Matrices of motherhood in Judges 5

Introduction

Two women are designated as mothers in Judges 5: Deborah and the mother of Sisera. Deborah, the prophet, judge, and leader of the Israelites in Judges 4, is a metaphorical ‘mother in Israel’ in the celebratory poem of victory. The mother of Sisera (the enemy commander), does not appear in Judges 4, yet this actual mother’s reflections close the song. Jael is a third prominent female, read by many as exhibiting ‘mothering’ behavior in Judges 4. In the poem, she is celebrated as she who is to be ‘blessed among women who dwell in tents’.

Female characters stand out—specifically as mothers. Accentuating this, men recede into the background. Deborah is presented as the wife of Lappidoth in the prose account, yet her husband plays no role; in fact, the attribution does not even necessarily indicate that she had a husband, and her role and status are independent of him. In the poem, Lappidoth is not mentioned. Barak, although clearly a partner to Deborah, operates subordinately to her. In the song, he is always mentioned second. In the prose account, he needs Deborah with him in battle, and his honor is ultimately explicitly and successfully challenged by a woman. Jael is the wife of Heber, but he is entirely absent from the song except in identifying her. ¹ Sisera is the only male who stands out clearly as an individual in the poem, if we do not count Yahweh. Sisera is passive or reactive, however: he is the object of celestial attack, he is hosted and bashed down by Jael, ² and he is the object of his mother’s victory fantasy.

Past readings of Deborah, Jael, and Sisera’s mother

Commentators have focused on the dominance of women in Judges 4-5 from the earliest times. ³ Deborah is the assumed primary character, with Jael in an indispensable secondary female role. For example, the first century text of Pseudo Philo accentuates the role of Jael, adding liberally to the story in ways inspired by the book of Judith, making it about honor and the avenging of Sisera’s intention to ‘take’ Israelite women. Most midrashic traditions laud Jael, whether they claim that she lay with Sisera or not (Kadari, no year). ⁴ Sisera’s mother is not mentioned as often; however, the idea that Sisera was out to ‘get’ Israelite women relies on the text’s voicing of his mother’s thoughts, although one could also argue that this motive can be assumed. The earliest feminist readings also point out the prominence of female characters. ⁵ Some suggest that Judges 5 is a woman’s story, or perhaps even written by a woman, or in a woman’s voice. ⁶

The characterization of Deborah as a ‘mother in Israel’ has been explored by several scholars, as I will describe in more detail below. The figure of Jael has been lifted up as a heroine, one who stands up against male power and the one who upends Barak in terms of honor. Never designated as a mother, her typically ‘mothering’ behavior toward Sisera in the prose account, as well as that of the seductress, feature in most readings of the poem (e.g. Alter, 1985: 48).

Matrices of motherhood

In Judges 5, patterns of motherhood weave throughout the poem, forming an intrinsic component of the fabric of the text. In pursuing these threads, I focus on the construction of Deborah as ‘mother in Israel’, both through the plain attribution of this epithet and also through the song’s intriguing ordering of the Israelite tribes, in what becomes a silent invocation of the mothers of the Israelite tribal ancestors. A focus on Deborah as Israelite matriarch brings into sharp relief the counterpoint between Israelite mother and the mother of the enemy commander—Deborah’s tribes and the Canaanites. Jael’s role forms a point of triangulation in the intriguing interplay between these three pivotal characters.

Judges 5.1-13: Deborah rises—a mother in Israel

Judges 5 contains a poem celebrating the Israelite tribes’ victory over Canaanite kings in the Wadi Kishon. The song follows a prose account in Judges 4 of the battle and events surrounding it that also introduces readers to the protagonists: Deborah and Jael, Barak, and Sisera. ⁷ The poem begins with an invocation that addresses the people, followed by the poet’s personal announcement that the song is addressed to Yahweh and a presentation of Yahweh. In v. 1, Deborah and Barak are both named, with Deborah mentioned first. The feminine verbal form determines the usual reading of Deborah’s as the primary voice in the poem. In the mouth of Deborah—with Barak attached—the poets’ initial praise of Yahweh as a holy warrior serves to highlight Deborah’s close connection to Yahweh as the source of her authority. Thus, Deborah’s position as Yahweh’s spokeswoman and special instrument imbued with his spirit, is put into practice and solidified. The Targum understood it this way, adding a clarifying ‘Deborah said in prophecy before Yahweh’, in verse 3. ⁸

