“And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee.  And he arose out of his seat.  And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:  and the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, for he drew not the sword out of his belly; and it came out behind.”  Then Ehud locked the doors and escaped.  “Now when he was gone out, his servants came; and they saw, and, behold, the doors of the parlour were locked; and they said, Surely he covereth his feet in his summer chamber.”  But by the time they had forced an entrance, Ehud had reached Gilgal and was in safety.  He at once assembled the clans of Benjamin, occupied the fords of the Jordan, massacred the bands of Moabites scattered over the plain of Jericho, and blocked the routes by which the invaders attempted to reach the hill-country of Ephraim.  Almost at the same time the tribes in Galilee had a narrow escape from a still more formidable enemy.* They had for some time been under the Amorite yoke, and the sacred writings represent them at this juncture as oppressed either by Sisera of Harosheth-ha-Goyim or by a second Jabin, who was able to bring nine hundred chariots of iron into the field.** At length the prophetess Deborah of Issachar sent to Barak of Kadesh a command to assemble his people, together with those of Zebulon, in the name of the Lord;*** she herself led the contingents of Issachar, Ephraim, and Machir to meet him at the foot of Tabor, where the united host is stated to have comprised forty thousand men.  Sisera,**** who commanded the Canaanite force, attacked the Israelite army between Taanach and Megiddo in that plain of Kishon which had often served as a battle-field during the Egyptian campaigns.

* The text tells us that, after the time of Ehud, the land had rest eighty years (Judges iii. 30).  This, again, is one of those numbers which represent an indefinite space of time.

** It has been maintained that two versions are here blended together in the text, one in which the principal part is played by Sisera, the other in which it is attributed to Jabin.  The episode of Deborah and Barak (Judges iv., v.) comprises a narrative in prose (chap, iv.), and the song (chap, v.) attributed to Deborah.  The prose account probably is derived from the song.  The differences in the two accounts may be explained as having arisen partly from an imperfect understanding of the poetic text, and partly from one having come down from some other source.

*** Some critics suppose that the prose narrative (Judges iv. 5) has confounded the prophetess Deborah, wife of Lapidoth, with Deborah, nurse of Rachel, who was buried near Bethel, under the “Oak of Weeping” (Gen. xxxv. 8), and consequently place it between Rama and Bethel, in the hill- country of Ephraim.

**** In the prose narrative (Judges iv. 2-7) Sisera is stated to have been the general