Lives of Scripture

During Deborah's judgeship, Israel was oppressed by Jabin, king of Canaan, whose army commander Sisera had nine hundred iron chariots (Judges 4:2-3). When Barak's forces routed Sisera's army at Deborah's word, Sisera fled on foot to the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite, since Heber's clan had peace with Jabin (4:15-17). Jael welcomed him, gave him milk when he asked for water, and covered him to rest, appearing to offer protection (4:18-20). Instead, while Sisera slept, Jael drove a tent peg through his temple with a hammer, killing Israel's most dangerous enemy in her own tent (4:21). Scripture does not moralize the deception involved; it is told as the fulfillment of Deborah's earlier word to Barak that "the LORD will sell Sisera into the hands of a woman" (4:9), and the Song of Deborah afterward calls Jael "most blessed of women" among tent-dwellers for the act (5:24-27). Jael's story, alongside Deborah's, is one of several places in Judges where God works deliverance through women in a period repeatedly marked by failed or compromised male leadership, closing out the account of Israel's rescue from Jabin's oppression with an ending no one in the story had expected.