From the prose account in Judges 4, Deborah is already known as a woman of prophecy (a prophetess), a judge, wife of Lappidoth, ⁹ a wise woman who gives counsel, one who gives advice in war, and a motivator in battle. All of these descriptions naturally inform any reading of Judges 5, where she is about to gain one prominent new designation, although not quite yet. At this point, she somehow combines both Miriam and Moses into one, as she, a prophet, counselor, charismatic pep-rally master and encourager of Barak, lifts up her voice (together with Barak) to offer this presentation of Yahweh at the opening of a victory song.

After this opening, the time of battle is established, (vv. 6-7). In the context of the poem, the period being described was a time of decline. Then, Deborah rises onto the stage. With this dramatic entry cue, the singer Deborah is presented as a ‘mother in Israel’, who rises in a bad time: עד שׁקמתי דבורה שׁקמתי אם בישׂראל‎. She rises, she is not raised up by Yahweh, as he raises up other figures, deliverers, and judges (e.g. Ehud in 3.15). ¹⁰

Based on the characterization in Judges 4, audiences may readily accept that Deborah is the de facto leader of the duo; however, nothing has prepared readers specifically for the designation of ‘mother in Israel’. Deborah may be seen as a prophet, a judge, possibly a wise woman, possibly a wife or fiery woman, a decision maker, and a military advisor and commander. Barak is really just the executor of her commands, and Yahweh the actual warrior. In fact, a composite of her roles in Judges 4 in many ways leads in the opposite direction of ‘mother’; the roles she enacts in Judges 4 are public, military roles. ¹¹ However, in a narrative-sequential or intertextual reading, by the time she is designated as אם בישׂראל‎, all of these behaviors will come together to inform the designation of ‘mother’, giving the label meaning on the basis of the previous information, perhaps defying many of the expected associations of motherhood.

Cheryl Exum (1985) notes, basing her conclusions on an analysis of the mothers of Genesis, that ‘a mother in Israel is one who brings liberation from oppression, provides protection, and ensures the well-being and security of her people. And [Debora’s] accomplishments in Judges 4–5 include counsel, inspiration, and leadership’ (p. 85). This leadership includes ‘bring[ing] liberation from oppression, provid[ing] protection, and ensur[ing] the well-being and security of her people’ (p. 84). According to Exum, Deborah as mother stands in continuity with the matriarchs of Genesis, interpreting their activities in a wide, socio-political context.

Claudia Camp (1981) argues that a custom in which people would come to Deborah for judgment implies something that relates to a mothering role. In other words, the ‘mother’ motif may have a particular connection to Deborah’s role in giving counsel under the tree, as a ‘wise’ woman who provides unity and protection for Israel, as does the wise woman of Abel in 2 Sam 20. This gives Deborah a special quality as a judge that distinguishes her from other judges. I would add that if giving counsel is a trait that distinguishes her as ‘mother’, Deborah is, in a sense, mother to Barak in Judges 4. She summons him, gives him the word from Yahweh, assures him that the battle will be victorious, she accompanies him—actually leads—in battle.

Mieke Bal’s emphasis on the connection between the motherhood of Deborah and her role as poet, as one who recounts or recites in order to memorialize is somewhat forced, since the subject of the verb תנה‎, although spoken by the poet, is not Deborah, but some third person plural subject, perhaps those described by the participle forms רכבי אתנות‎ and ישׁבי על־מדין‎ in verse 10. The only other occurrence of תנה‎ in the Bible is in reference to the ‘daughters of Israel’ commemorating Jephthah’s daughter (Judg. 11.40). There, of course, the idea of memorializing is clear, and this reference is reflected in Bal’s (1988a) conclusion that ‘a mother who deserves the title “a mother in Israel” stands for wholeness, completeness through order and memory. Caring for the people as a whole, she also cares for daughters’ (p. 210). So, just as the women of Israel commemorated the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, Deborah, as mother in Israel is reciting this victory song.

