The Book of Judges as a Bridge

The book of Judges is situated at the center of the larger narrative of the nation’s history, which begins with the creation of the world in Genesis and ends with the destruction of Jerusalem in the book of Kings.Footnote ¹ To appreciate the important structural function that Judges serves in this narrative, we need to compare the literary seams connecting Genesis to Exodus and Joshua to Judges.

The story in Exodus begins with the death of the Egyptian king. A new pharaoh, who does “not know Joseph,” “rises up” and adopts a radically different policy toward Israel. Whereas the book of Genesis presents Joseph and his family being welcomed to Egypt, the book of Exodus describes harassment and persecution in this country, which necessitate the nation’s collective flight and voyage to a new land.

The transition to the book of Judges is remarkably similar to the transition to the book of Exodus. The opening chapters of Judges also begin with a death – not of a foreign king, but of the nation’s leader Joshua. Just as a new pharaoh “rises up” in Exodus, a new generation of Israelites “rises up” in Judges. And just as the new pharaoh doesn’t “know Joseph,” the new generation in Judges doesn’t “know Yhwh” and worships other gods. The consequence of the Israelites’ actions is defeat: Yhwh brings an end to their streak of victories during the days of Joshua and allows them to be assailed by their enemies round about (Judg. 2:10–15).

As many scholars now agree, Genesis originally had nothing to do with the narrative of the exodus and conquest. In fact, the two accounts of Israel’s origins may have long competed with each other before they were spliced together to form a single narrative (see the discussion in Part I). As scribes conjoined these accounts, they had to deal with problems of transition. In Genesis, the pharaoh treats Israel with exceptional favor and generous patronage; in Exodus, the pharaoh is a genocidal tyrant. To explain this radical shift, the scribes who combined Genesis and Exodus prefaced a new introduction to the latter, which presents a different ruler taking the throne.

The narrative of the exodus and conquest concludes on a high note in the book of Joshua, with Israel’s enemies subjugated and the land resting from war (see Josh. 11:23). However, “the history of the monarchy,” which is told in the books of Samuel and Kings, presents the nation struggling with the Philistines and Ammonites; the monarchy is born as Saul and David subjugate these enemies. Eventually, scribes welded the two works together, just as they had attached Genesis to the exodus-conquest account. In this case, however, they had to bridge the gap between the triumphs recounted in Joshua and the dismal conditions faced by the nation at the beginning of the book of Samuel. Situated between these works, the book of Judges plays a pivotal role. By depicting the disintegration of the hegemony achieved by Joshua, it explains why the nation is plagued by foreign aggression in Samuel.Footnote ²

An Older Source?

While the book of Judges functions as a literary bridge in the narrative that extends from the book of Genesis to Kings, the Song of Deborah joins the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15) in demarcating an epoch within this narrative. What defines the epoch is Yhwh’s direct, royal sovereignty over the nation. (The Song of the Sea culminates with the proclamation of this Yhwh’s reign; likewise, the Song of Deborah pits this deity against the kings of Canaan.) What comes thereafter belongs to a different age and has a different historical status from the great salvation wrought by the nation’s god through the agency of Moses, Joshua, and Deborah – the three archetypal leaders in Israel’s premonarchic history.Footnote ³

In the new age portrayed in Judges, Yhwh repeatedly raises up leaders who “rescue/save” them from their foes. The cycle of sin and salvation progresses steadily, so that each new generation is worse than the one before (Judg. 2:19). What’s remarkable is that the book presents Israel’s golden age as a period in which a woman, Deborah, governs the nation. By concluding Deborah’s account with a lengthy hymn (the focus of our attention in Chapters 11 and 12), the book highlights her peerless performance. She is the ideal leader, and the account of her leadership conveys two of the book’s central themes: 1) the limits of (macho) monarchic power that undergirded ancient states and 2) the central role of volunteerism in the life of the nation.

According to the brief paragraph that prefaces Deborah’s story, the Israelites returned to their evil ways after the death of Ehud; consequently, Yhwh sold them into the hand of a Canaanite king, who oppressed them for twenty years. The Hebrew syntax suggests that the nation stubbornly endured the two decades of oppression before turning to Yhwh for help.

After this preface, the narrative introduces Deborah and begins the account of her activities with Barak. Most scholars deem this account to represent an older written source, while they attribute the preface (Judg. 4:1–3) to an “editor” who compiled inherited materials and shaped the narrative of the book.Footnote ⁴ By prefixing this secondary paragraph to the description of Deborah in the older account, the editor identified Deborah as the divine response to the nation’s belated lament:

Despite the attractiveness of this neat reconstruction, it poses problems. Various clues suggest that a scribe added lines to bring the account into conformity with the narrative in Judges. For example, two clauses in verses 4–5 (“she was judging Israel at the time” and “the Israelites went up to her for judgment”) recast this prophetess in the role of leader who judges Israel.Footnote ⁵ The phenomenon can be observed throughout the book: stories of disparate local heroes – Ehud, Gideon, Jephthah, Abimelech, Samson, etc. – have been reworked and aligned into a succession of “judges” (or “saviors”) who rescue the nation from its enemies. While the evidence of the editorial expansions supports the view that the Deborah-Barak account is an older written source that the putative editor/compiler of Judges integrated into his narrative, there’s a persisting problem: the reader would have no clue who Jabin is in verse 7 were it not for the preface in verses 1–3, which is supposed to be part of the later editorial framework. To save the thesis, scholars must argue that the editor did not preserve the older source intact.

