Judges 5:6 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

In the days of Shamgar, &c. In this and the two following verses Deborah, to give the Israelites a just sense of their deliverance, and excite them to greater thankfulness, represents the miseries to which the Canaanites had reduced them by twenty years' oppression; their public roads or high-ways were deserted for fear of robbers or violence; their villages depopulated; their cities blocked up, and their country overrun with the enemy's soldiers; while themselves were disarmed, dispirited, and helpless; till it pleased God to look down upon them with compassion, and raise up deliverance for them. In the days of Jael, &c. Jael, though an illustrious woman, effected nothing for the deliverance of God's people. The travellers walked through by-ways Because of the Philistines and Canaanites, who, besides the public burdens which they laid upon the Israelites, waited for all opportunities to do them mischief secretly; watching for travellers in common roads, as is usual with enemies in times of war; and because of the wicked even of their own people, who, having cast off the fear of God, and there being no king in Israel to punish them, broke forth into acts of injustice and violence, even against their own brethren. The Jael mentioned in this verse is generally taken to be the wife of Heber, who slew Sisera. But “the phrase, in the days of Jael, implies times past, and supposes that Jael was dead as well as Shamgar. Besides, what honour could redound to the prophetess from such a comparison? Is it worthy of a boast, that she, who was judge in Israel, had done more in delivering them from the enemy than Heber's wife, who was only a sojourner in Israel, and whose husband was at peace with the enemy? The Jael, therefore, here mentioned, seems to have been a prophetess raised up before Deborah to judge Israel, but who died without delivering them. It is true indeed the name of this prophetess is not mentioned before; but neither are any of the transactions of the time in which she is supposed to have lived recorded; nor is Shamgar's name mentioned more than once, Judges 3:31, and then principally on account of that single exploit, of slaying six hundred Philistines with an ox-goad.” Dodd.