Leila L. Bronner uses the term ‘metaphorical mother’ for Deborah to emphasize her power, and points out that her power lies in the way that she wields words. Bronner (2004) sees the ‘ability to think and reason’ as traits particular to the mothers of the Bible allowing them to ‘exert influence within the social realm’ (pp. 79-82). ¹² Aschkenasy (1986) emphasizes the fact that the Deborah character combines the ‘woman’s role as mother and her role as social leader’ (p. 168).

Susan Ackerman notices a neat parallel between vv. 4-5 and 6-7, showing that the pairing of the temporal description of Yahweh as holy warrior (בצאתך משׂעיר‎ and בצעדך משׂדה אדום‎) with the temporal determination of the situation in verse 6 (בימי ׂשמגר בן־ענת‎ and בימי יעל‎) highlights the cosmic and earthly levels of the battle at hand. Thus, Yahweh as God of Israel is paired with his ‘human counterpart in the holy war’ when Deborah is introduced as mother in Israel (Ackerman, 1998: 35-38). ¹³

In a more recent study that acknowledges the last few decades of feminist research on Judges 5, Don Seeman (2004) emphasizes that Deborah is contrasted with Sisera’s mother as ‘a mother who defends her children from imminent harm’ (p. 17), who rises up in a time of distress, and that ‘Deborah’s motherhood is an index of her ability to defend her people in a time of crisis’. ¹⁴

The designation אם בישׂראל‎ (mother in Israel) also stands in close proximity—and thus perhaps also as a contrast—to the reference to פרזון‎ (hamlets, rulers?) that ceased בישׂראל‎, and to the questionable state of mobilization בישׂראל‎, in verse 8. This threefold repetition of בישׂראל‎ should spur us to see the connection between the idea of Deborah as mother in Israel with her role as a military leader, something that the above-mentioned scholars, with the exception of Ackerman, seem to underplay.

Verses 8-11, fraught with textual difficulty, describe the mustering of support for the battle and sets expectations among the population, Yahweh’s people, for victory. Although these verses are difficult, there seems to be an intimation that the judgment of the past era, the one before Deborah, included a struggle over justice, in which justice was not upheld. The rise, the arrival of Deborah, changes all of this. The emphasis on the battle as Yahweh’s has the effect of further associating Deborah with Yahweh and his battles, in a leadership role, both as prophet and as commander. ¹⁵

Then follows another invocation; vv. 12-13 begin with

‘Awake/up, awake/up, (up, up; עורי עורי‎) Deborah!

Awake/up and utter a song!

Arise (go on; קום‎), Barak,

lead away your captives (gather your spoils; קום ושׁבה שׁביך‎), O son of Abinoam’.

The double calls to rise may reflect language of war or holy war. In this sense, they reflect the roles of Deborah and Barak that we know from Judges 4. These lines sum up everything, from the opening of the song to the end result of the battle. Barak, when he is described as gathering his spoils, i.e. taking captives, is identified as son. I comment more on this below.

If verse 12 summarizes the poem’s main actions—Deborah rising and singing and Barak going and gathering the spoils—verse 13 can perhaps be read as capturing the gist of the result of the battle:

Then a survivor triumphs

Over the mightiest people

The Lord triumphs for me,

Over the warriors. ¹⁶

Read this way, this verse at the center of the poem, basically summarizes and captures the poem’s subject and result in two lines. The Israelite tribes are weak and small (as was made explicit in v. 8b: ‘Was shield or spear to be seen among forty thousand in Israel?’), and the Canaanite enemy is strong, but God will do the fighting for them. This underscores that it is Yahweh who is the ultimate hero of the poem, on the macro-level. Yet, the majority of the poem does not flesh out or elaborate on details of Yahweh’s direct role in war. In fact, instead, the poem undercuts the neatness of Yahweh’s cosmic and natural warfare with the messiness and randomness of war: its causes, setting, participants, effects, and results. If verse 13 and the last line of the poem represent some sort of ‘official’ ideology (God is in charge and won the victory using nature), much of the rest of the poem deconstructs it (weak Israelite tribes fought the battle—though not all—coaxed on by their matriarch; the enemy captain got away and was killed by a woman).

