Tent Pegs

[TBC: Many "higher critics" often show a remarkably low level of comprehension when it comes to the simple meaning of words. In this essay originally written in 1893, the author demonstrates how a skeptic may commit error after error in his handling of a passage of Scripture.]

Robertson Smith, in his "Old Testament in the Jewish Church," attempts to eliminate Jael's tent pin, with which she killed Sisera. He says (p. 132):

"In the prose narrative, Jael kills Sisera in his sleep by hammering a wooden tent peg into his forehead--an extraordinary proceeding, for the peg must have been held with one hand and hammered with the other, which is not a likely way to drive a blunt tent peg through and through a man's skull without awakening him."

We see from this how higher criticism gives its professors insight which other persons do not possess; for Professor Smith has discovered that the "tent peg" was a "wooden" one, that it was "blunt," and that Jael had to hammer it by hard knocks into the "forehead" of Sisera, and not into his temple, as the text has it. He thinks, too, that Sisera ought to have waked up before she got it hammered "through and through his skull." We think so, too, if he intended to wake up at all. The Professor next proceeds to tell us that the writer of this prose narrative got his information from the song of Deborah, and that he fell into a blunder by misunderstanding the song. He makes the song say that Jael gave Sisera some "sour milk in an ample bowl," and that "while Sisera, still standing, buried his face in the bowl, and for a moment could not watch her actions," she put her hand to the "peg," which here means the handle of her hammer, and crushed his skull with the hammer! I suppose we must understand that Sisera drank as a cow does, by putting his mouth down into the sour milk, and that as the bowl was a very deep one, his eyes also went down into it too deep for him to see what Jael was about. Well, it is a great thing to be a critic; it enables a man not only to reconstruct the books of the Bible to suit his taste, but also to remodel its facts and show that its writers misunderstood one another.

(J. W. McGarvey, Short Essays in Biblical Criticism -1910)