It’s certainly possible that portions of the original Deborah-Barak account have been omitted or reformulated, yet it’s more probable that the (originally brief) account was drafted for its present context. If so, the two supplementary clauses in verses 4–5 (“she was judging Israel at the time” and “the Israelites went up to her for judgment”), which recast Deborah as a judge of Israel, would indicate not that the putative editor of the book was drawing on an older written source but that later scribes were expanding earlier iterations of a larger narrative. That this was a work in progress can be seen from the fact that a death announcement, which concludes the other accounts, is still missing for Deborah and appears to have been added secondarily for Ehud (4:1b; cf. 3:11).

Whereas the book of Judges now functions as a literary bridge between the exodus-conquest narrative and the history of the monarchy in Samuel-Kings, it may not have been originally conceived as such. Otherwise, it’s difficult to explain why the core accounts in Judges do not do a better job of making a case for the monarchy. Thus, the story of Deborah depicts the nation flourishing under her leadership, without a king standing in the way, and the following accounts of Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah are even more explicit in their repudiation of the monarchy, casting serious shade on the institution. As we will see, the Song of Deborah imagines and celebrates a nation ruled directly by Yhwh and “a mother in Israel”; in the absence of a king, it depends on the volunteerism of its diverse members.

A full elaboration and defense of my thesis will have to await a separate treatment, yet I would suggest that the earliest accounts in Judges were composed as appendices to the exodus-conquest narrative. The climax of the Joshua story reports that “the land had rest from its wars” (Josh. 11:23), and by concluding these appendices with similar statements (e.g., “the land had rest for forty years” in Judg. 5:31), their authors sought to demonstrate that the nonmonarchic rulers whom Yhwh “raises up” were repeatedly successful in restoring the peace and sovereignty that Joshua had first established.Footnote ⁶

Deborah and Gideon

Deborah performs her prophetic activities as a sibyl under “the Palm of Deborah.” Like the Oracle of Delphi in Greece, her isolated location (Judg. 4:5) corresponds to her political independence, so that her prophecies are not corrupted by the interest of any one city, such as Ramah or Bethel. It is from this remote residence that she summons Barak ben Abinoam. All we are told about this figure is his place of origin: the northern town of Kedesh. Deborah communicates to him the word of Yhwh, whom she calls “the god of Israel.”

The oracle charges Barak to go up to Mount Tabor and summon an army to himself in order to take the offensive against Sisera. The warrior executes his battle orders, rallying 10,000 warriors atop this isolated horst or inselberg. In response, Sisera, the enemy commander, musters his 900 iron chariots and his infantry in the valley near the Kishon River – a level playing field that has witnessed massive chariot and tank battles over the past five millennia.Footnote ⁷ The enemy’s professional forces and sophisticated armaments prove to be no match for Barak’s thousands. The latter descend in a “blitz” (both this German term and the name Barak mean lightning) and wipe out the Canaanite forces.

The point of the story is a common one in biblical literature. By mobilizing large numbers of volunteers who fight under the banner of their national deity, Israel can withstand the superior weapons and professional forces of the surrounding kingdoms. For a people who lack formidable military technology, strength is in the numbers: a large force of citizen-soldiers often can withstand a smaller, elite, well-equipped army. Yet this brief tale is less about military strategy than about the ideals of volunteerism and what we today call civic duty. As such, it serves as a fitting backdrop to the following, and much more elaborate, account of Gideon.

Like the Deborah-Barak story, the Gideon account treats questions of national belonging in terms of the voluntary contributions of Israel’s tribes to a war effort. Remnants of what appears to be an older account present Gideon as a warlord with a private army of 300 professional fighters. The scribes who drew excerpts from this older account transformed the hero into a timorous farmer; likewise, they made his elite force into a small and unskilled portion of a much larger volunteer army.

The new version of the Gideon account tells how a huge multitude answers his call to arms. Since “Israel might claim for themselves the glory,” Yhwh commands Gideon to discharge “all who fear and tremble.” When 10,000 troops remain, precisely the size of Barak’s force, Yhwh is still not satisfied, and he commands the hero to reduce his army again (Judg. 6:34–35, 7:2–8). In the end, Gideon is left with a force of 300 – the original size of his private army in what appears to be an older source (7:16, 8:4).

In this way, scribes transformed the identity of Gideon’s 300: they are no longer professional warriors and seasoned soldiers but farmers who volunteer for military service in an ad hoc war effort. As such, they rout the enemy not with martial savoir faire but with clever ruses and divine assistance. The heavily reworked Gideon account shares with the Deborah-Barak story an emphasis on volunteerism and the participation of Israel’s tribes, yet whereas Barak triumphs because of the size of his army, Gideon succeeds thanks to divine support and subterfuge.Footnote ⁸

The Jael Episode

The earliest iteration of the Deborah-Barak account likely didn’t include the episode with Jael. On the basis of parallels with other biblical battle stories, we would expect the account to conclude in Judges 4:16 – “The whole camp of Sisera fell by the sword; none remained” – which resembles the conclusion of many other battle stories.Footnote ⁹ When we’re told that the whole army of Sisera fell in battle and that no one survived, we should assume that this really means no one – neither the soldiers nor their commander. Yet, surprisingly, in the next paragraph (vv. 17–22), which is formulated in a different style and with much greater detail, Sisera is still alive and fleeing to the tent of Jael, the wife of one of his allies.

As scribes added the Jael episode, they made changes to other parts of the Deborah-Barak account, and the perceptive reader can easily retrace their moves. Thus, the statement about Jael’s husband Heber in verse 11 stands isolated in its context; a scribe apparently found this transitional point to be a suitable place to insert an explanation of why Sisera later trusts Jael.Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, Deborah’s surprising prophecy to Barak in verse 9b is easy to identify as an interpolation: originally, Deborah prophesies that Yhwh would deliver Sisera into Barak’s hand (v. 7), while here she declares that Yhwh would deliver the enemy general into the hand of a woman. Another place is the description of Sisera descending from his chariot and fleeing on foot to the tent of Jael (vv. 15b–16a). While the older portion presents Barak pursuing all the chariots back to the place whence they came, the reader now knows that Sisera is elsewhere and on foot. Similarly, while the older portion reports that “the entire camp of Sisera fell by the sword,” the reader must now conclude that this means only Sisera’s camp, not Sisera himself.

