ABSTRACT
It is extremely difficult to say anything new about Judges 4-5. These two chapters form a unique unit in Judges. They are not a short story – chapters 4 and 5 are clearly two different units, composed by (at least) two different people. Yet they are not a cycle in the usual sense either. As we saw with the Samson material, a cycle is composed of a series of shorter blocks of material, which are edited to form a series of narratives in chronological order about a judge. Though Judges 5 presents itself as subsequent to Judges 4, as a victory song celebrating the defeat of the Canaanites narrated in chapter 4, the bulk of chapter 5 is really a poetic variant of chapter 4. Unlike the cycles, the events told in the two chapters are simultaneous, rather than subsequent.
