The Song of Deborah in the Light of Stylistics

Abstract

The interpretation of Judges v presents difficulties in many ways unparalleled in the Old Testament. Its language is stamped by an archaic quality and a brevity which makes its meaning not easily intelligible. The Song of Deborah belongs also to the most conjectured upon and the most criticized of Old Testament texts. The commentaries give one an almost hopeless feeling that a critic, by nearly any variation, by any transposition of the radicals, and by any new division of the words, can produce new readable combinations possessing more or less rational meaning. Nearly all of these conjectures imply an arbitrary deviation from the transmitted text. The sense of the Massoretic text as it stands, what meaning the Massoretes themselves made of it, is a point too often absent from discussion by those eager to make brilliant conjectures. Yet it must be stated as a principle that the primary task of textual criticism in the Old Testament is to interpret the Massoretic text. Every critic who treats this matter summarily and dismisses the Massoretic tradition with a corruptum, necessarily works without firm ground under his feet.