Canter Bridge

An odd incongruity flavors the pages of the Book of Judges. Amid the stories of Israel’s vicious cycle of declension and the heroic feats of warrior ‘judges’, there is little exemplary behavior that aligns itself with the ethical counsel of the Hebrew Bible. Far more chaos appears than order, more idiosyncratic episodes than steady walking in right ways.

The book makes for great reading. Its heroic figures claimed their place in my memory in boyhood and remain there still.

Part of the book’s uncomfortable dissonance with broader canonical lines is seen in its celebration of the judge Deborah and a Kenite king-killer named Jael. Both women are celebrated unabashedly in a literature that, when it celebrates women’s feats at all, tends to do so with regard to the anonymous diligence of dedicated housewives.

Judges, true to form, is different. The exquisitely named Barak (‘lightning’) would liberate the Israelite tribes from their oppressor du jour, but he insists for unexplained reasons that Deborah accompany him. Her response anticipates the whole tale:

Barak said to her, ‘If you will go with me, I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go.’ And she said, ‘I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the LORD will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.’ Then Deborah got up and went with Barak to Kedesh.

It might have been enough that Deborah gained her renown by routing Sisera, but there is more. He is killed when the woman who becomes his putative rescuer drives a tent peg through his temple. Deborah’s leadership and Jael’s pro-Israelite ingenuity are celebrated in a poem that is widely regarded as one of the oldest texts to be collected into the biblical anthology.

Barak is left to play second fiddle, or third.

In the middle of it all, an insurrectionist taunt fills the mouths of Israel’s singers, thrilled by the exploits of regular folk loosely conjoined as YHWH’s tribes over against the iron-clad sophistication of charioted kings. Sisera gloried in his chariotry’s iron while he lived. It was iron through the head wot killed’im. It was the work of a woman who lived in tents and the cry of another whose convention-defying heroism enlarged rather than obliterated her maternal profile:

The peasantry prospered in Israel,
they grew fat on plunder,
because you arose, Deborah,
arose as a mother in Israel.