CHAPTER 5.

How The Canaanites Brought The Israelites Under Slavery For
Twenty Years; After Which They Were Delivered By Barak And
Deborah, Who Ruled Over Them For Forty Years.

1. And now it was that the Israelites, taking no warning by their
former misfortunes to amend their manners, and neither
worshipping God nor submitting to the laws, were brought under
slavery by Jabin, the king of the Canaanites, and that before
they had a short breathing time after the slavery under the
Moabites; for this Jabin out of Hazor, a city that was situate
over the Semechonitis, and had in pay three hundred footmen, and
ten thousand horsemen, with fewer than three thousand chariots.
Sisera was commander of all his army, and was the principal
person in the king's favor. He so sorely beat the Israelites when
they fought with him, that he ordered them to pay tribute.

2. So they continued to that hardship for twenty years, as not
good enough of themselves to grow wise by their misfortunes. God
was willing also hereby the more to subdue their obstinacy and
ingratitude towards himself: so when at length they were become
penitent, and were so wise as to learn that their calamities
arose from their contempt of the laws, they besought Deborah, a
certain prophetess among them, (which name in the Hebrew tongue
signifies a Bee,) to pray to God to take pity on them, and not to
overlook them, now they were ruined by the Canaanites. So God
granted them deliverance, and chose them a general, Barak, one
that was of the tribe of Naphtali. Now Barak, in the Hebrew