Nail.... workmen’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 right 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 realising by universal sympathy the position and sufferings of others. In ancient days no close moral analysis was applied to acts of which the 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 suffered 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 throes of Sisera’s death, and the agonising frustration of his mother’s hopes. only because she views those events in the single aspect of the deliverance of Israel. The tenderness of the Mother of Israel was absorbed in the thought of her own long-afflicted, but now rescued, race. “She was a mother in Israel, and with the vehemency 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 jeopardised 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 came not to the help of the Lord against the unjust” (Coleridge); and we may add, on all connected with the cruel oppressor.