1. And Deborah sang, and Barak son of Abinoam with her. The use of a singular verb (feminine) followed by a compound subject is an indication in biblical grammar that the first of the subjects named is the primary actor and the second one ancillary to the action. Deborah is introduced as singer of the victory song, but that is not a claim of authorship, and elsewhere in the poem she is addressed in the second person. In any case, the scholarly consensus is that this is one of the oldest texts in the Bible, perhaps composed not long after the battle it reports, around 1100 B.C.E. Its language abounds in archaisms, many of them uncertain in meaning and probably some of them scrambled in scribal transmission.

2. When bonds were loosed in Israel. The Hebrew verb can mean undoing hair or casting off restraints. In the context here, it might refer to a time of wildness in military crisis when the ordinary social and political order was in abeyance.

when the people answered the call. The noun here (‘am) and the verbal stem n-d-b often occur as joined terms. The verb suggests volunteering or answering the call, but is also particularly associated with noblemen, who would be the ones to fling themselves into the fray as leaders with the rest of the people following them.

4. Seir . . . Edom. These places mark the route of conquest from the southeast toward Canaan reported in Numbers and Deuteronomy. YHWH as warrior god marches ahead of the people.

dripped rain. “Rain” is merely implied in the Hebrew.

6. In the days of Shamgar . . . in the days of Jael, the caravans ceased. Shamgar, the first of the Judges, is represented as chronologically overlapping with Jael, the heroine of the poem. Israelite caravans, according to the poem, were unable to journey safely because of the danger from Canaanite warriors.

7. Unwalled cities. There are wildly different interpretations of the obscure Hebrew noun perazon. This translation links it to the verbal stem p-r-ts, “to breach,” and understands it to indicate a town without walls. At a moment of grave military instability, Israelites could no longer live in such unprotected places.

ceased, / in Israel, they ceased. This pattern of incremental repetition (the increment here is “in Israel”) strongly marks this poem and is a hallmark of its archaic character. Incremental repetition is the most explicit form of development or intensification from the first half of the line to the second, a pattern in which something is literally added in the second verset.

till you arose, Deborah, / till you arose, O mother in Israel. This is another line built on incremental repetition. Although the ending of the verbs looks, according to later normative grammar, like a first-person singular, it is almost certainly an archaic second-person feminine ending.

8. They chose new gods. As in the prose narratives, cultic disloyalty leads to military catastrophe—“then was there war at the gates.”

9. who answered the call for the people. Here the association of the verbal stem n-d-b with nobility is made explicit because these are “the leaders of Israel.” The martial ethos of noble warriors prepared to risk all has a certain affinity with the Homeric poems.

10. Riders on pure-white she-asses. In this early period, these would be the mounts of noblemen or princes.

11. archers. Although this is a common understanding of meḥatsetsim, linking it to ḥets, “arrow,” widely different interpretations have been proposed. If in fact the word refers to archers, the sound would be the twanging of many bows and the whizzing of arrows as volleys are shot.

unwalled cities. This is the same word that is used in verse 7. God’s “bounties” would be in reestablishing a safe order for the tribes of Israel in which they could once more live in unfortified towns.

went down to the gates. Battle is often engaged before the gates of the city.

12. speak the song. Yairah Amit proposes that the choice of the verb “speak,” dabri, is motivated by a pun on the name Deborah. The phrase here is the increment in still another incremental repetition.

13. came down. The Masoretic vocalization yerad is anomalous and has led many interpreters to see an entirely different verb here. The most plausible construction, however, is to understand it as an archaic variant of yarad, “came down.” Since battle is joined at a wadi and the Israelite forces assemble in the hills, “came down” seems appropriate.

14. After you, O Benjamin, with your forces. The tribe of Benjamin, known for its military prowess, would be a likely candidate to lead the allied tribes into the fray.

15. great were the heart’s probings. The translation follows several variant manuscripts that show ḥiqrey, “probings,” as in the next verse, instead of ḥiqeqey, “rulings” (?). Given that Reuben is denounced in the next line for not joining the assembled tribes in battle, this phrase is probably sarcastic: the Reubenites give themselves to indecisive thought and speculation instead of marshaling their forces for battle. This entire verse and the next one reflect a real situation a century before the monarchy in which there is no central governing force and not all the tribes can be counted on to “answer the call” in a time of crisis.

17. Dan, why did he linger by the ships? The reference is puzzling because Dan did not occupy coastal territory either in its early phase east of the Philistines or in its later migration to the north.

18. challenged death. Literally, “exposed its life to death.”

