In the days of Shamgar son of Anath, in the days of Jael,
the main roads were deserted because travellers kept to the side roads.
Villages were deserted, they were deserted in Israel,
until I, Deborah, arose, a mother in Israel.
Judges 5:6-7
Introduction
Jael is a popular Bible figure, famous for her brutal act of violence. It seems she was popular in ancient times too, and her story is told twice in the Hebrew Bible. We have a version written in prose, as part of a historical account (Judg. 4:17-24), and an older version written in poetry, as part of a song (Judg. 5:24-27).[1]
In this three-part series, I look at Jael and her controversial actions. In part one, I look at her story, especially as recorded in Judges 4. In part two, I look at possible sexual and maternal allusions, especially in Judges 5. In part three, I look at Jael as a type of Mary the Mother of Jesus.
“The Lord will hand over Sisera to a woman”
Before her name appears in the text, Jael is alluded to in a conversation between Deborah and Barak concerning the Canaanites. The Canaanites were a powerful enemy who, for twenty years, had made life miserable for the Israelites. Sisera was the commander of the well-armed Canaanite army (Judg. 4:3).
Deborah is leading Israel at this time, and her first recorded action in the biblical text is to summon Barak and remind him of what God had already said.
“Hasn’t the LORD, the God of Israel, commanded you, ‘Go, deploy the troops on Mount Tabor, and take with you ten thousand men from the Naphtalites and Zebulunites? Then I will lure Sisera commander of Jabin’s army, his chariots, and his infantry at the Wadi Kishon to fight against you, and I will hand him over to you’” (Judg. 4:6-7 CSB).
Barak tells Deborah, “If you will go with me, I will go. But if you will not go with me, I will not go” (Judg. 4:8). No explanation is given about his response. Did it arise from fear or cowardice? Or did Barak simply want Deborah with him? To have a wise woman who heard from God would be a valuable asset in battle.
Deborah replies, “I’ll definitely go with you. However, the path you’re taking won’t bring honor [or glory] to you, because the Lord will hand over Sisera to a woman” (Judg. 4:9 CEB). This woman is Jael.
Jael’s Hospitality
Barak and Deborah with 10,000 men go to battle. The LORD throws the Canaanites into a panic and they are defeated in a bloodbath (Judg. 4:15-16). Sisera, however, escapes with his life. He flees on foot to the camp of a man named Heber. The narrator of Judges 4 had previously, and briefly, mentioned Heber in anticipation of this moment in the story.
Now Heber the Kenite had moved away from the Kenites, the sons of Hobab, Moses’s father-in-law, and pitched his tent beside the oak tree of Zaanannim, which was near Kedesh (Judg. 4:11 CSB).
Sisera believes Heber is an ally and will protect him (Judg. 4:17). But he is not met by Heber; the man never appears in the story. Instead, a woman, Heber’s wife Jael, comes out of her tent to meet him. The pieces of the story are fitting into place.
Jael speaks reassuringly to Sisera who is exhausted from battle and from his escape, and who is probably in shock after witnessing the slaughter of his troops. She persuades him: “Come in, my lord. Come in with me. Don’t be afraid” (Judg. 4:18a CSB).
Sisera accepts Jael’s invitation and enters her tent. Married nomadic women had their own tents, and these female spaces were strictly off-limits to men except for their husbands (cf. Gen. 18:6 & 31:33). In fact, “in biblical literature, a man seldom enters a woman’s tent for purposes other than sexual intercourse.”[2]
Inviting a strange man into her tent was a scandalous and dangerous move for Jael. First-time listeners of the story may have wondered about her character or been concerned for her safety.[3]
Once inside the tent, Jael hides Sisera under a blanket. When he asks for water, she gives him milk. She appears to be behaving in a caring motherly manner, a manner that disguises her true feelings.
