Judges: Chapter 5

Awaken from the dephths

the mother seeking 

the ferocious core

[For full chapter, click here

The chapter reiterates and crystallizes the themes raised in the previous chapter. Reiterated is the spatial dimension, the leitwords "falling" "to go" (l'kh). Intensified is the focus on gender, and on the role and leadership of women.

The intertext of Deborah's Song is Moses' Song of the Sea, continuing the Book of Judges dialogue with the Book of Exodus. Both are replete with water imagery and the downfall of horses and chariots (Then the horses’ hoofs pounded / As headlong galloped the steeds ) . 

Az yashir, "Then sang" open both these iconic songs. In Exodus, the singer is the male Moses, while Mirian "the prophetess" (Exodus 15:21) only takes up the chant at the end with the band of dancing women, declaring "Sing to God." Here, Deborah takes up Miriam's imperative form, but it is "the woman prophetess" who is the primary singer, with the male Barak as secondary. Deborah is the speaking heart, Barak her physical arms: "Awake, awake, O Deborah! Awake, awake, speak  song! / Arise, O Barak; Take your captives, O son of Abinoam!").

The  poem switches to first person, as the prophetess calls on herself to speak: "I (anochi), to God, I (anochi) will sing," The song is a claiming of women's speech: "Awake Deborah...speak (Dabri) song"  as Deborah puns on her name to claim the authoritative speech (dibur) that is usually the preview of men. And the song is indeed structured around  the power of femininity, subverting female archetypes. History itself is redefined in feminine terms (in the days of Yael). It opens with the rise of Deborah, "a mother in Israel" (5:7), and closes with Sisera's mother, sitting and awaiting the return of her son. Between the bookends of these maternal figures is "Most blessed of women Yael, wife of Heber the Kenite, most blessed of all women in tents" (5:24). These three women are the structuring principle of the song, reaviling the hidden female matrix of warfare. Each woman drives the war in her own way: Deborah by ordering Barak to battle; Yael by seducing Sisera to supposed safety in order to assassinate him; and Sisera's mother, who raised her son to revel in the sexualized violence of war, where he can claim "a womb or two for every manhead (5:30). The male "taking of captives" is the muscle power playing out these deep drives. 

 

Western society has traditionally divided women by different traits: nurturance vs. sexuality, the mother and the whore. In this song, these female paradigms are intermixed, so no woman is one or the other. Deborah the mother is Deborah the speaker, calling, judging, "exploring the heart."  Sisera's mother, sits inside sniveling and worried, but is revealed as ferocious and predatory, reveling in rape. Yael exits the traditional female space of the tent to beckon Sisera in, in language that is sexually suggestive: "Between her legs" Sisera rises, falls, and collapses, rises and falls and collapses again, to be utterly destroyed.  Yet the seductress is also maternal, offering nurturing  "milk" as she soothes him to sleep. Has the rapist between her legs been birthed or undone? 

The maternal emerges as a dangerous, ferocious, and celebrated  power.]

Judges: Chapter 4

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

[For full chapter, click here

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.]