Judges 4:2

Sold them. — See Judges 2:14.

Jabin. — The name means, “he is wise.” It may have been a dynastic name, like Abimelech, Melchizedek, Pharaoh, Hadad, Agag, &c.

King of Canaan — i.e., of some great tribe or nation of the Canaanite8. In Joshua 11:1 Jabin is called king of Hazor, and sends messages to all the other Canaanite princes.

Reigned in Hazor. — See Joshua 11:1. Hazor was in the tribe of Naphtali (Joshua 19:36), and overlooked the waters of Merom (Jos., Antt. v. 5, § 1). We find from Egyptian inscriptions of Barneses II., &c., that it was a flourishing town in very ancient days. Owing to its importance, it was fortified by Solomon (1 Kings 9:15). Its inhabitants were taken captive by Tiglath-pileser (2 Kings 15:29); and it is last mentioned in 1Ma. 9:27. (Comp. Jos., Antt. xiii. 5, § 7.) De Saulcy discovered large and ancient ruins to the north of Merom, which he identifies with this town. The Bishop of Bath and Wells (Lord A. Hervey On the Genealogies, p. 28) has pointed out the strange resemblance between the circumstances of this defeat and that recorded in Joshua 11. In both we have a Jabin, king of Hazor; in both there are subordinate kings (Judges 5:19; Joshua 11:1); in both chariots are prominent, which, as we conjecture from Joshua 11:8, were burnt at Misrephoth-maim (“burnings by the waters”); and in both the general outline of circumstances is the same, and the same names occur in the list of conquered kings (Joshua 11:21). This seems to be the reason why Josephus, in his account of the earlier event (Antt. v. 1, § 18), does not mention either Jabin or Hazor, though strangely enough he says, in both instances, with his usual tendency to exaggeration, that the Canaanites had 300,000 foot, 10,000 horse, and 3,000 chariots. It is again a curious, though it may be an unimportant circumstance, that in 1 Samuel 12:9 the prophet mentions Sisera before Eglon. Of course, if the received view of the chronology be correct, we must make the not impossible supposition, that in the century and a half which is supposed to have elapsed since the death of Joshua, Hazor had risen from its obliteration and its ashes (Joshua 11:11; Jos., Antt. v. 5, § 4), under a new Canaanite settlement, governed by a king who adopted the old dynastic name. If, on the other hand, there are chronological indications that the whole period of the Judges must be greatly shortened, we may perhaps suppose that the armies of Joshua and Barak combined the full strength of the central and northern tribes in an attack from different directions, which ended in a common victory. In that case, the different tribal records can only have dwelt on that part of the victory in which they were themselves concerned. It is remarkable that even so conservative a critic as Bishop Wordsworth holds “that some of the judges of Israel were only judges of portions of Canaan, and that the years run parallel to those of other judges in other districts of the same country.” If there are difficulties in whatever scheme of chronology we adopt, we must remember the antiquity and the fragmentary nature of the records, which were written with other and far higher views than that of furnishing us with an elaborate consecutive history.

The captain of whose host. — In Eastern narratives it is common for the king to play a very subordinate personal part. In the last campaign of Crœsus we hear much more of Surenas, the general of the Parthians, than of Orodes (Arsaces, 14).

Sisera. — The name long lingered among the Israelites. It occurs again in Ezra 2:53, as the name of the founder of a family of Nethinim (minor servants of the Levites, of Canaanite origin, 2 Samuel 21; Ezra 2:43; 1 Chronicles 9:2); and in the strange fashion which prevailed among some of the Rabbis of claiming a foreign descent, the great Rabbi Akhivah professed to be descended from Sisera.

Harosheth. — The name means “wood-cutting.” The Chaldee renders it, “In the strength of citadels of the nations.” It was an ingenious and not improbable conjecture of the late Dr. Donaldson, that the town was named from the fact that Sisera made the subject Israelites serve as “hewers of wood” in the cedar-woods and fir-woods of Lebanon. The site of Harosheth has been precariously identified with Harsthîeh, a hill on the south-east of the plain of Akka. (Thomson’s Land and Book, ch. 29)

Of the Gentiles — i.e., of the nations; of mixed inhabitants; lying as it did in “Galilee of the Gentiles.” (Comp. “Tidal, king of nations,” Genesis 14:1, and “The king of the nations in Gilgal,” Joshua 12:23.)