Judges 5:3

"Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye Princes; I, even I, will sing unto Jehovah; I will sing praises to Jehovah, the God of Israel. Jehovah, when thou wentest forth out of Seir, When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, The earth trembled, the heavens also dropped, Yea, the clouds dropped water."

"Hear, O ye kings ... princes" (Judges 5:3). "These kings and princes were not those of Israel; Israel had no kings or princes; these are the kings and princes of the heathen nations."[9]

"Psalms 68:7-9; Habakkuk 3:3-16, and this passage all relate to the same event and mutually explain each other. The subject is the march of Israel with the Lord at their head to take possession of Canaan."[10]

"Jehovah, when thou wentest forth out of Seir;

When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom" (Judges 5:4).

This has puzzled some of the writers we have consulted, but the message is clear indeed. Deborah is here attributing the victory of Israel to the God of the Sinai Covenant, and, accordingly, she represents him as coming to Israel's rescue from that direction, namely, from the south and from the east, and, since Sinai was southeast of Edom, God would have come through Edom on his way to help Israel. And as Keil noted, "There is an allusion here to the great storm rising out of Seir from the east, in which the Lord advanced to meet his people."[11]

"The heavens also dropped;

Yea, the clouds dropped water" (Judges 5:4).

The parallelism in these and the previous two clauses should be noted. Josephus described the terrible storm which is mentioned here poetically in the words, "the clouds dropped water." Indeed they did!

As the baffle began, there came down a great storm from heaven, with a vast quantity of rain and hail, and the wind blew the rain into the face of the Canaanites, and so darkened their eyes that their arrows and slings were of no advantage to them, and the coldness of the air did not permit the soldiers to make use of their swords. The great storm did not so much inconvenience the Israelites, for it was at their backs. They fell upon their enemies and slew a vast number of them; some fell by their own horses which were put into disorder, and not a few were killed by their chariots.[12] A number of things about this battle are clarified in Deborah's ode: (1) The storm came from the east; (2) the Canaanites were attacking from the west; (3) the horses stampeded westward away from the storm; (4) in fact the whole army fled westward; it would have been impossible to flee in any other direction; (5) the Israelites followed in swift pursuit; (6) this means that the "battle," more accurately the "rout" probably took place over a distance of fifteen or twenty miles. These observations afford a full explanation of some of the critical allegations which we shall note below.