Biblion Bible Commentary
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So Let All Your Enemies Perish
Judges 5:24-31
24 “Jael shall be blessed above women, the wife of Heber the Kenite; blessed shall she be above women in the tent. · WEB
The song blesses Jael, then turns to a mother at a window waiting for a son who will not come — and asks God to make all his enemies perish.
Jael shall be blessed above women, the wife of Heber the Kenite; blessed shall she be above women in the tent Judges 5:24.
The song's verdict on the act the prose reported without comment Judges 4:21. She is blessed above women — the phrase later spoken to Mary Luke 1:42 — and the blessing is for what she did in a tent with a mallet. The poem retells it in slow motion: the milk offered instead of water, the hand to the peg, the hammer, and then a line that circles like a body falling — at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay Judges 5:25–27.
What the song does not do is discuss the ethics of it, and readers have long weighed the celebration against the hospitality Jael violated. The honest position is that Scripture here praises the outcome of a war it presents as God's own, in a book whose closing verdict on the whole era is that everyone did what seemed right to him Judges 21:25. The blessing is real and the era is not held up as a model.
Through the window she looked out, and cried: Sisera's mother looked through the lattice. "Why is his chariot so long in coming?" Judges 5:28.
And then the song does something remarkable. It leaves the victors and goes to the enemy commander's house, where his mother is at the window watching the road. The reader knows what she does not, and the poem holds her there for three verses — a woman waiting for a son who is lying in a tent with a peg through his head.
Her wise ladies answered her, Yes, she returned answer to herself, "Have they not found, have they not divided the plunder? A lady, two ladies to every man" Judges 5:29–30.
The comfort she is offered, and offers herself, is the reason the sympathy is complicated. The delay is explained as time spent dividing loot — including captured women, one or two for every soldier, and embroidered cloth for Sisera. That is what these mothers expected their sons to be doing, and it is what the women of Israel would have suffered had the battle gone the other way. The poem lets a grieving woman be pitiable and lets her own words show what her son's victory would have meant.
So let all your enemies perish, Yahweh, but let those who love him be as the sun when it rises in its strength Judges 5:31.
The song ends in a prayer with two halves. The first is a request that God's enemies come to nothing — and your enemies is the category the whole poem has been establishing, since Meroz was cursed for not helping Yahweh Judges 5:23 and the stars fought against Sisera Judges 5:20. The second is the image the book most needs: those who love him rising like the sun, which is where Scripture leaves the righteous elsewhere too 2 Samuel 23:4 Proverbs 4:18 Matthew 13:43.
Then the land had rest forty years. The formula closes the cycle Judges 3:11 Judges 3:30, and the next words in the book are that Israel did evil again Judges 6:1.
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