Charles Ellicott Commentary Judges 5:26

"She put her hand to the tent-pin, And her right hand to the workmen`s hammer; And with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote through his head; Yea, she pierced and struck through his temples." — Judges 5:26 (ASV)

Nail... workman’s hammer. —See on Judges 4:21.

Smote. — Hammered.

Smote off his head. —Rather, shattered his head. The Hebrew is onomatopoetic, i.e., the sound echoes the sense, recalling the smashing and crashing blows of the hammer. The repetition of these terrible alliterative verbs, “hammered,” “shattered,” “battered,” “transfixed,” the signs that the imagination of the prophetess seems to revel in the description, have been ascribed to “the delight of a satisfied thirst for revenge.”

This is hardly a correct view of her character. It must be remembered that the feelings of modern times are far more refined and complex than those of previous ages. The sense of tenderness, the quickness of compassion, the value set on human life, are immeasurably increased, and with them the power of realizing by universal sympathy the position and sufferings of others.

In ancient days, no close moral analysis was applied to acts whose general tendency was approved as right and beneficial. Caesar was not inherently a cruel man, yet he records without a shudder the massacre and misery of multitudes of Gaulish men, women, and children at Alesia; and he allowed the brave Vercingetorix to be led away from his triumph to be strangled in the Tullianum, without the slightest qualm of pity.

Deborah, in the spirit of her day, seems to regard with pitiless exultation the wild death throes of Sisera and the agonizing frustration of his mother’s hopes, only because she views these events solely from the perspective of Israel’s deliverance. The tenderness of the Mother of Israel was absorbed in the thought of her own long-afflicted, but now rescued, people.

“She was a mother in Israel, and with the vehemence of a mother’s and a patriot’s love, she had shot the light of love from her eyes, and poured the blessings of love from her lips on the people that had jeopardized their lives unto the death against the oppressors, and the bitterness awakened and borne aloft by the same love she precipitates in curses on the selfish and cowardly recreants who did not come to the help of the Lord against the unjust” (Coleridge); and, we may add, on all connected with the cruel oppressor.