A counterpart to Jacob: Deborah as matriarch

Verses 14-18 focus on the summoning and deployment of the tribes. In this section of the poem, the motherhood concept is present in an unexpected way, through the intriguing arrangement of the tribes. The tribes as they are enumerated and their recorded responses to being summoned are clearly organized according to their mothers: by Rachel, then by Leah, then Bilhah and Zilpah. (Sasson, 2012: 296-302). ¹⁷

First, the Rachel-tribes are mentioned, with Joseph (represented by Ephraim), and then Benjamin, and Machir (a son of Manasseh, grandfather of Gilead). The mention of Gilead is a little unclear here. Is it a tribe or a place in this context? Gilead is not only a descendent of Joseph but is also a region inhabited by the tribes of Reuben and Gad, cf. Numbers 32. Perhaps it could represent Gad, who is not mentioned, and is, as such, a son of Zilpah, Leah’s slave/servant. Next, we have the Leah-sons: Zebulun; then Issachar, although not in birth order according to the Genesis narratives; and Reuben, who has the most lines devoted to him. Next up are Bilhah’s (Rachel’s servant) son Dan and Zilpah’s son Asher, and finally Bilhah’s son Naphtali (the tribe of Barak, according to Judges 4). Leah’s three sons Simeon, Levi, and Judah are not mentioned. Commentators think that this is perhaps because these are Southern tribes and this describes a Northern battle (Frolov, 2011: 176-77).

While it is a challenge to interpret this arrangement, it is no doubt deliberate. Of note is the fact that Rachel’s sons are mentioned first. It is also interesting that what we have here is an example of a tradition about the tribe of Joseph that reflects several generations: Ephraim is the son of Joseph, and Machir is a son of Manasseh, one of Joseph’s sons. Machir is also mentioned in Num. 26.29 as the father of Gilead. It seems that the affection for Rachel’s descendants is being emphasized here. Rachel, who was Jacob’s favorite.

At the risk of exaggeration or reading more into the text than there is support for, I wonder if one can read the descriptions attached to the tribes as akin to a mother’s attaching of favorite epithets and the prodding or teasing of her sons, or a play on this type of ‘terms of endearment’? Perhaps I am pushing the mother-element too far here, but the idea seems viable. Thus, it is likely best to read this section as a sort of formal praising of tribes, a roll call. It also provides a way of folding Barak into the enumeration as well (v. 15); although here he is mentioned as part of Issachar. This is a little surprising, since in the prose account he is from Naphtali, which fits better with the favoring of Rachel/Bilhah. But both tribes work in terms of geography.

The approach has the effect of drawing attention to the idea that the fighters are sons of mothers, with the particular arrangement reflecting them in terms of their respective mothers. The Israelites’ tribal ancestors are sons of specific mothers who now figure in the poem by the very fact of the deliberate arrangement of the tribes, even though their names are not invoked explicitly. Thus, the pattern achieves the effect of weaving the thread of motherhood into the very fabric of the poem. And, as newly designated mother in Israel, Deborah finds her place in a relationship with these mothers of Israelite tribes. ¹⁸

Any intertextual connections that we may have made thus far in interpreting the attribution of the title ‘mother in Israel’ to matriarchs of the Genesis narratives become explicit here in Judg. 5.14-18. As metaphorical mother in Israel, Deborah now even forms a counterpart to Jacob, the ancestor, the father, Israel, and Deborah takes her place alongside the mothers of Israel’s sons. ¹⁹ The focus on the mothers of the tribes highlights this portion of the poem further in that it forms a bridge, a node between the earlier section that introduces Deborah as mother in Israel and the final sections on Jael and the mother of Sisera.

Verses 19-21/22 capture the scene of the battle. King Jabin is not mentioned here, the king specified in Judges 4; instead it is simply ‘the kings of Canaan’. The poem does not dwell on descriptions of the battle itself (Sasson, 2012: 302). The totality of the battle is conveyed through the dual images of stars fighting from heaven against Sisera (the first mention of him in the poem), and the torrent of the Kishon sweeping the enemy away, on earth. It focuses on the might of the enemy and its horses, and on Yahweh’s complete superiority, in which the stars become his weapons for surgical strikes from afar, as well as the rushing river which sweeps the enemy away. The section is framed by the particle אז‎, emphasizing consequence. Susan Ackerman’s (1998) reading of vv. 4-6, discussed above, aligns beautifully with this two-tiered understanding of the battle as happening simultaneously at a cosmic and an earthly level (p. 36). The fighting happens in open territory, no city is attacked, and no ḥerem is carried out. There is no description or mention of the Israelite tribes taking captives or booty, though in the prose narrative, they end on the threshold of Haroshet-hagoyim. The Canaanite defeat is captured by the detail that they took no spoils. This is Israel’s last battle against the Canaanites.

