Judges 4:21

21. A nail of the tent Or, a tent-pin, sometimes made of iron, but commonly of wood, to which, when driven into the ground, the ropes of a tent are fastened. “The nail which Jael used was a tent-pin, now, as then, called wated, and the hammer was the mallet with which it is driven into the ground. It is not necessary to suppose that either of them were of iron. The wated was probably a sharp-pointed pin of hard wood, and the hammer was the ordinary mallet used by these tent-dwelling Arabs.” Thomson.

Smote the nail into his temples Stanley thus pictures this scene: “Her attitude, her weapon, her deed, are described both in the historic and poetic account of the event, as if fixed in the national mind. She stands like the personification of the figure of speech so famous in the names of Judas the Maccabee, (the Hebrew word for hammer is maccab,) and Charles Martel the Hammer of her country’s enemies. Step by step we see her advance: first, the dead silence with which she approaches the sleeper, slumbering with the weariness of one who has run far and fast; then the successive blows with which she hammers, crushes, beats, and pierces through and through the forehead of the upturned face, till the point of the nail reaches the very ground on which the slumberer is stretched; and then comes the one startling bound, the contortion of agony with which the expiring man rolls over from the low divan, and lies weltering in blood between her feet as she strides over the lifeless corpse.”

Fastened it into the ground Rather, it went down into the ground; the tent pin passed through his head so as to reach to the very earth beneath him.

For he was fast asleep and weary This statement is parenthetical, showing how it was practicable for Jael to dispatch Sisera in the way she did. Compare the poetical description in Judges 5:26-27.