Judges 4:2

Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor Hazor, already a royal city in the 15 cent. b.c. (Amarna Tablets 154, 41), lay in the neighbourhood of Kedesh-naphtali (Joshua 19:36 f., 2 Kings 15:20) and to the S. of it (1Ma 11:63; 1Ma 11:67 ff.); the name (enclosure) is preserved in Jebel Ḥaḍîreh (sheep-fold) and Merj el-Ḥaḍîreh, W. of the lake of Ḥûleh, but the site is not known with certainty; Guthe (Bibel Atlas) places it at Ḥurçbeh, 2 m. E. of Jebel Ḥaḍîreh; in any case Jabin's city was at least 30 m. N. of the scene of Barak's victory. The compiler here and in Judges 4:23 raises Jabin king of Hazor(Judges 4:17; Joshua 11:1) to the rank of king of Canaan(cf. Genesis 26:1; Genesis 26:8 -king of the Philistines"), an anomalous title, for Canaan was not an organized kingdom under a single head, but a general name for a region of independent towns each with a chief of its own (Joshua 5:1; Joshua 9:1; Joshua 11:1 etc.). The tradition is further magnified in Joshua 11:1-15, where the struggle between Jabin king of Hazor and the two tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali, a reminiscence of which probably underlies the present narrative and Joshua 11, becomes the conquest of N. Canaan by Joshua and all Israel.

the captain of whose host was Sisera Cf. Judges 4:7. By subordinating Sisera in this way an attempt was made to combine the two traditions. But the narrative as it proceeds makes it clear that Sisera was an independent chief; the nine hundred chariots of iron(see Judges 1:19 n.) in Judges 4:13 belong to him; like Jabin, he had his own capital, Harosheth, probably Ḥârithîyeh, on the right bank of the Kishon, at the S.W. corner of the Plain of Jezreel, where the chariots could be used with effect. The name Sisera, which occurs again in Ezra 2:53, is foreign, cf. the Assyr. sasur-progeny," seseru-child": it may not be Semitic at all; Moore compares the Hittite names ending in - sira, Ḥtasira, Maurasira (W. H. Müller, As. u. Eur., p. 332).