Perhaps a hundred years after the Exodus, there was a man named Heber the Kenite. He was part of the clan of Hobab, who is identified here as the father-in-law of Moses (though Moses’s father-in-law is named Jethro elsewhere): that would make him some kind of a cousin-in-law to those in the tribe of Levi. He was not, then, an Israelite; but – as a wandering nomad? – he had pitched his tent not far from Kedesh (Judges 4:11).

When the Israelite army, led by Deborah and Barak, had defeated the army of the Canaanites, the Canaanite commander, Sisera, fled from the battlefield, and came to Heber’s encampment. He anticipated he might find refuge there, as there was peace between the Canaanites and the family of Heber (4:17). And that seemed to be the case, as Heber’s wife Jael welcomed him into her home; she told him not to be afraid, gave him some milk to drink, and hid him under a rug (4:18-19).

Knowing that Israelite soldiers would be pursuing him, Sisera instructed Jael to stand at the tent’s doorway and tell anyone who asked that he wasn’t there (4:20). But when he had fallen asleep, Jael took a mallet and a tent peg, crept up to Sisera, and drove the tent peg through his temple all the way down into the ground (4:21).

Jael’s deed would be celebrated in the song of victory sung by Deborah and Barak (5:24-27): not as treachery against someone who thought he could demand allegiance, but as a courageous blow against a deadly enemy by a seemingly-helpless girl. As they told this story down the generations, the song identifies the time of these events as “in the days of Jael” (5:6): they were remembering Jael not as a foreigner but as a hero of Israel. Was she, then, an Israelite girl who had been given in marriage to Heber? Or was she afterward claimed by Israel as one of their own in honor of what she did? Those details have been lost: but her name and her courage live on.

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So many times, Lord, you give the opportunity to take the decisive action to a person nobody has heard of. Often we are too afraid, thinking we are too small and too insignificant to make a difference. Yet you give us the chance to be heroes: grant us the courage to seize the opportunity, and to make it happen.