Deborah and Barak defeat Sisera

Deborah is described in three ways at once: a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, and a woman leading Israel at that time. She holds court under a palm tree between Ramah and Bethel, and people come up to her to have their disputes decided, which makes her the only one of these figures who actually does the work the English title implies.

The threat is Jabin king of Hazor and his commander Sisera, with nine hundred iron chariots, which is the technological gap that keeps recurring. She summons Barak and gives him orders that are already a command rather than a suggestion: take ten thousand men to Mount Tabor, and Sisera will be lured to the Kishon river and given into your hands.

His reply is the hinge of the whole episode: if you go with me, I will go; but if you do not go with me, I will not go. She agrees, and adds that because of the way he is going about it the honour will not be his, because the LORD will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman. Barak has assumed she means herself.

The battle turns on ground and weather. Tabor rises above the Jezreel valley, chariots need firm level ground, and the Kishon drains that plain and floods. The chariots are routed and Sisera abandons his and runs on foot.

He reaches the tent of Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite, whose clan is at peace with Jabin. She invites him in, covers him, gives him milk when he asks for water, and agrees to stand at the entrance and say nobody is there. When he is asleep from exhaustion she takes a tent peg and a hammer and drives the peg through his temple into the ground.

Nomadic tents were pitched by the women, so a hammer and a peg are the tools she would have been holding anyway, and she would have known exactly how hard to hit.

Jael's position is more complicated than a simple act of loyalty. Her husband's clan was at peace with Jabin, so Sisera ran to that tent precisely because it was neutral ground and he expected sanctuary. Hospitality in that world was close to inviolable and it was administered by the woman of the household. She breaks the strongest social convention available to her, and the poem that follows calls her most blessed of women.

The poem that follows is one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew in existence on linguistic grounds, and it covers the same events with a different emphasis. It praises the tribes that came and names the ones that did not, including Reuben, who stayed among the sheepfolds listening to the whistling for the flocks. It also ends with a scene nobody expects: Sisera's mother at a window, looking out for a son who is not coming, and her attendants reassuring her that he must be dividing the spoil, a girl or two for each man.