Where did Deborah and Barak defeat Sisera?

Question

Accepted Answer

In the Jezreel valley, between Mount Tabor and the river Kishon, in the north of today's Israel. Barak gathered ten thousand men on Tabor, the round hill of 575 m that rises alone at the valley's north-eastern edge, 9 km east of Nazareth; Sisera's nine hundred chariots came to the Kishon, the stream that drains the valley westward to the sea at Haifa. The Song of Deborah places the fighting “in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo”, some 24 km south-west of Tabor on the valley's southern rim. Deborah herself judged far to the south, under her palm between Ramah and Bethel in the hills of Ephraim, about 90 km from Tabor. Deborah's order to Barak was: “Go and draw toward mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of Zebulun? And I will draw unto thee to the river Kishon Sisera, the captain of Jabin's army, with his chariots and his multitude; and I will deliver him into thine hand.” Sisera gathered “nine hundred chariots of iron, and all the people that were with him, from Harosheth of the Gentiles unto the river of Kishon”; “So Barak went down from mount Tabor, and ten thousand men after him”, and the Lord “discomfited Sisera, and all his chariots”. The Song: “They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon.” Most read this as a storm that flooded the Kishon and mired the chariots; Josephus speaks of hail and rain in the enemy's faces. Jabin reigned at Hazor, 40 km to the north; Harosheth of the Gentiles, Sisera's base, has not been found: Tell el-Ahwat and el-Harithiyeh by the Kishon have been proposed, and it may be a district rather than a town. Barak's home, Kedesh-naphtali, is placed on the map at Khirbet Qedish above the Sea of Galilee, 16 km from Tabor, by those who think the great Kedesh of Upper Galilee too far; the identification is disputed. The date is uncertain, in the twelfth century BC on most reckonings, and the Song of Deborah is counted among the oldest Hebrew poems; the map's conventional year for the judges is about 1150 BC. Tabor later became the traditional mount of the Transfiguration, which is a question of its own.