Judges 4:17-18
Turn in, my lord, do not fear
He runs to the one tent in the region belonging to people at peace with his king. She comes out to meet him and invites him in, and covers him with a rug.
People of the Bible
Jael
Offered a fleeing general milk and a rug, and the song calls her most blessed of women in tents.
Jael is the wife of Heber the Kenite, and her household is at peace with the king Sisera serves, which is why he runs to her tent. She comes out to meet him and tells him not to be afraid. He asks for water and she gives him milk, covers him, and stands at the door while he sleeps. Then she takes a tent peg and a hammer, the tools of the person whose job it is to pitch the tent, and she does what forty thousand men in the valley could not.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Jael
- 01
- 02
Judges 4:19-20
He asked for water, she gave milk
Milk rather than water, and a request from him that she stand at the door and tell anyone who asks that there is no man here. He sleeps because he believes the tent is neutral.
- 03
Judges 4:21-22
The peg and the hammer
She uses the tools of her own work, softly, while he is exhausted. Then she goes out to meet Barak coming up the road and shows him the man he has been chasing.
- 04
Judges 5:24-27
Blessed above women in the tent
The song slows the whole scene down to a few beats: she put her hand to the peg, he sank, he fell, where he sank there he fell down dead. Nothing is hurried and nothing is softened.
Why it matters
Deborah said the honour of the day would go to a woman, and Jael is who she meant, though nobody in the chapter could have known it. The song of Judges 5 gives her the highest praise in the book and spends its last lines on Sisera’s mother at a window, counting out the spoil he is bringing home, which is a deliberate act of cruelty and mercy at once by a poet who will not let the victory be simple.
2 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
