Jabin, King of Canaan

Overview

Jabin, "king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor" (Judges 4:2), is the Canaanite king whose army, under its commander Sisera, oppressed Israel for twenty years in the days of Deborah. He is a different ruler from the Jabin king of Hazor whom Joshua defeated and killed (Joshua 11:10), and the name may have been used by more than one king of the city.

Biblical Significance

After the death of Ehud, when Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin (Judges 4:1-2). His commander Sisera lived at Harosheth Haggoyim and had nine hundred chariots of iron, and he oppressed Israel cruelly for twenty years (Judges 4:2-3). The prophetess Deborah summoned Barak to gather ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun at Mount Tabor, and the LORD routed Sisera's army at the Kishon (Judges 4:6-16). Sisera fled to the tent of Heber the Kenite, whose house was at peace with Jabin, and was killed there by Jael (Judges 4:17-22). On that day God subdued Jabin, and Israel pressed harder and harder against him until they destroyed him (Judges 4:23-24).

Later Scripture remembers the victory. Samuel recalls that the LORD sold Israel "into the hand of Sisera, commander of the army of Hazor" (1 Samuel 12:9), and Psalm 83:9 asks God to deal with Israel's enemies "as to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon."

Historical Context

In Eugene Merrill's chronology of the judges, the battle at the Kishon and the end of Jabin's oppression fall about 1230 BC, in Late Bronze II. Hazor's last Late Bronze city ended in a great fire usually dated to the thirteenth century BC. Early-date scholars such as Bryant Wood and Douglas Petrovich associate that destruction with Israel's victory over this Jabin, reading Judges 4:24 as including his capital; James Hoffmeier notes that the text itself does not describe an attack on the city.