Song of Deborah as Polemic 19 politically charged: a polemic against non-participation on the part of those who should have participated in military campaigns against foreign enemies but did not. In fact, to the extent that this focus on participation versus non-participation seems to permeate the entire song and can adequately relate to and explain the inclusion of every subsection within the song, whereas one would be hard pressed to explain the lack of prominence given to YHWH and the focus on the non-participants in war if the song was written simply to praise YHWH in a victory celebration, one can argue that the primary rhetorical purpose of the song is actually polemical rather than celebratory. To be sure, the author may have taken advantage of the occasion of a victory celebration and dressed his composition up in celebratory garb, but the content and literary structure that supports it seem to point clearly to a fundamentally polemic purpose. 3. The Song of Deborah as Polemic: Some Implications Such a conclusion, if sustainable, has certain implications for two issues of ongoing debate: the relationship between the prose account in Judg 4 and the song in Judg 5, and the possible date of composition for the song itself. Regarding the relationship between the prose account in Judg 4 and the song in Judg 5, it is noteworthy that, if a strong polemic against non-participation indeed suffuses the Song of Deborah, that same polemic is entirely absent in the prose account in Judg 4. Thus, for all the debate about whether it is the prose account that is dependent on the song or vice versa, the apparent divergence in rhetorical purpose for the two accounts raises a third possibility that neither account is actually derived from the other, but that each was independently composed for its own specific purpose. After all, if the prose account was indeed derived from the song and motivated by a desire to fill in apparent gaps so as to provide a more complete and coherent picture (44), then it is somewhat curious that the polemic against non- participation so prominent in the song would be left out entirely in the prose account. Conversely, since a significant focus of the song that certain Israelite tribes and cities had been expected to participate in the war against Sisera but did not is information extraneous to the prose account, that makes it unlikely that the prose account had been the main source of information behind the composition of the song. (44) See HALPERN, “Resourceful”, 379-401; KAWASHIMA, “Song”, 151-178.