Judges Chapter 4 verse 2 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 2. - Sold them. See Judges 2:14, note. Jabin king of Hazor. The exact site of Hazor has not been identified with certainty, but it is conjectured by Robinson, with great probability, to have stood on the Tell now called Khuraibeh, overlooking the waters of Merom (now called Lake Huleh), where are remains of a sepulchre, Cyclopean walls, and other buildings. In Joshua 11:1-14 we read of the total destruction by fire of Hazor, and of the slaughter of Jabin, the king thereof, with all the inhabitants of the city, and of the slaughter of all the confederate kings, and the capture of their cities; Hazor, however, "the head of all those kingdoms," being the only one which was "burnt with fire." It is a little surprising, therefore, to read here of another Jabin reigning in Hazor, with confederate kings under him (Judges 5:19), having, like his predecessor, a vast number of chariots (cf. Judges 4:3, 13 with Joshua 11:4, 9), and attacking Israel at the head of a great force (cf. Judges 4:7, 13, 16 with Joshua 11:4). It is impossible not to suspect that these are two accounts of the same event. If, however, the two events are distinct, we must suppose that the Canaanite kingdoms had been revived under a descendant of the former king, that Hazor had been rebuilt, and that Jabin was the hereditary name of its king. Gentiles, or nations, or Goim, as Joshua 12:23, and Genesis 14:1. Whether Goim was the proper name of a particular people, or denoted a collection of different tribes, their seat was in Galilee, called in Isaiah 9:1; Matthew 4:15, Galilee, of the nations, or Gentiles, in Hebrew Goim.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(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 (1Kings 9:15). Its inhabitants were taken captive by Tiglath-pileser (2Kings 15:29); and it is last mentioned in 1 Maccabees 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 1Samuel 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. . . .