Jael: avenger, trickster, survivor, heroine?

After the one-verse curse on Meroz follows the call to bless Jael: תברך מנשׁים יעל אשׁת חבר הקיני מנשׁים באהל תברך‎. ‘Blessed be Jael, wife of Heber the Kenite. Among women in tents, may she be blessed’. She is identified as the wife of Heber in an identical way in 4.17; however, this is the first mention of the Kenites in the poem. ²⁰ Although we in fact have no information about Jael’s own family, clan, or tribe, we assume that she also is a Kenite, at least by association.

The identification of Jael as being ‘among women in tents’, has been read as a quality of motherhood, associating her with the matriarchs of Genesis, who each cross into a tent to achieve their roles as mothers (Seeman, 2004: 17-18). In one midrash, the action of Jael in killing Sisera saved the offspring of the Genesis matriarchs from annihilation, so she thus deserves to take her place alongside them (Gen. Rab. 48:18, reference taken from Seeman).

After Jael has been introduced and the poet has called for her to be blessed, her actions are described: ‘He asks for water, she gives him milk. In an expensive chalice, she presents him with soured milk/curds (חמאה‎)’. At this point, we have not yet been told who ‘he’ is. Jael is described as performing an act of hospitality. Assuming that the mention of water and milk recalls the narrative of Judges 4, ‘he’ must refer to Sisera. His asking for water is quite ironic, however, since according to verse 21 he has been swept away by the torrents of the Kishon. The identification of Sisera is confirmed later but not until the moment Jael strikes her blow.

After Jael’s gesture of hospitality, her second act is a shock, although having read/heard Judges 4, perhaps only because of the accelerated pace. There is no putting Sisera to sleep first here. Her hand reaches for the peg, her right for the workmen’s mallet. She hammers Sisera, crushes his head; smashing, splitting his temple. There are four verbs of crushing here, one after the other: הלמה‎, מחקה‎, מחצה‎, הלפה‎! The verbs are alliterative in chiastic fashion. Jael hammers, crushes, shatters, and splits Sisera’s skull. And then his fall begins: ‘Between her legs/at her feet, כרה נפל שׁכב‎: he bends, falls/drops down or drops, lies prostrate or sprawls. Between her legs he bows, falls, and where he bows or bends, there he falls שׁדוד‎, completely destroyed’.

The portrayal of Jael in the poem casts her as one who initially honors Sisera with a fine gift, and then brutally strikes him down with a hammer. He is struck down while standing, not sleeping as in Judges 4, although interpreters have imagined that he has sat down, laid down, or even had intercourse with Jael at this point (Niditch, 1989: 47; Reis, 2005). ²¹ The contrast between this fierce Jael and the timid Barak of Judges 4 or the sort of shadow figure he presents here in the poem is stark, and Deborah’s prophecy in 4.9 that honor would be claimed by a woman resonates strongly. It is Deborah and Jael who are the heroines of Yahweh’s battle.

The mothering qualities of Jael are clear in Judges 4, where she covers Sisera with a rug after he seeks refuge in her tent, then gives him milk and he falls asleep while he thinks she is standing guard. Many have read sexual undertones and imagery bound up with the mothering imagery in Judges 4, however, and readings from the earliest times have portrayed sexual intercourse as having happened between Jael and Sisera, with Jael being cast as temptress, mother-figure, and murderer (Alter, 1985: 47-49; Aschkenasy, 1986: 170; Fewell and Gunn, 1990: 392-94). ²² Some modern, critical feminist interpretations have cast Jael as more than a temptress, in reading the killing itself as a rape, thus seeing in Jael a motive of revenge and gender reversal (Fewell and Gunn, 1990: 394). ²³ The mother–son image, which dominates in Judges 4, is not at the forefront of the poem, where the aspects of motherhood signaled by the Jael-figure rely on associations with ‘women in tents’. In Judges 5, sexual imagery is more forcefully present.

