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.

[8] 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.

[14][15] 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.

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.

"[19] German composer Simon Mayr wrote an oratorio (1793) on the story of Sisera for the church of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti in Venice.

[20] 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.

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.

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.