Judges 1:16; 4:1-22; 5:24-27
This is the way we ended lesson 3 ... Finally, we meet the lady of this study, and we see that she and her husband are of two different allegiances. We have two enemies, the Israelites and the Canaanites, fighting against each other and a husband supporting and helping the Canaanites while his wife ... well, what about his wife? We'll find out in the next lesson.
Here's that next lesson, hold on, the events in this lesson are a bit gruesome! Let's begin with Judges 4, verse 18 ...
18 And Jael
went out to meet Sisera, and said to him, “Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to
me; do not fear.” And when he had turned aside with her into the tent, she
covered him with a blanket.
Jael sees Sisera
and goes out to meet him. Was she being
hospitable or did she seize the opportunity to help the Israelites? Seeing fear and panic in Sisera’s demeanor,
Jael invites him into her tent for safety purposes … supposedly. She offers him a place to lay down and rest
and even covers him with a blanket.
19 Then he said
to her, “Please give me a little water to drink, for I am thirsty.” So she
opened a jug of milk, gave him a drink, and covered him.
We need to insert
Judges 5:25 here as it sheds further light and gives more detail on what
happened …
He asked for
water, she gave milk; She brought out cream in a lordly bowl.
Before giving in
to the sleep his exhaustion demanded, Sisera, thinking he was safe, asked for a
drink of water. Jael gave him a glass of
milk instead, probably clabbered milk that was fermented and that would have
had an intoxicating effect. She also
served it to him in a ‘lordly dish’ which would have eased any suspicion Sisera
might have had and then covered him with the blanket again.
20 And he said
to her, “Stand at the door of the tent, and if any man comes and inquires of
you, and says, ‘Is there any man here?’ you shall say, ‘No.’ ”
Before Sisera
gives into sleep, he tells Jael to stand at the door of the tent and if any man
comes and inquires if there is a man in her tent, that she is to say, ‘no.’
The Bible does not
give us Jael’s response to Sisera’s request … maybe she just chose to remain
silent as he drifted off to sleep.
21 Then Jael,
Heber’s wife, took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to
him and drove the peg into his temple, and it went down into the ground; for he
was fast asleep and weary. So he died.
Judges 5: 26
-27 … She stretched her hand to the tent peg, Her right hand to the workmen’s
hammer; She pounded Sisera, she pierced his head, She split and struck through
his temple. At her feet he sank, he
fell, he lay still; At her feet he sank, he fell; Where he sank, there he fell
dead.
Jael, with plans
of her own, waits until Sisera is in deep sleep and softly makes her way to
where he’s sleeping. It should be noted
that pitching and setting up tents was usually the women’s job therefore, Jael
would have been quite skilled in using the tools to do what she did next.
Jael took a hammer
and peg and drove it through Sisera’s temple, all the way through and into the
ground. When Sisera had collapsed from exhaustion in
Jael’s tent, that was the end of him. It
was the same as if he had fallen dead!
No, she didn't! Yes, she did! In our next lesson, we'll see what happens to Jael when everyone finds out what she's done!
patsy @ From This Heart of Mine
~ a place for women to gather and study God's Word ~
Sources used for this study:
Various translations of the Holy Bible
Various commentaries
Several trusted and biblically sound online sources
Dictionary of New Testament Background, Editors: Craig A Evans & Stanley E. Porter
Archaeological Study Bible
All the Women of the Bible by Edith Deen
Daughters of Eve by Lottie Beth Hobbs
Halley’s Bible Handbook by H. H. Halley
This has always just astonished me that anyone could even drive a ctent peg through the skull bones .
ReplyDeleteLana, I know! Just the thought makes me cringe!
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