that could throw light upon
their literature. It comes over the soul now like the full burst of
martial music. It stirs the blood and quickens the pulses with its
strain of triumph, while it melts us to pity, as it brings before us so
graphically, with such exquisite power--yet such slight allusion--the
distress and desolation of Israel. It is a finished picture of the age.
We see the judges, those that ride on white asses (still reserved for
royal stables) that walk by the way; while it gives us a full character
of Sisera and the mother who trained him. We see the mother--haughty,
proud, avaricious, surrounded by "her wise ladies," who are flatterers
rather than counsellors--ready to exult in the rapine and plunder of the
army of her son; her natural fears awakened by his delayed return, yet
hushed and soothed by the enumeration of the spoil. No feeling of pity
softening the love of vengeance,--the desire for the plunder of a
conquered people engrossing all.

And in Sisera we see the proud, cruel, licentious spoiler--all the
powers of his evil nature called into exercise by success and the long
indulgence of every evil passion and gross appetite--arrogant,
oppressive and cruel in success; abject, cowardly and overreaching in
adversity. We can well imagine the state of an oppressed people ruled by
such a man at the head of a licentious soldiery. And harsh as may seem
some of the expressions of Deborah, in her joyous outbursts of praise
and thanksgiving, they arise from the ineffable miseries, the deep
degradation, the oppressive cruelties, to which all the daughters of
Israel would have been exposed had he been triumphant; and a mother in
Israel might well exult in a deliverance from one whose desolating track
was marked by lust and carnage.

We do not love to dwell on the treachery of Jael--we do not feel called
upon to justify the act, although Deborah might well rejoice in the
deliverance of her people from so stern a foe, so foul an oppression.
Sisera appears as abject in the hour of defeat as he had been insolent
and arrogant and cruel in the hour of triumph.

After Israel was restored to liberty we hear no more of Deborah; but
"the land had rest forty years." She again returns to her own sphere, to
the unostentatious, yet all-pervading usefulness of domestic life. No
honours, no triumphs, no statues were awarded to her. No monuments seem
to have been erected to her memory. The palm-tree was her fitting
memorial