The Development of the Song of Deborah: Empirical Models from Ancient Egpytian Poetry and Bedouin Poetry

The Song of Deborah is generally thought to be among the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible. How and when was it produced, and how was such a poem transmitted in early Israel? Two different empirical models, oral Arabic poetry and ancient Egyptian royal battle poems, suggest different ways of understanding its composition and dissemination.

The celebration of military victories is one of the primary roles of the known Arabic ḳaṣīdā. There are similar poems among the Bedouin, and we know about the composition and transmission of these ḳaṣīdā-poems from ethnographers. One poet reported: “I thought quietly to myself…remembering what had happened. I gathered up words from here and there and pressed them together …” Kaṣīdas often open with a narrative introduction, which may not accurately reflect the real details of the episode that gave rise to the poem, reminiscent of way that the song of Judges 5 follows a prose account in Judges 4 that many scholars suggest tells a somewhat different story.

Two thirteenth-century Egyptian poems, Ramesses II’s Qadesh poem and the ‘battle hymn’ of his son Merenptah, are also reminiscent of the Song of Deborah. Two specific comparisons between Merenptah’s text and the Song are: both texts focus on travel being possible once again thanks to the victory; and both relish the imagined aftermath of the defeat of the enemy hero back in his hometown.

Both empirical models – Arabic ḳaṣīdā and Ramesside poems – are helpful for thinking about the Song of Deborah. Putting them together enables us to also make progress on textual questions. The text of Judges 4 and 5 can be divided into different parts, some of which are amenable to comparative analysis in light of the above texts. The lecture will propose a new model of textual development based on this study.