Beyond the techniques of embellishment we find in some ancient texts and midrashim, contemporary scholarship points to a couple of images in particular to account for the sexual undertones in the portrayal of Jael and Sisera. In the prose account, Jael drives the tent peg ברקתו‎. Normally, the point at which the peg pierces the skull is interpreted as the temple. This interpretation also agrees with the poem, which denotes what gets smashed as Sisera’s head (ראשׁ‎), before רקתו‎ is specified. Another interpretation sees the point of entry as the lips, or as the soft palate in the back of the mouth. ²⁴ Seeing the assault as targeting the mouth rather than the temple accentuates the implied sexual assault, as the attack here becomes oral penetration. However, in my opinion, this argument about the meaning of רקה‎ is not necessary. In and of itself, the image of a sharp instrument has phallic connotations, which pierce—literally—through the idyllic images of the sleeping, milk-soothed Sisera and the mothering, almost lullabying Jael of Judges 4 and the princely lord with his gallant hostess in Judges 5. ²⁵ The question is whether or not this serves to cast Jael as a violent, opportunistic killer or a quick thinking survivor who sees her chance to save herself by absconding to the other side. ²⁶ Either way, Jael’s killing of Sisera achieves the honor sought after in the prose account, the prize kill.

Another image that has inspired the imagination in terms of sexual undertones is the repeated image of Sisera falling at Jael’s feet, or, more literally, lying between her legs. To some interpreters, this image alludes to a sexual position (Gottlieb, 1981: 199) in which Sisera is subjugated. Indeed, the mention of feet may be taken as a euphemism for genitals (Niditch, 1989). Furthermore, the allusion to birth is obvious, in a shocking reversal of this image. In death, Sisera falls between the legs of Jael, as he did from his mother in birth. This time, however, he falls to his death as a stillborn, and ‘the powerful warrior becomes an aborted fetus’ (Fewell and Gunn, 1990: 404). ²⁷ In Judges 5, Jael as mother births a dead son.

In both Judges 4 and 5, Jael kills Israel’s enemy commander by crushing his head with a tent peg. While Judges 4 portrays her clearly in terms of her mothering behavior, the account has also been seen as alluding to sexual behavior. In Judges 5, she is placed between two mothers, the ‘mother in Israel’ and the mother of Sisera. She is portrayed as hostess gone rogue, with even stronger sexual allusions and explicit birthing imagery. Together, the two chapters portray her as a transgressive figure who slips between expected roles, both in her mothering and in her sexually allusive behavior.

This Jael is memorialized and will be praised, in a move that undermines the whole concept of a victory poem as one celebrating military power and the prowess of גבורים‎. In Judges 5, there is no explicit mention of honor being obtained by a woman, but the song leaves no doubt that one does not even have to leave one’s tent to deal the death blow to—or drive the final peg through the head of—the enemy captain. In a sense Jael becomes a אשׁה גבורה‎, in a move that critiques and subverts the standard image of the fighter. When Israelite poets characterize the military hero as a woman in her tent, perhaps in order to magnify the miraculous quality of their victory or to humiliate their enemy to compound their own victory, they simultaneously deconstruct their own normative military ideology.

Following this line of reasoning, the Israelite victory over the Canaanites is a feat that could only be adequately rendered as a female murderer (perhaps rapist) subjugating the greatest soldier in her own home. It is a total reversal. The joker is that Israel must claim as the one representing them, not just a woman, but also one whose allegiance is unclear. Jael is blessed and commemorated, but her status is left ambiguous. ²⁸

The mother of Sisera

The image of the slain Sisera which we are left with at the end of the Jael-sequence immediately gives way to the scene of his mother. Like Sisera in Jael’s tent, his mother is enclosed behind the window/lattice in her house (O’Connor, 1986: 284-85; Seeman, 2004). Unlike Jael and audiences of the song, however, she is completely unaware of what has just happened to her son. The mother is waiting for her son to return, but he delays. The setting around her is described in more detail than for any other character in the poem. It is a crystallized vignette: she peers through the window (evoking Jezebel when she knows her time is up), she is surrounded by her attendants. Her ladies in waiting remain loyal to her, they prop her up, unlike Jezebel’s eunuchs, who turn on her and toss her out. Sisera’s mother wonders why his chariot is delayed. The absence of horses’ hooves contrasts eerily with the rhythmic galloping of verse 22. Her attendants, the wisest among them, are ready to answer, but she supplies the answer herself: Sisera must be dividing up the spoil. She tells herself that her son has won, and that he is now participating in the customary taking of spoils. ²⁹

