Note 318 — Chapter V · THE AGE OF THE JUDGES

Being a poem, it was probably handed down orally at first. This would account for variant readings like ‘also the clouds dropped,’ by the side of ‘also the heavens dropped,’ in v. 4; or ‘in the days of Jael,’ by the side of ‘in the days of Shamgar ben-Anath,’ in v. 6. The name of Jael, however, may have been a marginal gloss like sârîd, ‘a remnant,’ possibly, in v. 13. The song was almost certainly written from the outset in the letters of the so-called Phœnician alphabet, and not in cuneiform characters. Had it been written in cuneiform there would have been a confusion between aleph, hê and ’ayin, which cannot be detected in it. At the same time, the use of the preposition bě in vv. 2 and 15 (b’ Isrâel, b’ Issachar) could be explained from the cuneiform syllabary, in which the character pi (used for bi in the Tel el-Amarna tablets) also has the value of yi. The omission of the article, which is a characteristic of the Song, reminds us that in Canaanite or Phœnician the definite article of Hebrew did not exist.