Judges 5 Summary and Study Guide

Judges 4 already told this story. The Bible tells it again in chapter 5, this time as a song Deborah and Barak sang on the same day the battle ended. This Judges 5 summary and study guide works through the second telling and what it adds that the first one left out.

Setting the Stage

After Joshua died, Israel fell into a pattern Judges repeats over and over. The people turned to other gods, God let an enemy oppress them, they cried out to Him, and He raised up a deliverer (Judges 2:11-19). Each rescue held for a time, then it began again.

By Judges 4 the enemy was Jabin of Canaan, whose commander Sisera had nine hundred chariots of iron and twenty years of control over Israel. Deborah, a prophetess judging Israel, sent for Barak, and God swept Sisera’s army away at the river Kishon.

Sisera fled and died in a tent. That account is in our study of the story of Deborah and Barak. Chapter 5 is what Deborah and Barak sang that same day.

Comprehensive Judges 5 Summary

The song opens by blessing God for two things at once: leaders who led, and a people willing to turn out behind them. Deborah then calls kings and princes to listen while she sings to the God of Israel, and she goes back much further than this battle. She remembers God coming from Seir with the ground shaking and the sky pouring rain, the same God who met Israel at Sinai.

Against that memory she sets what life had become. The main roads went unused, and travellers kept to back paths. Village life stopped.

Among forty thousand people there was hardly a shield or a spear to be found. Deborah names the cause without softening it: Israel had chosen new gods, and war came to their own gates.

Then she rose, and the tribes came down. Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, Issachar and Naphtali answered. Reuben deliberated and stayed with the flocks. Gilead stayed across the Jordan, Dan stayed with his ships, Asher stayed on the coast.

The battle itself takes four verses. The kings of Canaan fought at Taanach and got no silver for it. Heaven fought against Sisera, the Kishon rose and swept his army away, and the horses’ hooves broke under the galloping. One town, Meroz, is cursed for staying home.

Sisera got clear of the river and died under a tent peg in Jael’s hand. The song closes at a window in Canaan, where his mother waits for a son who is not coming, and then with a prayer: let God’s enemies come to nothing, and let everyone who loves Him shine like a rising sun. The land had rest forty years.

One Word Summary

• Willing: the song blesses volunteers twice before it names a single battle.
• Song: the whole chapter is sung, which no other chapter of Judges is.
• Contrast: tribes who came against tribes who stayed, a tent against a palace window.

In One Sentence

Deborah and Barak sing the day God broke Sisera’s army at the Kishon, naming the tribes who came, the tribes and the town of Meroz who stayed away, and Jael who ended the fleeing commander with a tent peg.

Theme of Judges 5

Judges 5 is about who actually won the battle. God did, and He did it with rain and a river rather than with weapons Israel did not own. Two ideas run alongside that. Willingness counted more than strength, which is why the song blesses volunteers, praises Zebulun and Naphtali, and saves its strongest blessing for a woman in a tent.

And the song does not treat staying home as neutral, which is why Reuben is questioned and Meroz is cursed. The chapter also names its own cause. Israel chose new gods, so the rescue is a mercy rather than a reward.

Judges 5 Outline

• Judges 5:1: Deborah and Barak sing on the day of the victory.
• Judges 5:2-3: The song blesses God for willing leaders and willing people, and calls the kings and princes to listen.
• Judges 5:4-5: Deborah remembers God marching from Seir, with the earth shaking and the clouds pouring water.
• Judges 5:6-8: She describes deserted highways, abandoned villages, and a disarmed Israel that had chosen new gods.
• Judges 5:9: Deborah blesses the LORD again, this time for the leaders who offered themselves willingly.
• Judges 5:10-11: She calls the wealthy, the judges and the ordinary travellers to retell God’s acts at the watering places and at the gates.
• Judges 5:12: The song calls Deborah to wake and sing, and Barak to arise and lead his captives away.
• Judges 5:13-15: Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun and Issachar come down to the valley, while Reuben stays behind deliberating.
• Judges 5:16-17: Reuben stays among the sheepfolds, Gilead beyond the Jordan, Dan with his ships, and Asher on the sea shore.
• Judges 5:18: Zebulun and Naphtali risked their lives on the high places of the field.
• Judges 5:19-22: The kings of Canaan fight at Taanach and gain nothing, heaven fights against Sisera, and the river Kishon sweeps his army away.
• Judges 5:23: The angel of the LORD curses Meroz for not coming to help.
• Judges 5:24-27: Jael is blessed above women, gives Sisera milk, and kills him with a tent peg and a hammer.
• Judges 5:28-30: Sisera’s mother watches at the lattice and comforts herself that he is delayed by dividing the spoil.
• Judges 5:31: The song ends asking that God’s enemies perish and those who love Him shine like the sun, and the land rests forty years.

