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Sisera ( Sīsərāʾ) was commander of the Canaanite army of King Jabin of Tel Hazor, who is mentioned in of the Hebrew Bible. After being defeated by the forces of the Israelite tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali under the command of Barak and Deborah, Sisera was killed by Jael, who hammered a tent peg into his temple while he slept.
After the battle, Sisera fled on foot until he came to the campsite of Heber the Kenite in the plain of Zaanaim, where he was received by Yael, Heber's wife. Jael brought him into her tent with apparent hospitality and gave him milk. Jael promised to hide Sisera and covered him with a rug, but after he fell asleep, she drove a tent peg through his temple with a mallet, her blow being so forceful that the peg pinned his head to the ground. and .
Later, during his farewell address, the prophet Samuel referred to the Israelites' subjection to Sisera as a consequence of their "forgetting the LORD their God".
Zertal and Oren Cohen proposed that the excavation at Ahwat between Harish and the Wadi Ara is the site of Harosheth Haggoyim, Sisera's military base. "Archaeological mystery solved" , University of Haifa press release, July 1, 2010. However, consensus has not been reached regarding the site of Harosheth Haggoyim. Niditch suggests that its association with the term haroset might indicate its placement at any number of wooded places.
According to the Talmud, Jael engaged in sexual intercourse with Sisera seven times, but because she was attempting to exhaust him in order to kill him, her sin was for Heaven's sake and therefore praiseworthy. The significance of that exact number of coituses and the meaning of the multicoital nature of Jael and Sisera's encounter has been discussed in the scholarship, along with an alternate view in rabbinic literature that asserts to the contrary that Jael never engaged in sex with Sisera.
Also according to the Midrash,Yalḳuṭ Shim'oni on Sisera had previously conquered every country against which he had fought. His voice was so strong that, when he called loudly, the most solid wall would shake and the wildest animal would fall dead. Deborah was the only one who could withstand his voice and not be stirred from her place. Sisera caught enough fish in his beard when bathing in the Kishon River to provision his whole army, and thirty-one kings followed Sisera merely for the opportunity of drinking, or otherwise using, the waters of Israel. Jewish Encyclopedia
Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1728–1804) wrote an oratorio, Debora e Sisera, for the Lenten season of 1788 at the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, which was said to have been "almost universally regarded as one of the most sublime works of the late 18th century."Howard E. Smither, A History of the Oratorio: Volume 3: The Oratorio in the Classical Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1987), 181–195.
German composer Simon Mayr wrote an oratorio (1793) on the story of Sisera for the church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti in Venice. Italian opera website.
In Geoffrey Household's 1939 spy thriller Rogue Male, the protagonist muses: "Behold, Sisera lay dead and the nail was in his temples."
In a half-hour radio drama, Butter in a Lordly Dish (1948), Agatha Christie has her protagonist drug a lawyer's coffee; after revealing her true identity, she hammers a nail into his head.
The central image of Aritha van Herk's novel 'The Tent Peg' refers to Sisera.
In Anthony Trollope's novel The Last Chronicle of Barset, artist Conway Dalrymple paints the heiress Clara Van Siever as Jael driving a nail through the head of Sisera.
The story of Jael and Sisera has been the subject of many paintings, including those by Artemisia Gentileschi, Gregorio Lazzarini, James Northcote, Gustave Doré and James Tissot.
In Shelby Foote's Stars in Their Courses (1994), about the Battle of Gettysburg, the author reflects on the defeat of General Robert E. Lee.
"The Stars in Their Courses" is the title of a chapter about the Battle of Gettysburg in the novel Lone Star Preacher (1941) by John Thomason. The quotation from Judges 5:20 appears at the end of the chapter.
In the Law & Order episode "Pro Se", the schizophrenic James Smith suffers from the delusion that (among other things) he is General Sisera and various women are trying to poison him.
In Waking the Dead s4ep1 "In Sight of The Lord" a series of murders are committed with a large nail through the head fixing the victim to the floor. The biblical meaning of the act is explored in the process of solving the murders.
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