (Fribourg: University Press, 1999). Lichtheim’s three volumes of translations of Egyptian literature (Ancient Egyptian Literature [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973-1980]) is a standard collection of Egyptian literature in English.

See, for example, Steven Weitzman, Song and Story in Biblical Narrative: The History of a Literary Convention in Ancient Israel, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 30, who argues that the rhetorical strategy of Exodus 14–15 is to mimic literary forms employed within Egyptian military propaganda in order to undermine the authority of the Egyptian king. See also Joshua Berman, “The Kadesh Inscriptions of Ramesses II and the Exodus Sea Account (Exodus 13:17–15:19),” in “Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt?” Biblical, Archaeological, and Egyptological Perspectives on the Exodus Narratives (ed. James K. Hoffmeier, Alan R. Millard, and Gary A. Rendsburg; Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 93-112; James K. Hoffmeier, “The Arm of God Versus the Arm of Pharaoh in the Exodus Narratives,” Biblica 67 (1986), 378–387; Chaim Cohen, “Pharaoh’s שלישים ‘Third-Man Charioteers’ (Exod. 14.7; 15.4) and the Unnoticed Literary Allusion to the Battle of of Qadesh in the Song of the Sea,” in Visions of Life in Biblical Times: Essays in Honor of Meir Lubetski (ed. Claire Gottlieb, Chaim Cohen, and Mayer Gruber; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2015), 17–46.

For the prose account, not discussed here, see Kenneth Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions IV, and Colleen Manassa, The Great Karnak Inscription of Merneptah: Grand Strategy in the 13th Century BC (New Haven: Yale Egyptological Seminar, 2003).

Editor’s note: For discussion of the Egyptian concept of Maat, see Jan Assmann, “Pharaoh's Divine Role in Maintaining Order,” TheTorah (2016).

Although the Hebrew verb looks like a 1s (“I rose”), many scholars believe it to be an archaic 2fs (“you rose”), which I believe to be correct.  

However, as we have seen, similar motifs can be found in pre-Islamic Arabian poems, as well as modern Bedouin poems.

What exactly this would look like in pre-monarchic Israel is not clear, but that does not mean it is impossible.

McDonald, “Orally Transmitted Poetry in Pre-Islamic Arabia and Other Pre-Literate Societies,” 30.