The Song of Deborah

The whole of Judges 5 is a victory song, sung by Deborah and Barak on the day of the battle. It belongs to a family that runs through Scripture: Moses and Miriam sang after the Red Sea (Exodus 15:1-21), and the women of Israel sang after Goliath fell (1 Samuel 18:6-7).

Deborah’s lines about the LORD marching out of Edom while the mountains melt run close to Moses in Deuteronomy 33:2, and Psalm 68:7-8 uses much the same imagery. What sets this one apart is its roll call. No other victory song in the Bible stops to name who showed up and who did not.

It opens by blessing God for willingness:

Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves.

Judges 5:2

Praise God for putting Israel’s wrongs right, and praise Him for a people who offered themselves for the fight without being made to.

It ends with two futures set side by side:

So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might.

Judges 5:31

May everyone who sets himself against God come to nothing, and may everyone who loves Him rise like the sun climbing to full strength.

Between those two points the song names what the prose account of Judges 4 leaves out: the tribes one by one, the storm, the curse on Meroz, and a mother at a window in Canaan.

Scholars who work on the Hebrew text describe Judges as one of the best preserved books of the Old Testament, and this song as the hardest passage in it, because its Hebrew is very old and several of its words appear almost nowhere else. That is why English translations of certain verses here differ from one another more than usual.

Observations from Judges 5

The Same Blessing Is Said Twice, to Two Different Groups (5:2, 5:9)

Verse 2 blesses God because the people offered themselves willingly. Verse 9 says almost the same thing about the leaders. The praise comes once before Deborah says how bad things had become and once after, aimed first at the people and then at the men in charge of them. Neither group is allowed to think the willingness was the other one’s job.

Reuben Thought About It, and Then Thought About It Again (5:15-16)

Verse 15 ends with “great thoughts of heart” among Reuben’s divisions. Verse 16 ends with “great searchings of heart” among the same divisions. Reuben did his thinking, then sat among the sheepfolds listening to the flocks. The song puts the resolve first and the searching second, and neither one moved him into the valley.

The song charges Reuben with slowness rather than with opposition, and in this chapter the slowness cost him the day. Jacob had said long before that Reuben was “unstable as water” (Genesis 49:4), meaning he would never hold a steady course.

Judah and Simeon Are Not on the List at All (5:13-18)

The roll call praises six tribes and questions four, and two are missing from both halves. Judah and Simeon lived far to the south of a battle fought in the northern valley, so they may never have been summoned, and the song neither thanks them nor blames them. Treating the roll call as a full list of who was loyal in Israel asks more of it than it says.

Nobody Took Any Spoil, and Sisera’s Mother Is Dividing It (5:19, 5:30)

Verse 19 says the kings of Canaan “took no gain of money” at Taanach. They came for plunder and left with none. Eleven verses later Sisera’s mother sits at a window telling herself that the delay must be plunder: a girl or two for each soldier, embroidered cloth for her son’s neck. The song set up the answer to her question long before she asked it, and she is comforting herself with something that never existed.

Difficult Verses Explained

Did Jael Cut Off Sisera’s Head?

No. The King James Version of Judges 5:26 reads “she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples,” and commentators from Adam Clarke onward have held that the first phrase goes further than the Hebrew does.

The verbs behind it mean she struck his head and drove the peg through his temples, which is exactly what Judges 4:21 describes: the tent peg through his temples and into the ground. This is one of the verses where the age of the song’s language shows, and many modern translations render it “she crushed his head.”

What Does It Mean That “The Stars In Their Courses Fought Against Sisera”?

Judges 5:20 says heaven itself entered the battle, and Bible teachers explain that in three main ways. Many take it as poetic language for the storm God sent, since the next verse credits the flooded Kishon with sweeping the army away. Others hear a reference to the armies of heaven fighting on Israel’s behalf.