Deconstructing Male Power

The Jael episode is part of a larger compositional effort in Judges to malign the male martial power that both symbolized and undergirded the authority of ancient states. Thus, two heroic warriors in the book, Jephthah and Samson, are “brought low” by women (11:35, 16:1–21).Footnote ¹¹ Likewise, when Abimelech besieges the town of Thebez in his quest for monarchic power, a woman drops a millstone from atop the wall on his head. Since weapons of war are reserved for men, she wields an object that symbolizes her domestic place in society. In the same way, when Jael slays Sisera, she brandishes a tent peg, the symbol of her identity as a nomadic Kenite woman who waits in her tent while men fight on the battlefield.Footnote ¹²

The authors of Judges reshaped the Gideon account so that this mighty warrior becomes an apprehensive and unlikely leader. He summons the courage to fight only after many divine assurances of success, and his triumph is ascribed to the fact that Yhwh “goes with” him into battle (6:15–16). Similarly, a supplement to our account subordinates the warrior Barak to the authority of Yhwh’s prophet Deborah: Barak will not accept this mission unless Deborah “goes with” him (4:8, 9b).

Barak’s demand that Deborah accompany him reflects the anxiety of rulers and their need for oracles assuring them that the deity would be with them in their undertakings. For example, the goddess Ishtar assures the Assyrian ruler Esarhaddon through the mouth of prophet:

In the biblical corpus, the injunction to “fear not” is also addressed to the king in response to military threats (e.g., Isa. 7:4, 37:6), while other texts portray Israel’s monarchs being eager, like Barak, to harness the divine prophetic power for their military campaigns (e.g., 1 Kings 22; 2 Kings 3). The scribe who added 4:9a allows Deborah to accompany the warrior while using her prophetic power to foretell (and simultaneously interpret) the outcome: “You will receive no glory on the way you are going, for Yhwh will deliver Sisera into the hand of a woman” (cf. Judg. 7:2).

Here and elsewhere, scribes have retouched a tale of triumph, subordinating the role of the male hero to the power of the nation’s deity that works through women. As an alternative to the egoism and thirst for glory that motivates male rulers, they imagine the ideal ruler for Israel as a mother (see 5:7). They beckon their (male) readers to embrace her capacity to both protect her people and inspire volunteerism among its members. To be a great leader like Deborah, one must curb the quest for personal honor and social advancement that motivates Barak and many of the other male figures in the book.

The Jael episode dovetails with the gender-bending subversion of macho-monarchic masculinity on display throughout the narrative of the nation’s formation. In Part III, we saw how Rahab, as a woman without husband or children, acts maternally by protecting the Israelite spies, hiding them under stalks of flax on her roof and lying at length to the king’s men. As one of the next women to appear in the wider narrative, Jael acts in defense of the nation by first seducing its enemy into her tent (“Turn aside to me, my lord, turn aside to me; have no fear!”) and then feigning maternal protection – covering him, feeding him milk, and agreeing to stand by the door and lie to those who sought his life. While Rahab lets down the spies from her window, orchestrating their escape as Michal does for David (see 1 Sam. 19), Sisera’s mother is depicted in the following chapter waiting at the window for her son to return and finds consolation in the thought that he is busy taking maidens captive for his pleasure.Footnote ¹⁴ The reader is invited to compare this Canaanite mother with “a mother in Israel” who mobilizes a nation and leads it to victory (see 5:7). Like Rahab and Deborah, Jael has no children, but whereas Rahab and Deborah also do not have husbands who would stand in their way, Jael is married to a man who sides with the enemy and whom she, in turn, brazenly sidelines in her solidarity with Israel.

Martial Valor and Monarchic Rule

To what extent the author of the Jael episode knew of, and consciously played on, similar stories throughout the biblical narrative is difficult to say. What seems more certain is that this author was inspired by the depiction of Deborah’s authority in the originally brief account of her commissioning Barak to fight Sisera. That account juxtaposes Deborah and Barak, on one side, with the Canaanite king Jabin and his general Sisera, on the other. Israel’s leader is neither a king nor a man, and by issuing instructions to Barak, she thwarts any intention he may have had to leverage his triumph in a bid for monarchic rule (as in the cases of Gideon and Jephthah, or Saul and David, for example).

One of the most striking lines in the account presents Deborah summoning Barak (4:4). Due to Deborah’s gender, the line has aroused the consternation of many later male commentators, both Jewish and Christian. But its implications for political theory and political theology are even more radical: Authority here is not predicated on the basis of martial valor, and the role of military leadership is sharply divided from the right to govern. Barak has a purpose to serve, but he, and the male readers of this account, must learn to “stay in their lane.” In keeping with the laws of Deuteronomy, in which generals are to be chosen right before battle and a king is nowhere to be found, success on the battlefield does not entitle one to wider political prerogatives, let alone offer a legitimate basis for exercising monarchic rule.Footnote ¹⁵

Between Prose and Poetry

If the prose version of the Deborah-Barak account (Judg. 4) represents an attempt to “tell the story” contained in the song (Judg. 5), as widely assumed, one must explain why it doesn’t mention Megiddo, Taanach, or “the kings of Canaan” (5:19), and why it describes a very different constellation of the participating tribes (5:14–15). There are other discrepancies to be explained, such as the song’s allusion to a dearth of weapons among the Israelites (5:8), which has no counterpart in the prose version.

