Judges 5:8

It is still the period of the oppression, though Judges 5:7 has for a moment anticipated matters by alluding to the -rise" of Deborah. The first half of the verse yields no certain meaning. They chose new gods, lit. it(Israel) choosesetc., implies that Israel had been guilty of apostasy, and so was punished by an invasion; this is an idea quite foreign to the poem. Of the other renderings, God chose new things, nova bella elegit Dominus, Vulgate, is ungrammatical in Hebr. and open to the objection that Jehovah, not Elohim, is the Name in the poem; he chooses new judges(Ewald) is based upon an erroneous interpretation of Elohim in Exodus 21:6 etc. There was war in the gatesseems to point to some occasion (then) in the unsettled times before Deborah; in Judges 5:11 the gatesare those of the enemy; but the word for waris wholly anomalous. Disregarding the vowels, the consonants might be translated then there was barley bread, similarly LXX. A, Lucian; but no good sense can be extracted from this. The corruption is too deep-seated for emendation; probably an early attempt was made to correct the passage from Deuteronomy 32:17.

Was there a shield or spear seen When the war broke out the able-bodied men in Israel had no proper weapons with which to meet the well-armed Canaanites; they were compelled to use such rude implements as they could find. 40,000 is a round number, not to be pressed; contrast the 301,000 men above twenty assigned in Numbers 26 (P) to the six tribes who here take part in the war.