A third reading notes that Canaanite religion looked to the stars and to Baal the storm god for help, so Deborah may be saying that the very powers Canaan trusted turned on them. The verse does not settle which is meant, and more than one may be true at once.

Why Is Meroz Cursed When Reuben and Dan Are Only Questioned?

The charge against Meroz is absence. Reuben, Gilead, Dan and Asher are asked why they stayed away, and the questions sting, but Judges 5:23 pronounces an actual curse, and it comes from the angel of the LORD rather than from Deborah. The reason given is that its people “came not to the help of the LORD, to the help of the LORD against the mighty.” They did not turn up to fight on the LORD’s side, and the song weighs that more heavily than anything it puts to the tribes.

What Does “To Every Man A Damsel Or Two” Mean In Judges 5:30?

The phrase is the enemy’s own language for the women they expected to capture. The Hebrew word behind “damsel” is a crude one, meaning a womb, and Deborah puts it in the mouths of Sisera’s mother and her ladies as they imagine the spoil. The song is showing what those women assumed a victorious army would be doing, and those words show what Israel had been living under for twenty years. The line is a report of what Canaan expected, not a description of anything God approved.

Common Misunderstandings

• Forty years of peace closes more than one account in Judges. The book gives the same span after Othniel and again after Gideon (Judges 3:11; 8:28). Judges 5:31 records a real peace, and Judges 6:1 starts the cycle over, so this rest is not unique to Deborah.
• Jael’s people had a history of kindness toward Israel. The Kenites were the people of Moses’ father in law (Judges 1:16; 1 Samuel 15:6). Judges 4:17 says only that Heber’s own household was at peace with Jabin, Scripture nowhere calls Jael an enemy of Israel who changed sides.
• The song blesses Jael and leaves her method undiscussed. Judges 5:24 blesses her, and says nothing at all about the hospitality she broke to do it. Christians have read that silence differently for centuries, so the blessing settles the argument in neither direction.

Christ Connection

Judges 5 ends with a prayer, and the same picture returns in the New Testament as a promise. Deborah asks that those who love God “be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might” (Judges 5:31). Centuries later Jesus says, “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43). Deborah was asking for something she could only pray for.

Jesus states it as what will happen, and He states it about people who belong to Him. The rest of the chapter runs the same way. God rescues a people who had chosen other gods, and He does it through a storm they never summoned rather than through anything they brought, which is how the gospel works and why nobody in this chapter gets to take credit for it.

Four more connections run from this song into the New Testament:

• Jael is blessed above women (5:24), and so is Mary. Elisabeth greets her with “Blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:42), and Mary answers with a song of her own that does what Deborah’s does: it puts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly (Luke 1:46-55).
• A tent peg beats nine hundred chariots. Paul states the principle at work in it: God chose the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, “that no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Corinthians 1:27-29).
• Barak, who would not go without Deborah, is named among the faithful. Hebrews 11:32 lists him by name, and the next verse says of that company that they “through faith subdued kingdoms” (Hebrews 11:33). The man who needed company is remembered for going.
• Sisera becomes the standing example of an enemy God overthrows. Psalm 83:9 prays “do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison,” turning this chapter into a plea for God to act again.

Some Bible teachers also hear Genesis 3:15 behind Jael’s blow, since God promised that a descendant of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. Judges 5 is not the fulfilment of that promise, and the song makes no such claim. It does stand in the line of it, and the line ends at the cross, where Christ “made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them” (Colossians 2:15). He stripped the powers that held people captive and put their defeat on public display.

When, Where, and Why

• When: During the era of the judges, after Joshua and before Israel had a king. Many scholars place Deborah’s leadership in the thirteenth or twelfth century BC and regard this song as one of the oldest passages in the Hebrew Bible, on the strength of its very old grammar and rare vocabulary. Any date this far back is approximate.
• Where: The Jezreel Valley in northern Israel. Taanach and Megiddo sit at its southern edge, the river Kishon runs through it, and Mount Tabor, where Barak gathered his men (Judges 4:6), stands at its north-eastern corner. Flat open ground was ideal for chariots, which is why Sisera brought his there, and why the rain mattered so much when it came.
• Why: Because a victory this complete could easily have been remembered as Barak’s. The writer of Judges includes the song so that the record says plainly who won the battle, who risked their lives for it, and who was missing when it mattered.

Key Verses

The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.