On the other hand, if the song is a late poetic midrash on the prose version, as a handful of scholars now claim, one must account for numerous features that bear no connection whatsoever to the prose version, such as the pivotal place of Mount Tabor, Barak’s 10,000 troops, or Sisera’s 900 chariots. Moreover, we would expect the authors of the prose version to have seized upon the opportunity to portray as many tribes as possible participating in the battle, given that volunteerism is a major theme of Judges. Yet instead of depicting six tribes contributing to this war effort and four tribes shirking their duties, as the song does, the prose version names only two tribes.

References to Kishon are integral to the song, while in the prose version they appear to be supplementary. Deborah prophesies that Yhwh “will draw out Sisera to you [Barak]” (4:7). The following detail, “to the Kishon River,” not only makes an unnecessarily detailed impression; it also conflicts with the emphasis on Mount Tabor as the place where Barak would descend and conquer the enemy (see 4:6, 12). In the description of that descent (4:14), the river is not mentioned. Likewise, in the miraculous routing of Sisera’s force (4:15), Yhwh does not use water as a weapon; instead, he throws the enemy horses and the army into a panic – a conventional “holy war” motif in the Bible. It’s also difficult to explain why the prose version has nothing to say about the “kings of Canaan” or places such as Megiddo and Taanach (5:19–21).

The song is in many ways internally incongruous. For example, one strophe describes how the stars fight from heaven and the waters of Kishon miraculously sweep away Sisera and the Canaanite kings; the reader assumes that these enemies had been fully vanquished (5:19–23). Yet the following strophes present Sisera as still alive and well, resting in the tent of Jael. How he ended up in her abode is not explained. In fact, we do not even know the identity of this figure until four lines later.Footnote ⁵

Here, as elsewhere, the song makes little sense by itself. If we assume the story was widely known through oral tradition, the gaps in the song’s narrative would not have posed a problem. Such an appeal to oral tradition is speculative, however, and must be the ultima ratio in any analysis. A more plausible scenario is that scribes amplified the song with strophes that presuppose knowledge of the prose version. This scenario is even more likely if the Jael episode was added to the prose version, as argued in Chapter 10.

Repurposing an Older Hymn

Within the song, it’s relatively easy to distinguish two strands: one that is symbolic and mythical, and another that is concrete and realistic. The first includes 5:2–5, 8–11, 13, 19, 21–23, and 31. It resembles the style of not only Exodus 15 but also Psalm 68. Thus, it begins with an exordium (see Exod. 15:1). Yhwh is described as coming out of Seir and Sinai as the earth trembles (see Ps. 68:8, 18). The people of Yhwh march down to fight a plurality of anonymous kings (see Ps. 68:13) in the Jezreel Valley, which, as noted, has long been one of the most popular battle sites in the southern Levant. These kings desire plunder but are swept away by primordial, chaotic waters (see Ps. 68:9–10; Exod. 15:8–10) in the form of the Kishon River.

The other strand comprises 5:6–7, 12, 14–18, 20, and 24–30, and is much more concrete. Deborah rouses the troops to fight, and Barak leads them into battle. Sisera represents the anonymous enemy kings, and the description of his death at the hands of Jael, with his mother awaiting his triumphal return, is exceptionally graphic. This strand also dates events by reference to the historical chronology employed by the book of Judges (“the days of Shamgar/Jael”).

The differences between the two strands in the song are perhaps most obvious when we compare verses 24–30 to the peroration in verse 31. The former is realistic or even “naturalistic” in the technical sense, while the latter employs highly rarefied, mythical symbols.

Scholars who distinguish between these two strands often conclude that the concrete, realistic one (“the heroic epic”) is older and that a later hand added more mythical, theological elements, which shift attention from human actors to the deity.Footnote ⁶ However, this interpretation of the evidence fails to recognize that the “mythical” thread is intact, with a beginning and an end and that its form and themes have much in common with other biblical songs. Conversely, the historically concrete material of the heroic epic is hardly self-sustaining and lacks biblical parallels. It can easily be removed without inflicting structural damage to the song, and when one does so, the coherency and natural flow of an older hymn come to light:

A National God and Israel’s Unity

War is one of the most powerful catalysts of political unification, and hence it is not surprising that the authors of Judges, like those of many other biblical books, treat the issue of national belonging in terms of wartime service and sacrifice. This issue is not central to the prose version of our story, though it does makes itself felt in the way a local narrative has been adopted and adapted to tell the story of the people of Israel as a whole. In the song, however, national belonging is argued directly through appeal to memories of military service and sacrifice performed on behalf of the nation’s deity, not its ruling house.

The emphasis on Israel’s unity under its national deity at a time of war is likely one of the primary reasons why scribes adopted the older hymn for their narrative.Footnote ¹² The poet praises the people and the commanders of Israel who “offer themselves willingly” (vv. 2 and 9); each of these stanzas is punctuated with the refrain “Bless Yhwh!”Footnote ¹³ Yhwh’s victories and those of “his peasantry” are one and the same (v. 11a). Similarly, the army of Israel is designated “the people of Yhwh” (vv. 11b, 13) or “those who love him” (v. 31). The implication is that if one loves Yhwh, one will readily participate in the wars he fights on behalf of his people. This participation is described as “coming to the help of Yhwh,” and those who fail to do so, such as the inhabitants of Meroz, are decisively cursed (v. 23).

Because it integrates disparate literary traditions, the song is characterized by a dizzying diversity of voices and actors. The heterogeneity is impressive, if not also occasionally confusing. What unites all these social classes, military ranks, regions, communities, and individual men and women is their collective identity, defined variously as “Israel,” the children of “a mother in Israel,” “the people/army of Yhwh,” and “those who love him” (i.e., his vassals and allies).

