In the book of Judges, the prophetess Deborah, after joining with Barak to lead the Israelites to victory over the army of the Canaanite general Sisera, utters a lengthy poem that recaps the events told in prose in the previous chapter. Michelle Knight uses this passage to illuminate the way the Hebrew Bible employs poetry. Contrary to the widespread and questionable 21st-century assumption that pairs verse with emotion and prose with reason, the Song of Deborah is, Knight argues, a work of theology as much as it is an aesthetic expression of the joy of salvation:

The rhetorical power of the Song of Deborah and Barak is undeniable. Its imagery is at times poignant, and at others uplifting. The poet celebrates, laments, and criticizes, using every tool at her disposal to draw the audience in to her appraisal of the battle, including, but not limited to, emotional appeals (e.g., 5:21: “March on, my soul, with might!”). However, the song is far from a simple emotive retelling of a stirring story. Instead, as a prophetic voice with the authority of a divine emissary, Deborah (with Barak) reinterprets the events that had just transpired to address a theological shortsightedness among the Hebrews.

Barak, like Gideon after him, was under the faulty impression that it would be under his leadership and on the field of battle, by means of the talents of his army and the weapons they wielded, that Israel would secure victory. Deborah corrected this perspective twice: prospectively, in her clarification that it would be in a completely different location and by a different hand that the Lord would bring victory (4:9), and then retrospectively, in the form of a song.

It is the unique quality of Hebrew poetry—its images, repetition, terseness, and lexical freedom—that best clarifies the state of affairs after the [battle against the Canaanites]. Simultaneously celebratory and convicting, this poem says explicitly what narrative can only intimate and argues forcefully what prose can only state. [The song] is evocative, certainly, but its aim is a shift in theological reasoning.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.