Judges 5:7

Village life across Israel came to a stop, and it stayed stopped until Deborah stood up as a mother to the nation. She does not call herself a warrior or even a prophetess in this line. She takes a title about protecting and caring for people, and applies it to a whole country.

They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: was there a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel?

Judges 5:8

Israel picked new gods, and then the fighting reached their own city gates, with barely a weapon among forty thousand of them. The song names the cause of the suffering before it celebrates the rescue, so nobody can mistake the rescue for something Israel had earned.

Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field.

Judges 5:18

Zebulun and Naphtali put their lives at risk of death on the open high ground. This is the strongest thing the song says about any tribe, and it goes to the two Barak had been told to summon in the first place (Judges 4:6).

The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon.

Judges 5:21

The Kishon carried Sisera’s army off, the old river doing it again. Nine hundred chariots of iron were the thing Israel had no answer for, and the answer turned out to be water in a riverbed that had been there the whole time.

Key Lessons from Judges 5

• Willingness mattered more than equipment, because Israel had almost no equipment to bring (Judges 5:8, 5:2).
• Deborah gave God the credit for a victory she had led, and she did it the same day (Judges 5:1-3).
• Reuben failed by delay rather than by opposition, and the deliberating outlasted the moment (Judges 5:15-16).
• Meroz was cursed for what it did not do, which means staying out of it was treated as a choice (Judges 5:23).
• God used a rainstorm and a river to defeat nine hundred chariots, so the win could not be credited to Israel’s strength (Judges 5:20-21).
• The forty years of peace were real, and Judges shows such peace can be lost again (Judges 5:31; 6:1).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: Lessons from Judges 5.

Bible Study Questions

1. Judges 5:2 and 5:9 say nearly the same thing about willingness, once about the people and once about the leaders. Why do you think Deborah says it twice?
2. Verse 15 speaks of Reuben’s “great thoughts of heart” and verse 16 of “great searchings of heart.” What is the difference between the two, and why does the order matter?
3. Judges 5:8 gives the reason Israel ended up disarmed and under attack. How does naming that cause change the way you read the rescue that follows?
4. Meroz is cursed in verse 23 for not coming to help. What does that verse say about the idea that staying out of something keeps a person innocent?
5. Judges 5:24 blesses Jael without one word about how she treated a guest. How do you read that silence, and what does the verse itself actually claim?
6. Judges 5:31 ends by asking that those who love God be like a sunrise at its brightest. What would a week lived in that direction look like for you?
7. Compare the account in Judges 4 with the song in Judges 5. What does the song give you that the narrative does not?

Frequently Asked Questions

Judges 5, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference. You can also read Judges 5 in the KJV online.

1 Then sang Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam on that day, saying,

2 Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel, when the people willingly offered themselves.

3 Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes; I, even I, will sing unto the LORD; I will sing praise to the LORD God of Israel.

4 LORD, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water.

5 The mountains melted from before the LORD, even that Sinai from before the LORD God of Israel.

6 In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways.

7 The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.

8 They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: was there a shield or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel?

9 My heart is toward the governors of Israel, that offered themselves willingly among the people. Bless ye the LORD.

10 Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment, and walk by the way.

11 They that are delivered from the noise of archers in the places of drawing water, there shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the LORD, even the righteous acts toward the inhabitants of his villages in Israel: then shall the people of the LORD go down to the gates.

12 Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song: arise, Barak, and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam.

13 Then he made him that remaineth have dominion over the nobles among the people: the LORD made me have dominion over the mighty.

14 Out of Ephraim was there a root of them against Amalek; after thee, Benjamin, among thy people; out of Machir came down governors, and out of Zebulun they that handle the pen of the writer.

15 And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah; even Issachar, and also Barak: he was sent on foot into the valley. For the divisions of Reuben there were great thoughts of heart.

16 Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to hear the bleatings of the flocks? For the divisions of Reuben there were great searchings of heart.

17 Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships? Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his breaches.

18 Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field.

19 The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo; they took no gain of money.

20 They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.

21 The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength.

22 Then were the horsehoofs broken by the means of the pransings, the pransings of their mighty ones.

23 Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the LORD, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the LORD, to the help of the LORD against the mighty.

24 Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

25 He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.

26 She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

27 At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

28 The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariots?

29 Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she returned answer to herself,

30 Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil?

31 So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might. And the land had rest forty years.