Ancient military coalitions usually did not fight under the banner of a single deity; each member had its own leaders, god, and emblems. Hence, Sisera would not have expected the Kenites to embrace his god as their own. Yet a nation like Israel is more than an ad hoc military coalition; it is unified by deeper, enduring commitments. For the biblical authors, the deity was an ideal focal point in their project of consolidating rival communities. Although often divided by warring factions, these communities could appeal to Yhwh as the one who transcends political divisions and binds them all together as one people.

The expansion of the hymn with elements of the prose version in chapter 4 develops this theme of solidarity. Thanks to the inspiration of “a mother in Israel” (v. 7; contrast “the mother of Sisera” in v. 28), the nation’s members volunteer for this war effort. Whole tribes and regions send down their officers and warriors, while others are rebuked for failing to participate. They come to the help of Deborah and the deity (vv. 13 and 23) instead of solely to relieve a beleaguered population. The prose version had already made Yhwh responsible for the triumph, and the addition of Deborah’s prophecy and the Jael episode to the story likewise diminishes the role of the male hero (Barak) by making a woman responsible for the most valorous deed in the battle. In the song, Barak now joins Deborah in directing attention away from himself by lauding Yhwh and the myriad members of the nation “who offered themselves freely.” With the addition of his name to the introduction in verse 1 (the verb is a singular feminine form), we are to understand that he came to fully embrace and internalize Deborah’s perspective, relinquishing his quest for personal glory and paying tribute to Jael’s culminating feat.

Religious Unity and American National Identity

According to a once popular interpretation, the song reflects the cultic celebration of a putative league of tribes in the pre-state period of Israel’s history, and the register of tribes in 5:14–18 constitutes an attendance list.Footnote ¹⁴ While such views have, with good reason, been abandoned in current scholarship, their proponents drew attention to an important feature of the song: the uniting of (rival) groups under the aegis of a single deity (see also 7:18, 20).

The depiction of a wide array of groups and individuals rallying around the deity in wartime is reminiscent of Karl Shapiro’s poem “Sunday: New Guinea,” which describes soldiers of all stripes and colors coming together to worship a single deity during the Second World War:

Citing this poem in her book GI Jews, Deborah Dash Moore discusses how the US armed forces during the early 1940s made a concerted effort to foster solidarity and cohesion among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, as well as all the denominations that constitute these three groups.Footnote ¹⁵ In order to achieve this unity, the armed forces appealed to “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” a notion that has a prehistory but that was not widely embraced until the Second World War and thereafter. The navy hoped that an ecumenical doctrine, according to which all three religions worshiped the same deity, would provide common ground on which disparate religious and social factions could come together. Hence, lifeboats carried waterproof packages of pocket-sized Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Bibles. According to the army’s standard operating procedure, chaplains of one faith were required to minister to the soldiers of other faiths, and they were often expected to collaborate with chaplains of other faiths for common memorial services.

The impact on internal divisions within Judaism was profound. The Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities (CANRA) formulated a tripartite Jewish denominationalism (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform), and one of the most remarkable achievements was the agreement of the three denominations on a common Siddur (Jewish prayer book).

The Song of Deborah is in many ways an ancient precursor to the efforts of the US armed forces inasmuch as its formation was propelled and sustained by concerns to bring together rival communities as one people. Yet there are basic differences to be noted: CANRA sought to create a cultural and national unity by redefining Jews in terms of one of several legitimate religions (“faiths”) that its members thought should define America’s national identity. Moreover, instead of mobilizing an already existing nation for war, the biblical scribes were inventing what it means to be a nation, and they were doing so in the aftermath of defeat.

Mobilizing the Nation’s Members

The song’s depiction of the nation’s plurality and unity culminates in the composition of the central section, the “Catalogue of Tribes” (Judg. 5:14–18), which identifies the combatants by tribe or region. This section is easy to isolate, and when it’s removed, one notices a tight connection between the surrounding statements: Yhwh’s people march down against/with the mighty (v. 13), and the kings of Canaan come and fight (v. 19). Read together, these lines portray Israel as a people confronting Canaanite polities that are represented solely by monarchs. The Catalogue of Tribes in turn celebrates those who contributed to this war effort, while chiding others for failing to take part.

Throughout the song, those who take part – who “march down to the gates” – are called variously “the people of Yhwh,” those “who love him,” “those who offer themselves freely,” etc. Positioned right before the descriptions of the actual engagement, the Catalogue of Tribes uses proper names to identify the groups that participate:

The five names listed here – Ephraim, Benjamin, Machir, Zebulun, and Issachar – correspond to tribes or regions. By naming them, the song commemorates their contributions and thereby declares that they deserve an honored place in the history of the nation. The two last-named participants, Zebulun and Naphtali, are the same tribes that join Barak in the prose version of chapter 4. Given the special place they occupy in that chapter, it’s not surprising that their contribution is singled out here:

The expression “spurned its soul (to die)” appears frequently in later Hebrew literature (e.g., in the official “Prayer of Remembrance for War Casualties” of the Israeli Defense Forces) to describe courageous self-sacrifice in battle.Footnote ² Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, death in battle is, with very few exceptions, a consequence of sin; likewise, victories are astonishingly devoid of any casualties in Israel’s ranks. One of the principal reasons for this curious fact is, as I argue elsewhere, a traumatic experience with radical politics: Many were willing to resist the encroachment of imperial armies at great expense, rejecting Jeremiah’s ethos of “put your necks under Babylon’s yoke … and live!” (Jer. 27:12). By risking all for the sake of territorial sovereignty, their politics brought only more pain and suffering on their communities. In opposition to these insurgent factions and their cult of martyrdom, the biblical scribes went to great lengths to avoid one of the basic rituals of statehood: the heroizing, memorializing, and sanctifying of the war dead.Footnote ³

