Wham!

Photo by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash

Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died. (Judges 4:21)( KJV).

---

“Yikes,” said Jesse, wincing. “I do not think he is coming back from that.”

“You think?” Mark said. “Okay, here’s the plan. You stay with her; I’ll look over Sleeping Beauty’s soul and see where we’re going. If I was betting I’d say down, but you never know.”

“Sleeping what?”

“I snuck a peak in Records. It’ll be a thing in a couple millennia or so. Anyway. Shall we?”

Jesse saluted. “Aye, aye, cap!”

Mark rolled his eyes and swooped in. “Hey, you, nail in the face. Wakey wakey! There you go. There we are.”

The man stirred. To be precise, the intangible wisps of his soul stirred and rose above his forever-stilled body. “What…. what is this? Am I dead?”

“Well, yes,” Mark explained patiently, “That does tend to happen when one has had a tent peg rather forcibly driven through one’s head by a hammer.”

The man blinked slowly as the memories came back. “That… woman…”

Mark raised a hand. “If you’re thinking of saying what I think you’re thinking of saying, I wouldn’t. You’re in enough trouble already.”

The man gathered himself. “Fine. I appeal to the gods. They will protect me.”

“Ooh,” Mark said. “Oh dear. About that…”

---

I hope you enjoyed this bit of flash fiction; I will not claim to be a Biblical scholar by any means; really, I wanted to write this story because that verse, especially in the King James translation, always struck me as darkly comic. The fella’s just had a tent-peg hammered into his skull; I should think the fact that he died goes without saying, no?

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Have you had a tent-peg slammed into your skull with lethal force and lived to tell about it? Are you an expert on Canaanite military strategems and Old Testament scholarship? Comment below!