Judges 5:24

"Blessed above women shall Jael be,

The wife of Heber the Kenite;

Blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

He asked water, and she gave him milk;

She brought him butter in a lordly dish.

She put her hand to the tent-pin,

And her right hand to the workman's hammer;

And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote through his head;

Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples.

At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay:

Where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

"Blessed above women shall Jael be" (Judges 5:24). Deborah was an inspired prophetess, and her words here must be construed as a blessing conveyed with God's approval upon the wife of Heber. Of course this is contrary to what nearly all the commentators write about this, and we agree that Christians cannot, in any sense, agree that Jael's behavior in this episode was moral, yet there must be something here that we do not understand. Without professing any full agreement with his remarks, we submit this quotation from Strahan:

"If the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon Gideon and upon Jephthah when they went to overthrow the enemies of Israel, who will say that the same Spirit did not impel the wife of Heber to take the life of Sisera, and to inspire Deborah to call her `Blessed above women'?"[35]

The words here are very similar to Elizabeth's greeting of the Virgin Mary, "Blessed art thou among women" (Luke 1:42).

Amerding has this regarding this event: "Jael, despite the vicious nature of her violent act, kept covenant-faith with the nation to which her people had been joined, and Heber's `peace with Jabin' (Judges 4:17) was a violation of his family's prior commitment to Yahweh."[36]

"She brought him butter in a lordly dish" (Judges 5:25). The parallelism in this with the preceding clause indicates, as Barnes said, that, "This should be rendered `curdled milk,' probably a fermented and intoxicating drink."[37] The "lordly dish" would have allayed any suspicion that Sisera might have had.

"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay" (Judges 5:27a). "This recapitulates Sisera's arrival at Jael's tent and his collapse in exhaustion."[38]

"Where he bowed, there he fell down dead" (Judges 5:27). This is a poetic reference to the fact that when Sisera collapsed from exhaustion in Jael's tent, that was the end of him. It was the same as if he had fallen dead. This is in no sense a contradiction of the account in Judges 4, but the skillful addition of a number of pertinent details omitted in Judges 4. This is characteristic of the Bible. In all of the recapitulations we have studied, not one of them fails to add details not previously mentioned. This runs some scholars nearly crazy, but that is the way the Word of God is!