In between these lines, the catalogue identifies four tribes that failed to heed the call to arms:

The tribes that are clearly included among the belligerents are described with verbs of action. Most often, they are said to have “descended” (y-r-d). In this way, the song identifies those who fight as highland dwellers who go down to battle in the Jezreel Valley. In contrast, the nonparticipants are portrayed in states of nonmovement, inactivity, passivity, and even tranquility. The transition to these verbs of inaction, and their variety, is pronounced; the specific verbs are “stay” (y-š-b), “dwell” (š-k-n), and “reside” (g-w-r).Footnote ⁴

In Numbers 32, which we studied in Part II, the verb y-š-b is the operative term in Moses’s censure of the Transjordanian tribes of Reuben and Gad for not contributing to the Cisjordanian war effort: “Shall your brothers/comrades go to war while you stay (y-š-b) here?” (v. 6). Reuben and Gad desire to “stay” in the Transjordan, rather than cross over and fight in the Cisjordan, since the rich pasturelands of the Gilead were well suited to their large herds (vv. 1–5). The Song of Deborah indicts the tribe of Reuben (in interrogatory form, like Num. 32:6) for staying in the safety of their sheepfolds and lazily listening to their herds rather than rising up to heed the call to arms.

That this use of y-š-b is formal or technical is suggested by the strange “law and ordinance” instituted by David: “For the share (of booty) of the one who goes down (y-r-d) to war shall be the same as the one who stays (y-š-b) with the baggage; they shall share (the spoils) together” (1 Sam. 30:24). Here, y-š-b is employed in a similar sense to Numbers 32:6 and the song; these texts refer, however, to those who shirk their military obligations rather than performing a logistical-support function.Footnote ⁵

The Catalogue of Tribes has much in common with Jacob’s deathbed blessings for his sons in Genesis 49. For example, its descriptions of Asher and Dan are similar to the patriarch’s statement about Zebulun (Gen. 49:13).Footnote ⁶ Immediately thereafter, Jacob speaks of Issachar lying “among the flocks/baggage,” a rare expression found only in Psalm 68, which is closely related to the song (see the discussion in Chapter 11), and in the song itself, where it is applied to Reuben. In Genesis 49, Reuben is the first to be mentioned: Jacob condemns his actions and prophesies his end. Likewise, in the song, Reuben leads the list of the reproached tribes.

These and other observations bespeak the likelihood that the scribes who expanded the song drew on several lines from Jacob’s blessings and applied them to the nonparticipants with a new twist. Whereas Genesis promotes pacifistic ideals, the book of Judges, in keeping with the very different ethos set forth in the exodus-conquest account, demonstrates the need for bellicose interactions with Israel’s neighbors.Footnote ⁷ Thus, Genesis 49 reproaches Simeon, Levi, and Benjamin for their unbridled violence and bellicosity; in contrast, the song uses the acclamations of quietude and idyllic passivity in Genesis 49 to upbraid several tribes for failing to rise up and mobilize for Israel’s war effort.Footnote ⁸

Censure of Transjordanian Communities

One of the most basic themes of Judges is Israel’s unity and disunity as a people. While the book of Joshua depicts a high point in the nation’s past by portraying its members joining together to conquer Canaan, the book of Judges tells how, after the death of Joshua, this unity dissolves, never to be reestablished. The only time the tribes assemble and unite for action is when they wage war against their own members, and even then some do not take part (see Judg. 21:5–14).

In keeping with Judges’ concern with Israel’s unity, several passages in the book depict Israel’s tribes providing, failing to provide, or being jealous that they were not asked to provide, military assistance. Many of these texts relate to Ephraim and Benjamin, tribes that occupied Israel’s core territory. Thus, a Benjaminite named Ehud petitions Ephraim to assist him against Moab (3:27), and in the same way, Gideon calls on Ephraim for help (7:24–25). As the narrative progresses, the depiction of Benjamin and Ephraim becomes gradually less favorable: The Ephraimites are angered that Gideon did not call on them earlier (8:1–3). Later, they mobilize for war against Jephthah the Gileadite because, once again, they were not invited to participate (12:1–3). In the final chapters of the book, a couple of Ephraimite individuals commit (shocking) crimes, and war is declared on Benjamin (chaps. 20–21). Notably, in the Song of Deborah, Ephraim and Benjamin are praised for being the first tribes to “come down” for battle (5:14). This is just what we would expect given the gradual transition of the book’s narrative from a positive to a negative tenor in the depiction of these tribes.

The members most excoriated in the song are the Transjordanian tribes of Reuben and Gilead; no fewer than six cola – with the indicting question surrounded by an inclusio – are devoted to Reuben. The censure of communities from the eastern side of Jordan is once again consistent with the larger narrative of Judges. In the immediately following chapters of the book, Gideon and his 300 famished men cross the Jordan in pursuit of the Midianite armies. He begs the inhabitants of Succoth for a few loaves of bread, yet his request is sharply rejected, with a telling rhetorical question: “Are [the enemy leaders] already in your hands that we should give bread to your troops?” (8:6). Gideon then petitions the city of Penuel and receives the same response. These two Transjordanian communities would be willing to supply victuals for Gideon and his men, but only after they prove themselves to be the victors; because they were unwilling to contribute to the Cisjordanian war effort until victory had been achieved, they are subjected to harsh sanctions.Footnote ⁹ The book’s censure of Succoth and Penuel is remarkable given that these cities figure prominently, and favorably, in the narrative of Jacob’s wanderings constructed in Genesis (see Gen. 32:17, 24–32, 33:17).

