CHAPTER V THE BIBLICAL ODE The Ode THE Ode cannot be exactly defined. Etymologically the word is equivalent to 'song'; usage seems to have given it the sense of song par excellence: the lyric poetry that is furthest removed from the ordinary speech, and nearest to pure music. If 'flight' be the regular image for the movement of lyric poetry, then the Ode is the song that can soar highest and remain longest on the wing. Speaking generally, we may say that it is distinguished from other lyrics by greater elaboration, and (so to speak) structural consciousness. Such a literary form will be discussed best by particular examples, and a commentary upon the Odes of the Bible will introduce us to lyric modes of movement in general. Deborah's Song It is natural to commence with Deborah's Song. This is the most elaborate of Biblical odes, and it exercised considerable influence upon succeeding poetry. There is another circumstance which makes it particularly Judges v valuable to the literary student. It is a narrative poem, and the story it narrates is in the previous chapter of Fudges given in the form of history. A careful comparison of the fourth and fifth chapters of that book will enable us to study the differences between lyric narrative and narrative as it appears in history. Few portions of the Old Testament are more familiar, or more frequently discussed, than the incidents that enter into Deborah's Song. Yet I think there are important elements in the story The Matter of which are by no means generally understood. The first point that I will put amounts to no more than a conjecture. The history opens by saying that Israel fell under the dominion of Jabin king of Canaan, and that he "mightily oppressed" them for twenty years. Though the Book of Fudges is full of similar subjugations of Israel, that particular phrase is nowhere else used; the suggestion is that there was something different in kind between the tyranny of Jabin and Sisera and other tyrannies. May it be that this oppression was of an indescribable nature, affecting person as well as property, such wanton violence as appears in a later chapter of Fudges to have brought all Israel in arms against a city of Benjamin? If this conjecture were adopted, it would give significance to the striking phrase used by the song to describe the misery of the oppression, that "the highways were unoccupied and the travellers walked through byways." It would explain how it was that the tyranny was borne without resistance until "a mother in Israel" roused the people against it. It would further enable us to understand how a prophetess could exult in the strange decree of Providence by which the instrument of a cruel and lustful tyranny met his doom at the hands of a woman. Chapter xx My next point is a matter of certainty. It is the relation to the story of Heber the Kenite, the husband of Jael. The Kenites were a tribe who had joined Israel in the wilderness; they had become a part of the chosen nation in all respects except one, that they still retained their life in tents, when the Israelites had settled down in villages and towns. But we are told in one verse of the narrative that there was peace between the oppressing tyrant and the house of Heber the Kenite; another verse tells us how Heber had separated himself from the other Kenites, and "pitched his tent as far as the oak in Zaanannim, which is by Kedesh," that is, close to the muster ground of Barak; and the verse that follows says, "And they told Sisera that Barak the son of Abinoam was gone up to mount Tabor." Though the phrasing in this last verse iv. 17 II 12 |