Jael's blessing ends beside a mother's waiting

Jael is blessed, and Sisera's fall is sung as violence

Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent. He asked water; she gave milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish. She put her hand to the nail, her right hand to the workmen's hammer, and smote Sisera. She smote off his head when she had pierced and stricken through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

The poem compresses and intensifies the death. It need not be forced into the prose scene's forensic sequence. Blessing Jael for this reversal is not a doctrine that all deceptive killing is virtue. The violence remains violence.

Sisera's mother waits, and the court imagines captive women

The mother of Sisera looks out at a window and cries through the lattice: Why is his chariot so long in coming? Her wise ladies answer; she answers herself. Have they not sped? Have they not divided the prey: to every man a damsel or two, to Sisera a prey of divers colours, needlework, meeting for the necks of them that take the spoil?

KJV 'damsel or two' softens Hebrew language that objectifies captive women by the womb. The delayed chariot turns enemy triumph-fantasy into irony and grief. The mother is not a punch line; she is a waiting human in an enemy household. Captive women are not legitimate spoil in ancient or modern war. The song ends: so let all thine enemies perish, LORD; let them that love him be as the sun going forth in his might. And the land had rest forty years.