Judges 4:2

And the Lord sold them,.... Delivered them into a state of bondage and slavery, where they were like men sold for slaves, see Jude 3:8; into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor;

And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor; the captain of whose host was Sisera, which dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles. Jabin king of Canaan - Jabin was a dynastic title (Joshua 11:1).

King of Canaan, i.e. of the land where the most of the Canaanites, strictly so called, now dwelt, which seems to be in thee northern part of Canaan. This seems to be of the posterity of that Jabin, whom Joshua slew, who watched all opportunities to recover his ancient possessions, and to revenge his own and father’ s quarrel upon the Israelites. In Hazor; either, 1. In the city of Hazor, which though taken and burnt by Joshua, , yet might be retaken and rebuilt by the Canaanites. Or, 2. In the territory or kingdom of Hazor, which might now be restored to its former largeness and power, , the names of cities being oft put for their territories, as Zorah, a city, , is put for the fields belonging to it, , in which Samson’ s parents lived, 18:2. Harosheth of the Gentiles; so called, because it was much frequented and inhabited by the Gentiles; either by the Canaanites, who being beaten out of their former possessions, seated themselves in those northern parts; or by other nations coming there for traffic, or upon other occasions, as Strabo notes of those parts; whence Galilee, where this was, is called Galilee of the Gentiles.

Judges 4:2 And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that reigned in Hazor; the captain of whose host [was] Sisera, which dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles.Ver. 2. And the Lord sold them.] As Judges 2:14. It must not be troublesome to us to hear the same things often: Verba toties repetita viva sunt, vera sunt, sans sunt, plana sunt, saith Augustine. Into the hand of Jabin.] Whose father or grandfather, of the same name, Joshua had slain, and burnt his city. He therefore, on revenge, having got now the better of the Israelites, oppressed them most grievously for twenty years together, using them like beasts which are bought and sold to carry burdens, as Ferus noteth. Which dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles.] Or, In the wood of the nations, as some render it; that is, of the remaining Canaanites, who had hither betaken themselves for safety and conveniency of issuing forth against the enemy. In loco sylvatico. Jun.

(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 11:21-22). 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.

Verse 2. Jabin king of Canaan] Probably a descendant of the Jabin mentioned Joshua 11:1, c., who had gathered together the wrecks of the army of that Jabin defeated by Joshua. Calmet supposes that these Canaanites had the dominion over the tribes of Naphtali, Zebulun, and Issachar while Deborah judged in Ephraim, and Shamgar in Judah.

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 Ḥ ?aḍ ?ξreh (= sheep-fold) and Merj el-Ḥ ?aḍ ?ξreh, W. of the lake of Ḥ ?ϋleh, but the site is not known with certainty; Guthe (Bibel Atlas) places it at Ḥ ?urηbeh, 2 m. E. of Jebel Ḥ ?aḍ ?ξreh; 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 4:23-24 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 Ḥ ?βrithξyeh, 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, Ḥ ?tasira, Maurasira (W. H. Mόller, As. u. Eur., p. 332).

See Joshua 11:1 note. Since the events there narrated, Hazor must have been rebuilt, and have resumed its position as the metropolis of the northern Canaanites; the other cities must also have

2. Sold them — See note on Judges 2:14. Jabin king of Canaan — This powerful monarch was probably a descendant of the Jabin who headed the confederacy of the northern Canaanites against Joshua, but