“Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his cars?” The wisest of her waiting-women answered her, Yea, she returned answer to herself: “Have they not found and divided the spoil, A damsel or two to each man, A spoil of many-coloured garments to Sisera, A spoil of garments of many-coloured needlework, Two garments of many-coloured needlework for the neck of the spoiler.”[329] So may all thine enemies perish, O Yahveh; But may those who love him be as the rising of the sun in his might!’ Of Barak and Deborah we hear no more. The next judge and deliverer who appears upon the canvas is an Abi-ezrite of Manasseh, who came from the northern borders of Ephraim between Ophrah and Shechem. His father was Joash, the head, it would seem, of the clan. But he himself bears a double name. It is as Gideon, the ‘cutter-down’ of his father’s idol, that he is first introduced to us. In later history his name is Jerubbaal. The latter name is said to have been given him because he had thrown down the altar of Baal, and is interpreted to mean ‘Let Baal plead against him.’[330] But the other Old Testament examples we have met with of the interpretation of proper names may well make us hesitate about accepting this. They are all mere plays upon words, mere ‘popular etymologies,’ which have no claim to be regarded as history. Whether the philology is that of an ancient Hebrew writer or of a modern critic, its conclusions do not belong to the domain of the historian. Jerubbaal signifies ‘Baal will contend,’ not ‘Baal will plead against him,’ and therefore really has a meaning exactly the reverse of that ascribed to it in the narrative. The name seems substantially identical with that of Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia in the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Joash, the father of Jerubbaal, was a worshipper of Baal, and consequently there was nothing strange in his calling his son after his god. It is only as Jerubbaal that the future judge was known to the generation that followed him,[331] and his successor in the kingdom of Manasseh was called even in his own day ‘Abimelech the son of Jerubbaal.’[332] It has been suggested that Jerubbaal and Gideon were two different personages, whom tradition has amalgamated together,[333] but double names of the kind were not unknown in Oriental antiquity. Solomon himself also bore the name of Jedidiah (2 Sam. xii. 25), and Gideon, ‘the cutter-down,’ was not an inappropriate epithet for the conqueror of the Midianites. There was a good reason why the pious Israelite of a later generation should shrink from admitting that one of his national heroes had borne a name compounded with that of Baal.[334]