This haftarah introduces Deborah, a prophetess who judges Israel from beneath a palm tree, summoning Barak to lead an army of ten thousand against Sisera, the commander of a Canaanite force with nine hundred iron chariots that has oppressed Israel for two decades. Barak agrees to go only if Deborah accompanies him, and she does, telling him plainly that the honor of the coming victory will belong to a woman rather than to him.
The battle turns decisively against Sisera's forces, and Sisera himself flees on foot to the tent of Jael, whose family has a truce with his side, where she offers him milk and shelter before driving a tent peg through his temple as he sleeps, ending the campaign with the enemy commander's death at a woman's hand exactly as Deborah had foretold.
The haftarah closes with the Song of Deborah, a lengthy poetic celebration of the victory sung by Deborah and Barak together, recounting the tribes who answered the call to fight and those who stayed behind, praising Jael's decisive act, and closing with a vivid, almost mocking scene imagining Sisera's mother waiting anxiously at a window for a son who will never return.
Deborah's insistence that Barak would not receive the honor of Sisera's defeat because a woman would be the one to finish the campaign gives the whole episode a structure the Song of the Sea also shares in its own way, since Miriam's song follows immediately after Moses's own, both accounts giving a woman prominent voice in the celebration of a battle a man is more commonly credited with winning.