Jael Strikes
Jael was remarkably brave to invite a fierce warrior―a general, no less―into her tent. And she seems quick-witted by giving him soporific milk to drink instead of water. Her quick thinking and resourcefulness are also shown when she used what was at hand, a tent peg and hammer, to assassinate Israel’s enemy.
While he was sleeping from exhaustion, Heber’s wife, Jael, took a tent peg, grabbed a hammer, and went silently to Sisera. She hammered the peg into his temple and drove it into the ground, and he died (Judg. 4:22 CSB).
Jael shows composure, cunning, and fierce courage in the way she executed Sisera. As Deborah had prophesied, the LORD handed over Sisera to a woman, a very capable woman.
Jael then shows off her handiwork to Barak.
When Barak arrived in pursuit of Sisera, Jael went out to greet him and said to him, “Come and I will show you the man you are looking for.” So he went in with her, and there was Sisera lying dead with a tent peg through his temple! (Judg. 4:22 CSB).
No reason is given for Jael’s apparent hatred of Sisera or for why she helped Israel by killing him. Did Jael and Sisera have a history? Perhaps one that her husband Heber was unaware of? She didn’t just hammer a tent peg through Sisera’s skull; the tent peg was driven into the ground. There was ferocity in Jael’s death blow.
What is also puzzling is that Jael is praised and commended in both Judges 4 and 5 even though she broke the ancient Near East codes of hospitality, considered as sacred, when she murdered her invited guest.[4] It seems “both story-teller and singer are concerned with Israel’s deliverance, not with abstract compliance to laws of hospitality.”[5] The focus is firmly on “Jael’s assassination of Israel’s oppressor [which] is the climax of the story of God’s deliverance of the people.”[6]
Sisera’s death marked a turning point in the fortunes of Israel. The Israelites now had the upper hand and, instead of being on the defensive, they were now on the offensive.
That day God subdued King Jabin of Canaan before the Israelites. The power of the Israelites continued to increase against King Jabin of Canaan until they destroyed him (Judg. 4:23-24 CSB).
In part 2 I look more at Jael’s questionable behaviour and in part 3 I look at the use of Jael in typology.
Footnotes
[1] Many biblical scholars believe the version in Judges 5 is the older account because it contains archaic Hebrew words and because victory songs are thought to have been more readily passed through oral tradition. Some scholars believe the victory song in Judges 5 is the oldest passage in the Hebrew Bible. See Colleen M. Conway, Sex and Slaughter in the Tent of Jael: A Cultural History of a Biblical Story (Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. (Google Books)
Judges 5:1, which prefaces the song, has both Deborah’s and Barak’s names, but Deborah’s name is first and the Hebrew verb for “sing” is feminine and singular which gives her prominence.
[2] Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, “Controlling Perspectives: Women, Men, and the Authority of Violence in Judges 4 & 5,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58.3 (Autumn, 1990): 389-411, 392.
[3] Sexual violence against women has often been a part of warfare. We are reminded of this at the end of Deborah’s song in Judges 5:30. More on this in part 2.
[4] Clinton McCann argues that it was Sisera, more so than Jael, who broke the customs of hospitality. He states that “the charges against Jael [for being inhospitable] need to be dropped” especially as “the immediate context of the book hails her as a hero.” See his discussion in J. Clinton McCann, Judges (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 53-54 (Google Books)
[5] Carolyn Pressler, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth (Westminster Bible Companion; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 165.
[6] Pressler, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, 165.
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Image Credit
Photo (cropped) by Alvin Ng via Pexels.
Postscript: October 8 2022
I like Michelle Knight’s comments on Jael, Deborah, and Barak in this Twitter thread from January 2022. Dr Knight is a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the USA.
Ok, let’s talk about Deborah.
