What Does Judges 5:30 Mean?
Have they not found? Have they not divided the plunder? To every man a womb or two. To Sisera, a spoil of many-dyed cloth, a spoil of dyed embroidery, dyed embroidery upon both sides, fit for the necks of those who take plunder?
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Have they not sped? have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil?THE KEY
The imagined victory counts women and embroidered cloth in the same inventory of spoil.
THE MEANING
The verse gives voice to a confident fantasy: Sisera is delayed because the victors are dividing their spoils, including women assigned to the soldiers and fine cloth for Sisera. Its language exposes the violence of conquest without disguising women as anything other than objects of distribution in that imagined scene. The reader sees how easily the powerful can be presumed to own what they have not secured.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the certainty that a powerful man’s delay proves he is winning. The next verse reveals that Sisera’s mother’s confident inventory is only a fantasy.
THE ROOT
רַחַם רַחֲמָתַיִם
reḥem reḥămātayim
GROWS FROM
רחם
r-ḥ-m
Womb; the same root also names compassion and tender regard.
The Hebrew phrase is literally “a womb, two wombs,” idiomatically one or two young women. The same root forms raḥamim, “compassion”; here, women’s bodies are counted as units in an imagined division of spoils.
ALSO GROWS
reḥem: Womb
רֶחֶם
The word beneath “damsel” makes the captured woman legible as a living body being allocated.
raḥamim: Compassion, tender mercy
רַחֲמִים
The same root names compassion, a startling semantic neighbor to this verse’s treatment of women as inventory.
שָׁלָל
shalal
GROWS FROM
שלל
sh-l-l
To plunder or strip away; spoil taken as booty.
“plunder, spoil” in this verse is shalal. The spoil-word returns as a refrain, enclosing women and embroidered cloth within one inventory. Its repetition makes the logic of possession sound routine: everything is divided as the spoils of victory.
ALSO GROWS
shalal: To plunder, take as spoil
שָׁלַל
The verb names the force behind the imagined distribution.
shalal: Spoil, booty
שָׁלָל
The noun appears repeatedly, placing people and objects under the same category of seized property.
רִקְמָה
riqmah
GROWS FROM
רקם
r-q-m
To embroider, interlacing threads into patterned fabric.
“embroidery” in this verse is riqmah. The repeated words from this root describe carefully worked cloth, made by threads interlaced into a pattern. That handiwork sits beside the violence of the taking that supplies its imagined owner.
ALSO GROWS
raqam: To embroider
רָקַם
The verb names the craft behind the ornament imagined as booty.
roqem: An embroiderer
רֹקֵם
The related word names the maker whose labor is visible in the prized cloth.
THE PATTERN
The spoils of victory are described as people and possessions transferred from defeated power into the victors’ hands.
But the women, the little ones, the cattle, and all that is in the city, all its plunder, you shall take for yourself; and you shall eat the plunder of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.Kings of the armies run, they run; and she who stays in the house divides the spoil.But when a stronger one comes upon him and overcomes him, he takes from him his full armor, in which he trusted, and distributes his spoils.THE THREAD
Kings of the armies run, they run; and she who stays in the house divides the spoil.Both verses use שָׁלָל (shalal), “spoil,” the same root repeated around the imagined plunder of Sisera’s defeat. Psalm 68 places a woman among those dividing the spoil, while Judges names women among what is divided.
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