I believe the academic analysis dates this after 600 BCE based on the linguistic, cultural and vocabulary used.
Dating Deborah
The Song of Deborah (Judges 5) is often seen as an ancient text, perhaps one of the oldest in the Tanach, but analysis of its language and contents suggests that it is a later Deuteronomistic composition.
https://www.thetorah.com/author/serge-frolov
Deborah, Gustave Dore, 1885. 123rf
Biblical Literature: Late or Early?
Modern scholarly study of the Tanach began in the seventeenth century when several critically inclined thinkers, including the famous Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, argued that contrary to the tradition shared by Jews and Christians, Moses could not possibly have written the Torah. Instead, they tentatively suggested that not only the Torah but also its sequel, the Former Prophets, was compiled almost a thousand years later, in the fifth century B.C.E., by Ezra (who probably used earlier sources).
Over the last few decades, the tendency to place biblical texts, including the Torah and the Former Prophets, closer (often much closer) to our own time than suggested by traditional authorities has been stronger than ever. Today, few scholars would argue that much of the grand historical narrative stretching from Genesis through Kings came into being more than a century or two before the Babylonian exile (sixth century BCE), and not a few would contend, returning to Spinoza and even going beyond him, that the entire corpus was created after the exile if not in the Hellenistic period that started with Alexander’s conquests in the late-fourth century B.C.E.
Nevertheless, one relatively small but well-known and liturgically important piece of the Former Prophets seems to have largely escaped the overall trend – Deborah’s Song in Judges 5.[1] Serving as the
haftarah for
Parashat Beshalach (as a twin of the Song of Moses/Miriam in Exodus 15), it recapitulates, in poetic form, the events covered by the previous chapter – Israel’s oppression by King Jabin of Hazor and especially by his general Sisera, the uprising against them led by Deborah and Barak, Sisera’s defeat, and his subsequent assassination by Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. Although there are, as usual, some dissenters (biblical scholars are famous for never agreeing 100% on anything), the prevailing consensus is that this text dates as far back as the 11th or even 12th century BCE.
That would not only make Deborah’s Song one of the most ancient fragments of the Tanach (in fact, this is precisely how it is routinely described in popular literature and textbooks), but also place it, in an unparalleled way, earlier than the traditional date or at least close to it: according to the Talmud, Judges was written by Samuel who purportedly lived in the latter part of the 11th century.
Such an ancient text would offer us an important glimpse into the Tanach’s historical background and its composition. But is the Song really that old?
“Deborahspeak”: Linguistic Considerations
All languages change over time. Today’s English is very different from that of Dickens and Milton, to say nothing of Shakespeare and Chaucer. And as any secular Israeli would readily confirm, being a native speaker of Modern Hebrew is no guarantee that you will understand the Hebrew of the Tanach in all its nuances. For that reason, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of a text often come handy in determining its date, especially if other texts in the same language, belonging to different periods, are available for comparison. Where does Deborah’s Song stand in this respect?
The Hebrew text of Judges 5 is very different from that of the surrounding chapters, indeed, from almost everything in the Torah and the Former Prophets. Even to an experienced Biblical Hebrew reader, some of its diction may be barely recognizable or even completely unrecognizable, and some of its grammatical forms are very difficult. When we encounter such difficulties in English, our first instinct is to brand the text archaic. Yet, the case is not so simple with the Song of Deborah.
Vocabulary
Several words in the Song are demonstrably late:
רֹמַח (
romah) Judg 5:8. Out of 14 other occurrences of this term for “spear,” nine are in Chronicles (e.g., 2 Chr 11:12) and Nehemiah (e.g., 4:10), clearly post-exilic books, and another two are in Jeremiah (46:4) and Ezekiel (39:9) whose content makes it impossible to date them before the exile. Works that may be earlier, such as Joshua (8:18, 26) and 1 Samuel (17:6, 45), usually refer to the same weapon using the word
כּידון (
kidon) – as in Modern Hebrew.
רִקְמָה (
riqmah) “fabric” (twice in Judg 5:30) appears mainly in Ezekiel (eight occurrences out of twelve) and again in Chronicles (1 Chron 29:2).
צָחֹר (
tsachor) “light-colored,” is only attested in Judg 5:10 and Ezek 27:18.
בְּהִתְנַדֵּב, the Hithpael of the verb
נדב (Judg 5:2, 9), is only used elsewhere in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles; moreover, Judg 5:2, 9, Neh 11:2, and 2 Chr 17:16 are the only places where this form means “to offer oneself,” in other words, “to volunteer.”
Thus, the distinctive vocabulary of Deborah’s Song turns out to be late rather than early. The most striking display of this trend is found in Judg 5:7, which twice employs the inseparable relative pronoun
שׁ־ (
she). In Modern Hebrew, it is used just as widely, perhaps even more so, as the self-standing relative pronoun
אֲשֶׁר, but in Biblical Hebrew that is decidedly not the case: in the entire Tanach,
שׁ־ is employed just 136 times and
אֲשֶׁר more than 5,500. Even more significantly, 96 occurrences (70%) of
שׁ־ are in Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, books that are widely recognized as written centuries after the exile; both employ Persian loanwords, and the word
אַפִּרְיון (
apiryon), “palanquin,” in Song 3:9 may even be a loanword from Greek, suggesting Hellenistic provenance.
More in the reference . . .