[310]. Twenty is half the indeterminate number forty, and merely denotes that the exact number of years, though unknown, was less than a generation.
[311]. Judg. v. 15. Literally the words are: ‘Issachar [is] like Barak.’ The Heb. kên is the Assyrian kêmi, ‘like,’ and is used in the same way as kida in modern Egyptian Arabic. It is criticism run wild to assert with Budde, Wellhausen, and others, that Deborah also is described as belonging to Issachar.
[312]. Pindar, Pyth. iv. 106; Lactant. i. 22; Etym. Mag. s.v. ἐσσην.
[313]. Gen. xxxv. 8, where the name of the terebinth, Allon-Bachuth, ‘the terebinth of weeping,’ is derived from the lamentations over the death of the nurse. A different origin of the name, however, seems to be indicated in Hos. xii. 4.
[314]. Rimmon, one of the chief Assyrian gods, was also entitled Barqu, ‘the lightning,’ and it is possible that the name had migrated westward along with that of Rimmon. Noam, whose name enters into that of Abinoam, the father of Barak, seems to have been a Phœnician god, whose consort was Naamah.
[315]. ‘Forty thousand’ represents the highest unit, one thousand, in the division of the army, multiplied by the indeterminate number forty.
[316]. ‘The Hittites of Kadesh,’ according to the reading of Lucian’s recension of the Septuagint, 2 Sam. xxiv. 6, in place of the corrupt and unmeaning Tahtim-hodshi of the Massoretic text. See Hitzig, Z. D. M. G., ix. pp. 763 sqq.; Wellhausen, T. B. S., p. 221.
[317]. It has been generally assumed to have been near the Kishon, on account of Judges iv. 16. But the inference is not certain, partly because we do not know how far the pursuit may have extended, partly because Oriental expressions cannot be interpreted with the mathematical exactitude of western language. The name of Harosheth means probably ‘[the town of] metal-working,’ or ‘the smithy.’
[318]. Being a poem, it was probably handed down orally at first. This would account for variant readings like ‘also the clouds dropped,’ by the side of ‘also the heavens dropped,’ in v. 4; or ‘in the days of Jael,’ by the side of ‘in the days of Shamgar ben-Anath,’ in v. 6. The name of Jael, however, may have been a marginal gloss like sârîd, ‘a remnant,’ possibly, in v. 13. The song was almost certainly written from the outset in the letters of the so-called Phœnician alphabet, and not in cuneiform characters. Had it been written in cuneiform there would have been a confusion between aleph, hê and ’ayin, which cannot be detected in it. At the same time, the use of the preposition bě in vv. 2 and 15 (b’ Isrâel, b’ Issachar) could be explained from the cuneiform syllabary, in which the character pi (used for bi in the Tel el-Amarna tablets) also has the value of yi. The omission of the article, which is a characteristic of the Song, reminds us that in Canaanite or Phœnician the definite article of Hebrew did not exist.
[319]. A variant reading gave ‘clouds’ instead of ‘heavens.’