Judges 5, the Song of Deborah, is and has traditionally been one of the foci of biblical study. Artistically, it evinces a consummate skill, with a series of powerful scenes and strong stanzas. Literarily, it has broad import, particularly in that it is one of the oldest integral texts in the Hebrew Bible. Few scholars dissent from the proposition that the poem is premonarchic. As a result, it represents also a virtually unimpeachable source for the study of early Israel.

Midrashic literature often employs the exegesis of a biblical text as the source for a story. When the story is coupled with a historic person, a legend is born. Since there are historic aspects to the legend, its historicity is sometimes uncritically accepted in its entirety. In most instances, however, the fictional content of a legend far exceeds its historical content. Some of these legends continue to flourish and evolve into baroque narratives often quite far removed from the original scriptural verse that precipitated their creation. Then, only a careful examination of the transmission history of the story can recapture its original exegetic context. Beginning with the assumption that some stories evolve from a simple exegesis to a full-blown narrative through the accretion of folk motifs and the fixed formulas of story tellers, one may order the versions of a given legend according to their development.

At the beginning of the ninth century, George Syncellus, a monk of Constantinople, composed a chronicle of world history which extended from the beginning of the world up to the reign of Diocletian. As the title suggests, the chronicle was an ἐκλογή of excerpts and citations from highly diverse sources. Among other things, these excerpts include kings lists from Africanus' and Eusebius' chronicles, arranged in parallel columns for the sake of comparison, material from various ethnic histories, and several extracts from Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha. These pseudepigraphic citations are clustered together in the antediluvian portion of his chronicle, and include material from Jubilees, the Life of Adam, the Testament of Adam, and the Jewish pseudepigraphon known as 1 Enoch. The citations from 1 Enoch consist of two large excerpts, both of which Syncellus assigns to the “Book of the Watchers.” Expanding on the Genesis 6 legend of the fall of the sons of God, these excerpts recount the descent of the Watchers from Mt. Hermon, their revelations to and intercourse with the daughters of men, and the subsequent corruption of the earth.

Eloisa, the medieval nun torn between “grace and nature” in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, has proved to be one of the poet's most fascinating and popular female creations among religious scholars as well as literary critics. Yet there appears in Pope's masterpiece another female figure who has been largely ignored and whose nature and function in the poem have never been accurately described. In the midst of Eloisa's spiritual and emotional conflict between her carnal memories of Abelard and her religious obligations as a nun, she imagines that she sees sitting in front of her the figure of “Black Melancholy,” a woman spreading spiritual gloom over the entire scene:

But o'er the twilight groves, and dusky caves,

Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves,

Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws

A death-like silence, and a dread repose;

Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,

Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,

Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,

And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

A Puritan sloth is as hard to imagine as a Puritan humorist. The Saints have been called many things since the sixteenth century, but seldom if ever have they been accounted lazy. From Ben Jonson's caustic caricature of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, ready to intrude his opinions on any subject, to Michael Walzer's portrayal of them as the indefatigable pioneers of modern radical politics, observers have readily acknowledged their “extraordinary activism.” To link this enterprise with the ethic of striving that lay at the heart of Puritan thought is easy, for the preachers always spoke of the godly life as arduous. “I say shew your grace, shew your regeneration, by being new creatures, by doing more than others,” John Preston urged, and he practiced what he preached. Chaplain to Charles I, Master of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, participant in Puritan Parliamentary politics while commuting between lectureships at both Lincoln's Inn and Trinity Church in Cambridge, Preston forced several careers into the less than two decades between his conversion and his death at the age of forty from consumption probably exacerbated by exhaustion. “[H]e never (by his good will) rested that day since God was truly known unto him untill [his death],” wrote his first biographer, “God gave him therefore now an everlasting rest.” Few people more fully exemplified the Puritan ideal that pious performance is the thanksgiving for the gift of eternal life.