Intended or not, the brutal reality of war comes under scrutiny here, offering an opportunity to picture the scene that has been left out up to now, namely, that of the women who are left behind when men go off to war and who will suffer if their side loses. In a bold move that explicitly—albeit temporarily—exposes the ritual celebration of military victory, the poet provides a telescopic mirror with which to ponder the suffering of the other side through an imagined scenario about the enemy’s thoughts about victory. The suffering of the vanquished other is admitted quite candidly, with two stark images: wombs and fabrics.

A womb or two for each man. There are two aspects to this image: the allusion to wartime rape and the idea of capturing women to use for reproductive purposes as future wives. ³⁰ Each of these involves a different act on the part of the victor, although the raping of women does not preclude taking them as captives. Each also has its separate justification, which when uttered by a woman in a song being recited by a woman has the effect of directly implicating women, thus thematizing women’s complicity in systemic violence against women. ³¹

This is a story that makes a point of elevating female characters. A woman, a ‘mother in Israel’, no less, takes the lead in what is normally considered a male role: victory in battle. The poem bestows honor and blessing on a woman for killing the enemy, in a way many read as gender reversal. Through Sisera’s mother’s thoughts, the reverse aspect of these protagonists’ deeds is portrayed. Instead of two female heroes, there are two women violated. Instead of the slaughter of Sisera with his bloodied skull, a colorful cloth around his neck is imagined (Seeman, 2004: 20).

Sisera’s mother is imagining her son taking women and booty, yet in the poem he has already been defeated. Even before the section on Jael’s act of deadly violence, Sisera has been the object of celestial attack in the ode’s account of the battle between the Israelite tribes and the Canaanite kings. The kings take no booty, so Deborah sings, implying Canaanite defeat. Sisera, as the only named Canaanite, is attacked by the stars, before the Kishon tears him away with the others. Sisera is the star at the center of vv. 19-21, but he is a fallen star.

The fabrics are intriguing. Sisera is wrapped up in the middle of these images, quite literally. Verse 30 repeats the word שׁלל‎, booty, four times: twice before the mention of Sisera and twice after. The womb and double-womb are mentioned before, and the fabric and double layered fabrics, after. Already wrapped up in a rug—skewered—and ensconced in a woman’s tent in Judges 4, so Sisera is here—at the center of the verses praising Jael—both by virtue of the textual structure and the meaning of the words, entombed in a fantasy about power as displayed through sexual subjugation and beautiful fabrics.

Eerily, the mother’s musings about Siera’s plunder are supposed to be self-comforting. She is imagining her son getting something good. This is shocking, because of the violent and dehumanizing way she speaks about the raping of women in the aftermath of war, as a prize of victory for her son. But who is actually thinking these thoughts? Isn’t it the Israelite poet, who puts them in the mouth of Deborah, the mother in Israel, the victorious counterpart to Sisera’s mother?

In this final section on Sisera’s mother, all the mother concepts that have been running throughout the poem find their counterpoint, their pivot. The song tells the story of Israelite plunder indirectly, when Sisera’s mother becomes the mirror for Deborah. Is not Deborah singing about her own children here? Through these thoughts, projected onto the enemy’s mother, she takes comfort in what her own children have done. In this sense, there are clear parallels drawn between Deborah and Sisera’s mother, between Sisera and Barak, and between Sisera’s slaughtered troops and the Israelite tribes.

In 5.12, we noted that Deborah sings the song, whereas Barak collects the spoils. In the same verse, Barak’s status as son is specified. Although he is identified as son of Abinoam (the father, not the mother), here Barak is also Deborah’s son. In terms of perspective, self-reflection, mirroring, and imagination, what we have here is deeply intriguing. It is the Israelite poet’s reflection, recited by the mouth of Deborah the prophetess, judge, and mother in Israel, at the closing portion of a song of victory, all achieved through the projection of what the enemy commander’s mother is thinking after the battle.

