I. Perhaps the general idea of a village in the Bible was of a cluster of unwalled huts or houses, without a synagogue; but we may be sure that in most such places, although the priest and the building were not there, there was divine service, the knowledge of God, and the calling upon His name. A religious atmosphere invests the villages of the Bible; human life everywhere is compelled to look up, saved from looking down, from regarding life as a hopeless, grinding fate; the life of the villager is charmed from injustice, oppression, and fraud, by Divine principles taking shape in laws and enactments. God revealed Himself first to villages and villagers. The patriarchs were villagers; the great thoughts of the men who from time to time roused the nation, were born in villages, and the first notes of the Incarnation sounded over the plain in villagers' ears.
II. Almost all the most beautiful imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures clusters round the scenery of village life; the land was full of pictures, on which faith was invited to meditate.
III. The villages of the Bible illustrate this lesson, that national wealth is not in the Divine conception the chief end and purpose of any nation. In the denunciations pronounced on Egypt and Tyre and Babylon, we learn how great, in God's judgment, is the difference between a wealthy and a happy land.
E. Paxton Hood, Preacher's Lantern,vol. iii., p. 31.
References: Judges 5:11. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiii., No. 763.Judges 5:12. Ibid.,vol. vi., No. 340. Judges 5:16. Parker, vol. vi., p. 164; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 133.Judges 5:20. Preacher's Monthly,vol. iii., p. 352; E. J. Hardy, Faint yet Pursuing,p. 85.