Ebook: The song of Deborah: poetry in dialect

Publisher: T.F. Macdaniel
Publication date: 2003
Number of pages: 412I offer here a translation of the Song of Deborah which adheres closely to the consonants of the Masoretic text, though I have redivided many of the consonant clusters in order to restore certain poetic lines. Exegetical traditions, early and modern, have been carefully examined; but with a number of the more obscure lines
there has been no compelling reason to stay with traditional translations or exegesis.
At times it became necessary to step away from the guesswork reflected in the ancient variants and the speculative emendations of more recent commentators. Looking at the poem as if it were found in a newly discovered scroll provided constructive alternatives for a number of the more obscure passages. The obscurities in Judges 5 are diminished once the poem is read as dialectal Hebrew and the interpreter makes use of a larger lexicon than that traditionally used for classical canonical Judean Hebrew.
This approach provided new insights, not only on the names of Deborah and Yael, but also on the meaning of many lines in the poem.