“Sisra’s mother looks out the window;
peering out through the lattice she wonders,
‘Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why are his horses so slow to return?’
The wisest of her ladies answer her,
and she repeats it to herself,
‘Of course! They’re collecting and dividing the spoil —
a girl, two girls for every warrior,
for Sisra booty of dyed clothing,
a plunder of colorfully embroidered garments,
two embroidered scarves for every soldier’s neck.’”
-Judges 5:28-30
We next encounter a section of the Song of Devorah that shall we say is a bit questionable in terms of its morals.
We have Devorah making a mockery of the pain Sisra’s mother must’ve been feeling as she waited for her son to return home from battle.
The mood darkens as we’re told of Sisra’s mother waiting expectantly at her window side.
“Why”, she says to herself, “is my son’s chariot taking so long?”
“And where in the world are all the other horses and their owners?”
She probably assumed the Canaanite troops with their awesome chariots would have made quick work of the lightly armed Israelite army.
And she probably mocked the Israelite soldiers before the battle begun.
But now she was the one being mocked.
Since she was the son of a military commander, she was part of the elite class.
She would have been surrounded by servants and lady helpers who tended to her every beck and call.
We’re told her lady servants did their darndest to cheer her up.
They suggested the only reason her son was taking so long to return is because his men captured so much war booty they were taking forever to divvy it up.
Take a look at the part where it says “a girl, two girls for every warrior”.
The King James Version says “to every man a damsel or two”.
However, the original Hebrew is actually a lot more graphic.
Instead of “girl” or “damsel”, the Hebrew word is RAHAM which means “womb”.
Therefore, it would be rendered as “a womb, two wombs for every warrior”.
See, in ancient times, women were part of the spoils of war handed over to the conquering soldiers who would take them home to be their sex slaves.
Although the Torah prohibits Hebrew soldiers from doing such a thing, this was a common practice in the ancient world.
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