Was Sisera killed in his sleep, or as he stood?

Judges 4 is a plain narrative and Judges 5 is a victory song, and the song never says that Sisera was standing. It celebrates the same moment in the heightened style of Hebrew poetry. Verse 27 heaps up three verbs and repeats them: kara‘ (Strong’s H3766, to bow, bend the knee or sink down), naphal (to fall) and shakab (to lie down). Together they picture the great general collapsing and lying dead. Keil and Delitzsch note that the piling up of words shows that the man who had terrified Israel for years was struck dead with a single blow.

These words fit a man lying down when he was struck. The Hebrew says ‘between her feet’, which pictures Jael standing over him as he lay. Ellicott takes ‘he bowed’ as a sudden drawing up of the knees in the death agony, ‘he fell’ as rolling over, and ‘he lay’ as lying still. The song agrees with the narrative in its details. He asked for water and was given milk (4:19; 5:25). She took the peg and the hammer (4:21; 5:26). The blow went through his temples. Poetry dwells on the vivid moment; it does not correct the prose.

He started up at the blow

Gill suggested that Sisera may have half risen as the peg struck, and then dropped back at her feet and lay still. On this view too he was asleep when the blow came, as Judges 4:21 says.

Some modern scholars read the song as picturing Sisera standing and drinking when Jael struck him, and take it as an older, different form of the story. The song does not say this, and most Christian commentators read the two chapters as one event told in prose and in poetry.