Judges: Chapter 4

What is up
will topple down
and what is out 
be gathered in.
Stand at the linen

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A chapter that is both highly gendered and spatial. The leitworts are "arise" "go down" and "go".   Whereas time here is fuzzy and simultaneous (they did evil and Ehud died; she was judging Israel at that time) space is defined and prominent. Deborah, the "women prophetess" who is the "wife/woman of Lapidot"  (gender emphasized a three-rung gong) sits "beneath" the palm in the hills of Ephraim, where all of Israel "goes up" to her to be judged.   The upward motion is emphasized 4 times. The woman-prophetess calls upon Barak son of Avinoam to "go" (l''kh) and fight Sisera and the Canaanites. This vectored motion is repeated 7 times, as Barak insists that he will only "go" if Deborah "goes" with him; she assents, but warns him there will be no glory on the path on which he "goes". "Afes"--literally "zero": for if she accompanies him, salvation will be given to "the hands of a woman."

From here, all motion moves downward, and the army "goes down" to attack Sistra's forces; Sisra "goes down" from his chariot. We are descending towards ground zero. With Barak hinging all his actions on Deborah's presence, we have entered fully the realm of the female. 

Yael, the wife of Hever the Kennite, is the embodiment of that realm, as she exits the feminine space of the tent to draw Sistra inwards. "Turn into me," she tells him. and he turns in (va'yisar) "in unto her, into the tent." Sisra gets sucked inwards, then covered (ve-techsehu) , in a double hiding--in and in again. "Go to the doorway," he commands, attempting to control the threshold, to straddle the line between out and in; between the masculine battlefield, and the dark, protected, milky tent (she opened a bottle of milk... and covered him). Instead, Yael takes the peg that roots the tent to the earth, and uses it to drive Sisera into the ground: he "collapses"; he "falls", utterly engulfed and destroyed by the female space.  

There are links here to the opening chapters: if the initial salvation in chapter 3 returns us to the transitional figure of Otniel ben Kenaz, salvation here comes through one of the Kenites, who join the tribe of Judah at the opening of the book. We are still in the transitional period from the Book of Joshua, though the linking sinews are becoming thinner.]