into idolatry, but not utterly destroying it, that the punishment which God would inflict would also fall upon the heathen, who would have made an end of Israel; it is no less apparent from Deu 32:37 and Deu 32:38, especially from the appeal in Deu 32:38, Let your idols arise and help you (Deu 32:38), which is addressed, as all admit, to the idolatrous Israelites, and not to the heathen, that those Israelites who had made worthless idols their rock would be exposed to the vengeance and retribution of the Lord. In Deu 32:42 the figure of the warrior is revived, and the judgment of God is carried out still further under this figure. Of the four different clauses in this verse, the third is related to the first, and the fourth to the second. God would make His arrows drunk with the blood not only of the slain, but also of the captives, whose lives are generally spared, but were not to be spared in this judgment. This sword would eat flesh of the hairy head of the foe. The edge of the sword is represented poetically as the mouth with which it eats (2Sa 2:26; 2Sa 18:8, etc.); “the sword is said to devour bodies when it slays them by piercing” (Ges. thes. p. 1088). פּרעות, from פּרע, a luxuriant, uncut growth of hair (Num 6:5; see at Lev 10:6). The hairy head is not a figure used to denote the “wild and cruel foe” (Knobel), but a luxuriant abundance of strength, and the indomitable pride of the foe, who had grown fat and forgotten his Creator (Deu 32:15). This explanation is confirmed by Psa 68:22; whereas the rendering ἄρχοντες, princes, leaders, which is given in the Septuagint, has no foundation in the language itself, and no tenable support in Jdg 5:2.
Verse 43
For this retribution which God accomplishes upon His enemies, the nations were to praise the people of the Lord. As this song commenced with an appeal to heaven and earth to give glory to the Lord (Deu 32:1-3), so it very suitably closes with an appeal to the heathen to rejoice with His people on account of the acts of the Lord. “Rejoice, nations, over His people; for He avenges the blood of His servants, and repays vengeance to His adversaries, and so expiates His land, His people.” “His people” is an accusative, and not in apposition to nations in the sense of “nations which are His people.” For, apart from the fact that such a combination would be unnatural, the thought that the heathen had become the people of God is nowhere distinctly expressed in the song (not even in Deu 32:21); nor is the way even so prepared for it as that we could expect it here, although the appeal to the nations to rejoice with His people on account of what God had done involves the Messianic idea, that all nations will come to the knowledge of