Several other texts in Judges cast aspersions on the Transjordanians. The account of Jephthah (chaps. 10–12) depicts the inhabitants of Gilead and its leadership as self-absorbed and foolish. As the son of a harlot, Jephthah is disinherited and becomes a leader of a marauding band out in the backcountry of Tob. Later, the elders of Gilead bring him back, but only because they need someone who can fight their wars with the neighboring Ammonites. Jephthah acquiesces on the condition that they make him their leader, and later he must sacrifice his daughter to Yhwh as compensation for his triumph. The account concludes with him gathering all his men to do battle against members of Israel, slaying 42,000 inhabitants of Ephraim. This censure of Jephthah and Gilead is echoed in the last chapter of the book, where the city of Jabesh-Gilead ducks its wartime duties and is punished with the extermination of all its citizens (21:5–14).

The same failure to support a pan-Israelite war effort is the grievance brought against the Transjordanian communities in the Song of Deborah. Moreover, the way the song associates Gilead with those who cowardly dodge their military duties may be compared to the words Gideon utters when he musters out all the lily-livered troops: “Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home, flying like a bird from Mount Gilead” (7:3).Footnote ¹⁰

The book of Judges is not alone in this respect. As we saw in Part II, a wide range of biblical texts address a question posed by the Transjordanian communities. If the Jordan marks the border of the Promised Land, what is the status of the territories on the east bank of the river? Many of the texts we looked at address this question in relation to wartime contributions. Some texts censure the Transjordanian communities for attempting to shirk their military duties, while others respond to these accusations, claiming that the Transjordanians spearheaded the offensive when Israel crossed the Jordan and took possession of the Promised Land.

Against the backdrop of these numerous texts, it’s all the more significant that the Song of Deborah contains several strophes that accuse the Transjordanian tribes of forsaking their wartime obligations to the nation. Yet there is a difference between the song and the texts reviewed above: rather than attempting to impugn the memory of the Transjordanian communities, the indictment more likely affirms their membership by implying that they have the same obligation as the Cisjordanian tribes. It’s noteworthy that Dan and Asher are the other two tribes that the song censures for dodging their duties. The land allocated to these tribes does not belong to the core territory of Israel and was rarely under its hegemony. Israelites were a hill-country people, and this fact accounts for the scarcity of references to ships and seacoast life in the Bible. In the song, all the territories/tribes that “go down” to battle are located in the central hill country and the Jezreel Valley, regions that constitute the central realm of the kingdom.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, while the prose version of the Deborah-Barak account (Judg. 4) focuses on the contributions of Zebulun and Naphtali, the song commemorates Ephraim and Benjamin as the first tribes to follow Deborah. By chiding communities on the periphery (on the coasts, in the North, and across the Jordan) for failing to demonstrate their belonging, it invites these outlying communities to join the core and demonstrate that they belong to the people who eagerly volunteer themselves for the cause of Yhwh and Deborah.Footnote ¹²

Judah’s Absence

One of the most remarkable features of the song is that it commemorates the contributions of only ten tribes, not twelve as we would expect.Footnote ¹³ What’s more, two of the ten names, Gilead and Machir, do not appear in the canonical tribal registers. With respect to Machir, many texts locate this tribe in the Transjordan, identifying it with either the name of Gilead’s father or the clan that conquers Gilead.Footnote ¹⁴ The rich region of Gilead is ascribed by many biblical texts to Gad. While Gilead is censured in the song, Machir is praised – namely, for sending troops down to the battle. This movement is easiest to understand if Machir represents not an eastern territory but rather the large region in the central hill country known as Manasseh. Not only does the song fail to mention Manasseh; it also refers to Machir right after Ephraim and Benjamin in the south and right before Zebulun and Issachar in the north – precisely the Cisjordanian region identified elsewhere as Manasseh. Not surprisingly, a number of biblical texts identify Manasseh as the father of Machir.

But what about the absence of Judah? All the tribes/regions that do not participate in the battle are on the outermost margins of Israel’s core territory, located either across the Jordan or on the northern periphery. Written from the perspective of Ephraim and Benjamin, the song should either report that Judah took part in the battle or rebuke it for failing to do so. The indictment for shirking duties is, as noted, an implicit affirmation of membership in the nation, but the song issues no such indictment against Judah.

The significance of Judah’s absence would be difficult to overstate. Much of the biblical corpus originated in the North, in the context of the kingdom of Israel (Samaria) as well as during the centuries after its destruction in 722 BCE. But the biblical corpus wouldn’t exist – or at least it would look very different – were it not for Southern scribes who expanded and shaped it during the final century of the kingdom of Judah and then after foreign empires conquered this kingdom in 587 BCE.

The activity of these Southern scribes is the reason why the tribe of Judah figures so prominently in biblical literature. In the book of Judges, Judah is the first tribe chosen by Yhwh to “go up” to conquer the land (chap. 1), and it’s the first tribe to produce a “savior” who delivers Israel from its enemies (3:7–11). These passages were likely added in the book’s final compositional stages. If their authors had been involved in the composition of the song, we would expect Judah to have been portrayed as marching at the front of the tribes who mobilize for war, yet the song has nothing whatsoever to say about Judah, assigning the leading role to Ephraim and Benjamin.