Implicating motherhood

With the Israelite tribes succeeding in battle, what does it mean that they are led by Deborah, who is described as a mother in Israel; that Jael kills the enemy commander; and that Sisera’s mother imagines that her son is taking women as booty? What does the use of the motherhood motif imply about the normativity of gendered roles in a community struggling for survival?

Deborah is called a mother, though we have no evidence of her biological offspring. She is designated matriarch, a counterpart to Jacob, a metaphorical mother. She went out into the battle, actually led it; so her role departs from the standard stereotype of mother as one who stays home and waits for her husband and sons to return, or one who will suffer rape and capture if her men lose the battle. She is different from Sisera’s mother in all these ways.

However, Deborah and the mother of Sisera mirror each other through the victory poem, by both condoning, actually extolling, the killing of the enemy and the taking of women as booty. Deborah, a mother in Israel, sings about these things, thus becoming a cooperative partner to Sisera’s mother. The Israelite fighters are sons of mothers, as Sisera is. Sisera epitomizes the enemy of Israel, and the poet’s imagined scenario about the thoughts of Sisera’s mother evokes readers’ imagination once more to see the Israelite fighters as heads of tribes, as well as individuals with mothers.

What does this achieve for readers? Gottlieb (1981) writes, ‘It is her lack of fellow feeling that effectively cuts off ours’ (p. 202), implying a propagandistic or rhetorical effect. Fewell and Gunn (1990) write, ‘One mother reduces her enemy to a “womb,” while the other reduces hers to a caricature of moral insensitivity. Each mother has justified the violence of her “children” by dehumanizing their victims’ (p. 125). This mirroring acknowledges the violence of war, of one’s views of the enemy, and one’s own complicity. However, it also provides a way to dismiss these complexities, and allows for their reduction to the normative ideology as expressed by verse 13 and the last line of the poem. ³²

This war-poem opens with the portrayal of Deborah as a ‘mother in Israel’, and closes with a projection of the imaged anxieties of the mother of Sisera. Deborah is the focal point for the Israelite tribes, the armies that fight the battle. In the main body of the poem, as they were enumerated and perhaps judged for their participation or non-participation in the war against the Canaanites, the Israelite tribes were arranged in groups by their mothers: Rachel, Leah, and then back and forth between Zilpah, Bilhah, and Leah.

The striking climax—literally—of the poem came with the offering of praise for Jael’s deed of beating down Sisera. The echoes of her subtle yet fierce ‘mothering to death’ of Sisera in Judges 4 still reverberate in the poem’s ‘vertical’ portrayal of this killing. And finally, the ‘mother in Israel’, an Israelite matriarch, Jacob’s stand-in, imagines the thoughts of the enemy’s mother, giving a motherly stamp of approval to an ideology proclaiming that military victory must essentially involve the taking and degradation of human life.

The song ends with a line that wraps everything up and ties a pretty bow on it, in the poet’s reassuring closing statement and final prayer: So perish all your enemies, O Yahweh, and may your friends be like the going forth of the sun in its might (like Yahweh going forth from Seir in v. 4). This is a normative statement; things are now right. Yahweh is right and his enemies deserve to perish. The fact that King Jabin is defeated and Sisera and his troops have all perished, the women likely raped and the booty taken, has been justified. For those who do not wish to linger in the discomfort of the results of war or its ethical challenges, equilibrium is now established. The male authors of the poem have demonstrated that the taking of ‘wombs’ and the slaughter of the enemy is an intrinsic, and justified, part of war; and they have successfully implicated women—mothers, specifically—in both (Exum, 1995: 74-75).

The casting of Deborah as a figure with military power and the mother of Sisera as one who by proxy justifies the practice of wartime rape, achieves the complicity of women. Jael, who claims honor for Israel through the humiliating emasculation of the enemy soldier, embodies and acts out the enormity of Yahweh’s and Israel’s victory perhaps as strongly as the biblical writers knew how. A woman, whose allegiance is not clear, pierces the head of the enemy leader with a household implement inside her own tent. Far from challenging patriarchy, this re-gendering and domestication of the role of the victorious warrior presupposes the assumptions of patriarchy to accentuate the fantastic quality of the underdog’s victory. ³³ The effectiveness of the portrayal relies on basic identifications of men with their role as son to enlist the power of mothers, a power indispensable, it might seem, in justifying wartime rape and violence against women. ³⁴