Daniel E. Fleming on Judges 5:4-5 and Psalm 68:8-9

 

 

Judg 5:4-5	Ps 68:8-9
(4) Yahweh, when you went out from Seir, when you walked from the open country of Edom, the earth quivered, as the heavens dripped, as the clouds dripped water.	(8) Elohim, when you went out before your people, when you walked in the wasteland (9) the earth quivered, indeed the heavens dripped,
(5) The mountains gushed from before Yahweh, he of Sinai, from before Yahweh, god of Israel.	from before Elohim, he of Sinai, from before Elohim, god of Israel.

. . . .

 

The most important difference between the two texts is the feature most central to evaluation of the Midianite Hypothesis. Psalm 68:8 lacks Seir and Edom, and instead, it develops Yahweh’s movement without reference to the south. In other contexts, the “wasteland” (yĕšîmôn) can be the harsh country in Moab visible from Mount Pisgah and Peor (Num 21:20; 23:28), as well as the imagined terrain between Babylon and Judah when Yahweh returns his people from exile (Isa 43:19, 20). According to Deut 32:10, Yahweh “found” his people in the wilderness (midbār) and the wasteland (yĕšîmôn)—only the back country, not specifying the south. However we resolve the problem of this difference between Judg 5:4 and Ps 68:8, it is likely that Seir and Edom were invoked specifically for the Song of Deborah introduction, and the psalm does not demonstrate the higher antiquity of a shred hymnic fragment. If there was such a fragment, it included “he of Sinai” but not the march from Seir and Edom. It may be easier to explain the textual interdependence by the priority of Judges 5:4-5, with Psalm 68 drawn from that text and molding it to suit a Jerusalem setting and an exodus story that had God accompany Israel in the wasteland of its way to the Promised Land. If the new hymnic introduction to the Song of Deborah drew on an older bit of known praise, the case is best made from Judges 5 alone.

 

However old the poetic tradition of Yahweh’s arrival from the southern wilderness, it does not describe the god’s historical origin. Seir and Edom are not presented as peoples who worship Yahweh, and they are not related to the Midianite tradition of Moses’ marriage in the exodus narrative. In the shared material of Judg 5:4-5 and Ps 68:8-9, Yahweh is “god of Israel” and “he of Sinai,” the latter a location in the southern desert that no associated population, evidently a divine dwelling, a category to which we will return after discussion of the biblical texts. It appears that Seir and Edom are elaborations on the wilderness association of Yahweh with Sinai, though they could also display a less targeted and equally ancient Israelite conception of the god’s southern home (identification of Sinai in the Moses narrative with the “mountain of God” is likely to be a secondary combination, but it is a reading of both the Sinai and mountain traditions in tune with their older intent). (Daniel E. Fleming, The Legacy of Israel in Judah’s Bible: History, Politics, and the Reinscribing of Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 132, 133-34)