"The kings came and fought;
The kings of Canaan in Taanach, by the waters of Megiddo;
They brought away no treasure.
They fought; from heaven the stars in their courses
They fought against Sisera.
The river Kishon swept them down,
That ancient river, Kishon.
O my soul! walk forth with strength!
Then was the rattling of hoofs of horses!
They rushed back,—the horses of the mighty."
And now the solemn sound of a prophetic curse:—
"Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of Jehovah,
Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof,
Because they came not to the help of Jehovah,
To the help of Jehovah against the mighty!"
Then follows a burst of blessing on the woman who had slain the oppressor; in which we must remember, it is a woman driven to the last extreme of indignation at outrages practiced on her sex that thus rejoices. When the tiger who has slain helpless women and children is tracked to his lair, snared, and caught, a shout of exultation goes up; and there are men so cruel and brutal that even humanity rejoices in their destruction. There is something repulsive in the thought of the artifice and treachery that beguiled and betrayed the brigand chief. But woman cannot meet her destroyer in open, hand-to-hand conflict. She is thrown perforce on the weapons of physical weakness; and Deborah exults in the success of the artifice with all the warmth of her indignant soul.
"Blessed above women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite!
Blessed shall she be above women in the tent!
He asked water and she gave him milk;
She brought forth butter in a lordly dish.
She put her hand to the nail,
Her right hand to the workman's hammer.
With the hammer she smote Sisera,
She smote off his head.
When she had stricken through his temple,
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay prostrate.
At her feet he bowed, he fell.
Where he bowed, there he fell down dead!"
The outrages on wives, mothers, and little children, during twenty years of oppression, gives energy to this blessing on the woman who dared to deliver.
By an exquisite touch of the poetess, we are reminded what must have been the fate of all Judæan women except for this nail of Jael.
"The mother of Sisera looked out at a window.
She cried through the lattice,
Why delay the wheels of his chariot?
Why tarries the rattle of his horse-hoofs?
Her wise ladies answered: yea, she spake herself.
Have they not won? Have they not divided the prey?
To every man a virgin or two;
To Sisera a prey of divers colors, of divers colors and gold embroidery,
Meet for the necks of them that take the spoil."
In the reckoning of this haughty princess, a noble Judæan lady, with her gold embroideries and raiment of needle-work, is only an ornament meet for the neck of the conqueror,—a toy, to be paraded in triumph. The song now rises with one grand, solemn swell, like the roll of waves on the sea-shore:—
"So let all thine enemies perish, O Jehovah!
But let them that love thee shine forth as the sun in his strength."