What Does Judges 5:30 Mean in the King James?
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 analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
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.
“damsel or two” in this verse is reḥem reḥămātayim. 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.
“prey” 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.
“needlework” 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, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.Kings of armies did flee apace: and she that tarried at home divided the spoil.But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils.THE THREAD
Kings of armies did flee apace: and she that tarried at home divided 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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