Genderbending Performances in Wartime: From Judges to Judith

February 2021 | Vol. 9.2

By Jacob Wright

At the ancient biblical site of Achziv, 15 km north of Acco, archaeologists discovered what became known as the Tomb of the Horsemen. Deposited in the grave were figurines of women drummers alongside various other objects, such as figurines of horsemen. As archaeologist Sarit Paz noted, it’s conceivable that “the juxtaposition of the women drummers and horsemen denotes the ‘victory song’ tradition of women who go forth singing, drumming, and dancing to greet the warriors returning from battle.”

Achziv, photo courtesy of Ferrell Jenkins.

Horse and Rider from Akhzib. Iron Age II, 8th-7th century BCE. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

This “victory song” tradition to which Paz refers is well attested in biblical literature. At his homecoming, the daughter of the triumphant Jephthah comes out to welcome him with dance and tuppîm (Judg. 11:34). The latter are likely frame drums, similar to the Greek tympanum or the Arabic duff. Women do the same for Saul and David when they return from their battles with the Philistines (1 Sam. 18:6–8), playing tuppîm and other instruments. Likewise, Miriam leads the women of Israel with tuppîm and dancing after the victory at the Red Sea (Exod. 15:20).

The messages encoded in women’s songs and celebrations had the potential to sway public opinion far and wide. Victory is first and foremost a performance, and the song and dance of women determined to a considerable extent how triumphs and defeats were remembered. They might deflect honor from the reigning king by praising him alongside a figure who has his eye on the throne, or they might deflect honor from men altogether by focusing attention on the nation’s deity.

The accounts of Deborah and Jael in Judges 4-5 presuppose these conventional wartime roles. The poetic version in chap. 5 exhorts Deborah to break out in song at the same time as it enjoins Barak to take captives (Judg. 5:12). The preceding prose story depicts Jael going out to meet Sisera, the enemy general. Her behavior follows the pattern of women’s postbattle performances – but with a dramatic twist: Sisera is not a returning hero but the leader of Israel’s enemy fleeing to save his life. Jael entices him into her tent under the pretense of hospitality; once he enters her domain, she slays him with cunning and stealth. Having made a battlefield out of her domestic confinement, she then goes out again to meet Israel’s returning warrior, Barak. Yet instead of hailing him as the champion, she invites him to come into her tent and see the man whom he was seeking and whom she has slain.

From Bed to Battlefield

In many photos and artistic renderings of Middle Eastern aristocracy, women often lie reposed on divans. In contrast, men stand proudly or sit mounted on their steeds, parading their weapons prominently. To advertise confidence, a man might depart from these expectations by posing in a recumbent posture, especially if it’s in the company of women. Such is how the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal is portrayed in an impressive palace relief (ca. 645 BCE), which depicts the king reclining on a couch in his garden and drinking with his wife. His weapons rest behind him, and the head of the enemy king dangles from a tree. The passivity of the scene has a theological quality: if the king can rest at home with the queen, it’s because his deity, the goddess Ishtar, leads his army against the enemy for him – “You stay here in your place, eat bread, drink wine, play music, and praise my godhead, while I go there to complete the job, and to fulfill your heart’s desire.”

Relief of the Banquet of Ashurbanipal From Nineveh, British Museum, by Allan Gluck, CC BY-SA.

Adventuresome valor is extolled in the Erra Epic, one of the most widely circulated texts in Mesopotamia during the first millennium. A portion of the epic, called “The Warrior’s Manifesto,” beckons the hero to arise and partake in the “feast” of the battlefield, instead of “sitting” (wašābum) like an old man in the city, like a little infant in the house, or like the timorous who “eat the bread of women” (I:46–49).

To cite an example from personal correspondence, Shamshi-Adad, a king from the Old Assyrian Empire, wrote to his son in ca. 1776 BCE admonishing him to withdraw from the company of women in order to go out and conquer:

“Here your brother won a victory, but there you lie among women! Now, when you march with your army to Qatna, be a man. As your brother has established a great name, you also in your region establish a great name.” (ARM 1:69, rev. 8–16)

The expression “establish a great name” refers here not only to feats on the battlefield but also to the act of setting up a victory monument bearing the name of the ruler.

Biblical texts, too, present the battlefield and the bed as antithetically gendered spaces. Thus, the David-Bathsheba story from the book of Samuel has the king staying back in Jerusalem and sleeping with the wife of one of his soldiers while the nation is away engaged in a military campaign.

Between Jael and Judith

Defying this spatial polarity, Jael transforms her bed into a battleground. In the prose version of the account, Jael goes out of her tent to meet Sisera and lures him into her tent: “Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me; have no fear.” Later, displaying maternal hospitality, she covers him with a blanket. When he asks for water, she serves him milk. He orders her to stand at the entrance lest a man come looking for him. When he falls fast asleep, confident that he has found a secure place to rest, she drives a peg into his temple, pinning him to the ground.