* rolls up her proverbial sleeves *
1/so many
— Michelle Knight (@mlizknight) January 25, 2022
Sex and Violence in the Days of Jael (series)
» Part 2: Sexual and Maternal Imagery in Jael’s Story
» Part 3: Jael, Mary, and Jesus’ Crucifixion
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11 thoughts on “Jael (1): The Lord will hand over Sisera to a woman”
Hi Marg,
I confess I haven’t paid much attention to this story even though there is a song that begs for musical analysis. But I am looking forward to your next posts since this story is part of a class at the annual seminar of the use of the OT in the NT at Newman University which I am attending (virtually) next week (Thu – Fri). One of the papers is on the Gospels’ Chronological Intertextuality with Judges 4/5. This section is presented by Julie Walsh.
Hi Bob, Julie Walsh is my friend and I’ve relied on her input for part 3. I’d love to see a musical analysis for Judges 5.
Hi Marg – Here’s a sketch. https://meafar.blogspot.com/2021/03/judges-5-song-of-deborah-and-baraq.html. It was a near terminal experience. I could not succeed until I had assigned voices to each verse – D, B, D&B together, Narrator, Chorus. And I would suggest some variation in the mode during the piece – especially for the irony of verse 30. I was bowled away by the difficulty of reading this song.
You’ve been busy! I’m intrigued by this statement: “The song is framed by the single word, mother.” Can you explain this to me?
I use the term ‘frame’ to indicate the first and last sets of recurring words in a section of poetry or prose. Sometimes it is stronger than others. In the section from verses 6 to 31, it is the word mother, אם. We can also add עד, ‘ultil / through’ to this ‘frame’. The sequence is ‘yd am’ then ‘am yd’.
It is not particularly strong for a poetic word frame, but the overall subjects of the story are strong, the mother in Israel, the mustering of the troops, and the mother not in Israel. So the battle scene(s) are framed by the ‘mother’ scenes.
I picked verse 6, even though it is not the beginning of the chapter – as if some of the ‘picture’ were ‘outside’ the framing – because verses 1-5 are narrator + general invitations to stand in front of the picture. First the disheveled warriors ready for battle, then the implied warnings to kings and rulers, and finally the invocation of Yahweh (this is Sinai). It is Torah that distinguishes Israel from the surrounding nations.
If we include verse 5, yhvh becomes part of the frame as well. And the pattern is circular, yhvh-yd-am am-yd-yhvh like the mattes in a framed image. yhvh is pervasive in the text, occurring 14 times. yd and am occur only in the framing verses.
It is possible that some word recurrence is ‘accidental’, but often it can be seen as deliberate on the part of the poet.
Sorry for the transcription typo in the reply. My mind is fighting with conflicting transcriptions these days as I experiment with SimHebrew. I should have spelled yhvh as ihvh . And there’s another typo in English that will be obvious to fix.
Sadly, most of this is over my head. But there are few things I find interesting such as the sounds in 5:30 and the relatively longer phrase lengths.
The different ways we can approach the biblical texts are fascinating. Well, at least, some approaches are.
“the path you’re taking won’t bring honor to you, because the Lord will hand over Sisera to a woman”
If I was in Barak’s place I would reply: “I don’t care about who gets the honour, I just want to make sure that Israel defeats Sisera”.
This got me thinking about the “path” that Barak is taking. The “complementarians” say that Barak is taking the *wrong* path in allowing a woman (Deborah) to take the lead and go into battle and as a result he is losing the honour that is “rightfully” his (because he is a man and only men should be honoured in this way). Because Deborah is a better leader, she (and Jael) will take “his” honour.
I think that his path is the *right* path for the exact same reasons: bacause allowing capable women to lead is the right path, and giving them the honour that would otherwise go to a man is also the right path.
And Barak doesn’t do too badly out of it. He’s singing in Judges 5 and is honoured in Hebrews 11. 😉
She killed Sisera because … [comment removed]
I wonder about the personal history between Jael and Sisera, but my speculation is slightly different from yours. I’ve written about the sexual innuendos in Judges 4 and 5 here: https://margmowczko.com/jael-judges-5/
I’ve removed your comment because your wording and tone may cause grief to other readers.