19. Kings came, did battle, / then Canaan’s kings did battle. This is another fine flourish of incremental repetition. “Then” is repeated through the poem, marking its narrative momentum. Unlike the narrative version of this story in chapter 4, which has only one enemy king, Jabin, the Canaanite forces here are led more plausibly by an alliance of kings.

no spoil of silver did they take. This is the first clear indication that they are defeated. It also anticipates the self-deluding notion of the Canaanite noblewomen at the end of the poem that their men are about to bring home an abundance of spoils.

20. From the heavens the stars did battle. This is a characteristic move of Israelite war poetry: no feats of valor on the battlefield are reported, for the victory comes from divine intervention. The fact that in Hebrew idiom the clustered stars are referred to as the “army” or “host” (tzava’) of the heavens encourages this representation of the stars battling on behalf of Israel.

21. The Kishon Wadi swept them off. Although the poem’s narrative report here is highly elliptical, it looks as though there is an evocation of the victory at the Sea of Reeds: perhaps here, too, the chariots are disabled in the muck of the wadi, which might be the concrete manifestation of the stars’ battling for Israel.

22. The hooves of the horses hammered. This pounding of hoofbeats steps up the “march” or “tread,” of the preceding line. The entire line in Hebrew is strongly alliterative and onomatopoeic, an effect the translation seeks to emulate.

23. Curse Meroz. Nothing is known about this particular town other than its representation in the poem as a place of egregious failure to join the general effort of battle.

the aid of the LORD midst the warriors. In this incremental repetition, it is evident that YHWH needs His human warriors in order to be victorious. The poem wavers in this fashion between understanding victory as a miraculous event and as the accomplishment of heroic deeds by brave warriors. Jael at the end certainly needs no divine assistance.

24. above women in tents be she blessed. This incremental repetition, by introducing an ostensibly automatic epithet for women with their domestic sphere, “in tents,” sets the scene for the killing with the tent peg.

25. Water he asked for, milk did she give. Unlike the prose narrative, there is no dialogue, with its delineation of interaction of characters, only a series of gestures and acts.

in a princely bowl she served him curds. This is an eloquent flourish and heightening of the giving of milk in the first verset. At the same time, the offering of the bowl to Sisera (who has not yet been named) focuses visual attention on the hands of the woman bearing the bowl, and in the next line those hands will be murderous.

26. Her hand for the tent peg reached out. This would have to be her left hand. In the elliptical narrative report of the poem, we are not told that Sisera has fallen asleep, although the understanding of the prose story that this is the case sounds plausible. Alternatively, as he was drinking, his face deep in the bowl, she might have attacked him from behind, though he appears to be facing her when he falls.

she hammered Sisera, cracked his head. / She smashed and pierced his temple. The noun “hammer” at the end of the previous line now becomes a verb. In a related way, the entire report of the killing uses sequences of overlapping verbs, like cinematic frames one after the other—here: hammered, cracked, smashed, pierced. The verb “hammered” was previously applied to hoofbeats.

27. Between her legs he kneeled, fell, lay. His death agony is a kind of grotesque parody and reversal of sexual assault, a common practice in warfare, as we are reminded at the beginning of verse 30. This triadic line is one of the most brilliant deployments of incremental repetition in the poem, culminating in the climactic increment “destroyed” at the end.

28. Through the window she looked out. In a maneuver akin to cinematic faux raccord, we do not yet know that the “she” is Sisera’s mother, and for a moment we might even imagine that the poem is referring to Jael, though the window could not belong in a tent.

moaned. The Hebrew verbal stem y-b-b appears only here in the biblical corpus, and so one must surmise from context that it is some sort of lament, moan, or complaint.

window . . . lattice. It then becomes apparent that the scene has switched from the simple setting of a tent to a luxurious palace.

the clatter of his cars. The term “clatter” is more literally “pounding” and thus picks up the hammering hoofbeats of verse 22.

30. they will find and share out the spoils. The reason for the delayed return, they imagine, is that the victorious warriors are taking time to gather booty.

a damsel or two. The Hebrew raḥam is an archaic term, with a cognate that figures in Ugaritic texts, hence the choice of “damsel.” But it is transparently linked with reḥem, “womb,” and so might conceivably be a coarser term for a captive woman. In this warrior culture, the women unquestionably assume that it is the prerogative of the men to bring back fresh bedmates for themselves—even two to a customer—from the conquered enemy.

spoil of dyed stuff. But the women can anticipate their own special share in the spoils—gorgeous embroidered cloth taken from the women of the enemy. If this is the raiment of the captive women, they will have no need of such finery as sex slaves of their captors.