The song makes Jael’s deed even more daring and Tarantinoesque. Instead of waiting for him to sleep, she straightaway crushes his skull with a hammer so that he topples over and then falls dead between her legs. Meanwhile, Sisera’s mother waits passively and patiently at her home for her son to return triumphantly as a warrior from battle. In one of the finest literary flourishes in the biblical corpus, we overhear this woman reassuring herself in front of her ladies-in-waiting, as she gazes from her window, that her son is delayed in his return because he was busy collecting and dividing up the spoils, which include “a damsel [lit. a womb] or two for each man.” Little can she imagine, as the reader knows, that one of those damsels had assassinated her warrior-son.

The book of Judith from the Hellenistic period draws directly on our story and drives its gender reversal even further. It portrays a woman achieving a name and honor for herself (16:21–23) by performing a feat of martial valor. Instead of enticing the victim into her tent, she abandons her frightful countrymen in order to penetrate the enemy camp. Once she decapitates the enemy general, she marches with his head, as David did with that of his Philistine competitor. Just as the dancing women had gone out to meet returning male heroes, so now they go out to welcome this triumphant woman. Traditional roles are transformed as “all the men of Israel in their armor, bearing garlands and with songs on their lips,” join the women’s procession (15:12–13).

Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio, 1598-1999 or 1602.

Memory, Milton, and Midrash

Societies rarely recognize the critical role women have played in war commemoration, just as they rarely commemorate women’s direct contributions to war efforts. The problem persists to the present. Thus, more than a thousand female aviators flew some sixty million miles in the Army’s aircraft during World War II, yet because these members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) were not considered real military pilots, no flags were draped over the coffins of the thirty-eight members who died in the line of duty. After the war ended, the surviving members of the unit paid their own bus fare home, and for decades thereafter they fought an arduous battle for recognition. In 1977, they were finally granted official veteran status. More than thirty years later, in 2009, the remaining members received a prestigious award; it was, however, the Congressional Gold Medal – a civilian honor.

Congressional Gold Medal, Women Airforce Service Pilots.

A moral failure to commemorate women’s contributions cannot be charged against the book of Judges. As we’ve seen, the scribes who composed the account diminished the heroic contributions of men by assigning credit for the greatest martial feats to “a mother in Israel” and to a woman who represents a marginal group in their society. Nothing is said about the direct progeny of these two women; their attention is directed elsewhere. As the book’s ideal leader, Deborah exerts authority over all others in her society. She beckons the warrior Barak, issues his battle orders, and thereby severs his military role from the right to govern. Instead of staying behind the front lines, she accompanies him into battle while warning him that another woman, Jael, would secure the glory he sought.

Addressing the issue of collective amnesia most directly, the story of Jephthah, several chapters later, portrays “the daughters of Israel” coming together every year for four days to “recount” (letannôt) the deeds of his brave daughter, who had not produced a child and who, without their efforts, would be consigned to oblivion (Judg. 11:40). It is this imagined festival that preserves this nameless woman’s memory; meanwhile, what preserves Jephthah’s memory is an account that excoriates his hypermasculine obsession with his own name-making.

Edgar Degas, The Daughter of Jephthah, 1859-1860.

Delilah is yet another woman from the book of Judges, and Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) has this figure expressing a desire to be named among the famed for eschewing “wedlock-bands” and saving her country from an enemy predator:

But in my countrey where I most desire,

In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath

I shall be nam’d among the famousest

Of Women, sung at solemn festivals,

Living and dead recorded, who to save

Her countrey from a fierce destroyer, chose

Above the faith of wedlock-bands, my tomb

With odours visited and annual flowers.

Not less renown’d then in Mount Ephraim,

Jael, who with inhospitable guile

Smote Sisera sleeping through the Temples nail’d. [18]

In wishing to be “sung at solemn festivals” and to have her grave visited in annual celebrations, Delilah not only reminds us of Jephthah and his nameless daughter; she also covets the fame that Jael enjoyed in Mount Ephraim for demonstrating “inhospitable guile” to a sleeping enemy. Exercising midrashic license, Milton joins here the architects of biblical memory in an effort to restrain the male ego by celebrating, with the help of graphic and shocking images, the martial feats women perform to make a name for themselves.

Jacob Wright is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. This article draws and lightly reworks passages from his book War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible (2020).

How to cite this article:

Wright, J. 2021. “Genderbending Performances in Wartime: From Judges to Judith.” The Ancient Near East Today 9.2. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/genderbending-performances-wartime/. 

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