The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael draws a line from the Red Sea to another famous battlefield to demonstrate that God fights Israel's wars from heaven. The case in point: Sisera, the fearsome Canaanite general who terrorized the Israelites for twenty years with his nine hundred iron chariots.
The text is concise but devastating. Sisera assembled his full military might (Judges 4:13): "And Sisera called up all his chariots." Nine hundred chariots of iron, the most advanced weapons platform of the ancient world. The Canaanite army should have been invincible. The Israelites had no comparable technology, no standing army to match this force. By every natural calculation, Sisera should have won.
But then the Song of Deborah reveals what actually happened (Judges 5:20): "From the heavens they warred" against Sisera. The stars themselves fought from their courses. According to rabbinic tradition, God sent a cosmic upheaval—a supernatural storm, a heavenly intervention that turned Sisera's greatest advantage into his destruction. The iron chariots that should have crushed the Israelite foot soldiers instead became death traps, bogged down in the flooding Kishon River, their wheels mired in mud.
The Mekhilta cites this episode as part of a series showing that whenever enemies rise against Israel, heaven intervenes. The pattern established at the Red Sea—where God destroyed Pharaoh's chariots—repeated itself in the days of the Judges. Sisera had chariots, just as Pharaoh had chariots. And just as at the sea, it was not human military strategy but divine power that decided the outcome. The heavens themselves went to war on Israel's behalf.