However this may be, the age of Shamgar overlapped that of the prophetess Deborah. ‘In the days of Shamgar,’ she says, ‘the highways were unoccupied ... until that I, Deborah, arose—that I arose a mother in Israel.’ It was not only from the incursions of the Philistines that the Israelites suffered. In the north the tribes were called upon to face a confederacy of the Canaanitish states. It was the last effort of Canaan to stem the gradual advance of Israel, and the struggle was decided in the plain of Megiddo, as it had been in the older days of Egyptian invasion and conquest. Megiddo and Taanach were still Canaanitish fortresses; so, too, was Beth-shean, in the valley of the Jordan,[309] and the Israelites of Mount Ephraim were thus cut off from their brethren in the north. Here Jabin, the king of Hazor, was the dominant Canaanite prince, whose standard was followed by the other ‘kings of Canaan.’ Twenty years long, we are told, ‘he mightily oppressed the children of Israel,’ ‘for he had nine hundred chariots of iron.’[310] Two accounts of the ‘oppression’ and the war that put an end to it have been handed down, one a prose version, which the compiler of the book of Judges has made part of his narrative, while the other is contained in the song of victory composed by Deborah after the overthrow of the foe. Critics have found discrepancies between the two accounts, and have maintained that where they differ the prose version is unhistorical. In the latter the Canaanitish leader is the king of Hazor, Sisera being his general, who ‘dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles,’ whereas in the song there is no mention of Hazor, and Sisera appears as a Canaanitish king. Moreover, it is alleged that, according to the Song (v. 12), Barak seems to have belonged to the tribe of Issachar, while in the prose narrative he is said to have come from Kadesh of Naphtali, and it is further asserted that Hazor had already been taken and destroyed in the time of Joshua. The author of the book of Judges, however, failed to see the discrepancies which have been discovered by the modern European critic, and he has accordingly set the prose narrative by the side of the Song without note or comment. As the king of Hazor did not personally take part in the battle on the banks of the Kishon, there was no occasion for any reference to him in the Song, and that the commander of his army should have been one of his royal allies is surely nothing extraordinary. In the Song, Barak is expressly distinguished from ‘the princes of Issachar,’[311] and the question of the destruction of Hazor by Joshua has already been dealt with. It is a gratuitous supposition that the introduction of Jabin into the narrative, and the reference to Harosheth, are the inventions of popular legend or interested historians.