We've got another LHBOTS release to tell you about: Charles L. Echols' "Tell Me, O Muse": The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) in the Light of Heroic Poetry, Vol. 487, now available in the US and UK.
Professor Echols has gracious accepted our invitation to become a member of our Author's Circle by providing this guest post:
The so-called Song of Deborah (Judges 5) celebrates a decisive victory during the era of the Judges, and praises Jael and the Israelites for their defeat of a Canaanite coalition led by Sisera. Indeed, it is a rich text and can be studied profitably along several lines, including clues to the history of ancient Israel and Hebrew linguistics. Despite generations of research, virtually every aspect of the poem remains disputed. My aim in this study, in two stages, is to elucidate the role of Yahweh in the poem in the light of a comparative study of heroic poetry.
The first stage introduces the book, provides an annotated translation, and addresses further preliminary critical issues, especially the question of the unity of the poem. The case for a unified composition has merit, but the stronger argument is that the original Song of Deborah (hereafter “Song”) was re-worked with the addition of religious material. Without the secondary material, some references to Yahweh remain, but the original poem is essentially secular. This portrayal of Yahweh is strikingly different, as I show through a comparison with similar Hebrew poetry. Moreover, attempts by a few scholars to reassert Yahweh's prominence along other lines such as comparative mythology are unconvincing.
Part II begins by establishing a basis of comparison for the original poem vis-à-vis heroic poetry. Since the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains precious little heroic poetry, I identify its constituent components, particularly heroic narrative poetry, by surveying a wide variety of heroic poetry from different times and places. The survey distinguishes, furthermore, the main features of non-heroic poetry. The results are then compared with the Song, which is found not to be heroic narrative poetry. The poem is then compared with lyric poetry, and, of its many sub-genres, the victory song is shown to correspond most closely with the Song. Next, the results of the survey of heroic poetry are adduced to determine whether the Song is heroic. The poem is assessed for heroic and non-heroic features, and the results indicate that it is indeed a heroic victory song – a previously unidentified genre in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The refinement of the generic classification explains the enigmatic role of Yahweh in the poem. The fruits of the comparative approach using heroic poetry are then applied to the victory song genre in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament research, and the study ends with some general conclusions and suggestions for further research.
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