What possibly motivated the omission was, I suggest, the move by Judah, and above all the Davidic dynasty that ruled Judah, to lay claim to Israel’s cultural heritage after the conquest of Samaria in 722 BCE. In reaction to this move, scribes from the erstwhile kingdom of Israel appear to have collected and composed a number of texts that envision Israel as a people without a king at its center. Their most important literary production was the exodus-conquest account, and if the earliest iteration of the Judges narrative was composed as a continuation of that account, it makes sense that the Song of Deborah articulates a national identity for Israel that includes neither Judah or a monarchy.Footnote ¹⁵

A testimony to the kind of statist ideology that developed in Judah is found in Psalm 78.Footnote ¹⁶ This psalm represents the antithesis of the song. Thus, it assigns an indispensable role to a monarch: “[Yhwh] chose David, his servant, and took him from the sheepfolds. He brought him from the nursing ewes to tend his people Jacob, Israel, his very own … ” (vv. 70–72). Likewise, the perspective in the psalm is explicitly anti-Northern: “[Yhwh] rejected the clan of Joseph; he did not choose the tribe of Ephraim. He chose instead the tribe of Judah, Mount Zion, which he loved” (v. 67). Like the Song of Deborah, the psalm uses war commemoration to formulate its polemics: “The Ephraimites, armed with the bow, turned back on the day of battle …” (v. 9). The psalm continues: “They did not keep God’s covenant, and refused to walk according to his law. They forgot what he had done …” (vv. 10–11). This late Judean broadside against the North conjoins memories of military service with fidelity to the Torah, which is similar to what we observed in Part II with respect to the Narrative of the Transjordanian Tribes.

The Curse of Meroz

The Catalogue of Tribes evinces parallels not only with other biblical texts, but also with war commemoration in the Aegean world. Thus, the so-called Catalogue of Ships transmitted in Homer’s Iliad negotiates belonging by naming the contingents and their leaders who contributed to a momentous collective war effort situated in the shadows of time.Footnote ¹⁷ It also includes descriptive epithets of the territories and clans, similar to what we witness in Genesis 49, Deuteronomy 32, and the Song of Deborah. Most experts agree that this Homeric text has been supplemented variously with the names of new contributors and that some participants may have been deleted as a way of criticizing these communities. By stating exactly how many ships each land sent, the catalogue ranks the level of each participant’s contribution. For example:

Other strophes name the land that sent the best horses (2.761–765) or the best warriors (2.767–768). The catalogue also notes nonparticipation: “But their minds weren’t set / on the grim clash of war. They had no one to lead them” (2.761–762). Later, we read that these same troops “stayed behind by their ships” and “amused themselves” in various ways (2.771–779; cf. Judg. 5:16–17).Footnote ¹⁸

By imagining the nation’s territories as discrete and circumscribed tribal units, the Catalogue of Tribes from the Song of Deborah could treat the problem of “the one and the many” in Israel’s political history: e pluribus unum. The counterpart to this unification is exclusion, as we witness in the case of Meroz. This is the only time in the Bible where the name Meroz appears. Whatever group this name represents, the song clearly does not extend membership to its members:

Similar maledictions and sanctions are known from the Aegean world. For example, the city Thebes was reluctant to join the Hellenic alliance and later fought on the Persian side (even though 400 Theban hoplites were supposed to have fought bravely against the Persians at Thermopylae). As a result, the city was severely penalized and almost eliminated from the Delphic amphictyony.Footnote ¹⁹

I’ve argued that the song doesn’t exclude from the national fold several tribes on Israel’s periphery when it scolds them for failing to contribute to Deborah’s war effort; to the contrary, it affirms their belonging among the people of Israel and exhorts them to demonstrate this belonging through their actions in the present. Had the authors of our song wished to sever ties with other tribes, we would expect them to have pronounced a curse upon them as they did on Meroz. That the song does not do so is likely because the scribes who repurposed the older hymn wanted to encourage marginal communities to think of themselves as part of Israel and to conduct themselves accordingly.

Why then is Meroz execrated? Scholars have offered a range of explanations: Israel expected Meroz to cut off the enemy when the latter retreated, but Meroz did not do so and was therefore harshly cursed. Or Meroz was in alliance with Israel but joined “the Canaanites” during this battle. According to another suggestion, economic reasons militated against the participation of the other tribes that did not participate, whereas Meroz lacked a legitimate excuse.Footnote ²⁰

These suggestions are, however, based on little more than speculation. As we saw in our reconstruction, the insertion of the Jael material juxtaposes “most blessed of women is Jael” with “Curse Meroz … for they did not come to the help of Yhwh,” and before the Jael material was inserted into the older hymn, the imprecation would have stood right before “So may all your enemies perish, O Yhwh!” in the final strophe. The authors of the hymn may have chosen an obscure name, or even invented one, in order to illustrate the point of the curse: those who conduct themselves as Meroz did, failing to “come to the help of Yhwh,” however such “help” is understood, will be punished with total oblivion.

Meroz and the American War of Independence

In 1777, a year after the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, a Presbyterian minister named Nathaniel Whitaker, pastor of the Third Church of Salem, Massachusetts (the “Tabernacle”), delivered a sermon on the curse of Meroz entitled “Antidote Against Toryism.” The transcript was widely circulated both during and after the Revolutionary War and was republished a year before the American Civil War.Footnote ²¹ The sermon offers a graphic illustration from recent reception history of the song’s political potential. What makes the sermon especially worthy of our attention is the way it, like the song, combines antimonarchic sentiment with an emphasis on volunteerism.

According to Whitaker, the Song of Deborah provides biblical justification for limiting membership and privileges in the American colonies to those individuals and communities who readily contributed to the war effort against King George of England. Applying the curse of Meroz to those who remain loyal to the British throne, the Presbyterian preacher begins by observing that:

Asserting that America’s war is as equally legitimate and divinely authorized as the war that Israel initiated against the Canaanite king, Whitaker goes on to declare that:

Contributions to the war effort consist of more than just bearing arms; all kinds of exertion for the public good are demanded. Men and women, young and old, are called upon to give liberally of their time and substance. Pastors should preach to encourage the public, while parents should exhort their children to do their part. Everyone can participate in various kinds of manufacturing activities and services essential to the success of the American forces.

Whitaker’s sermon contains some of the most eloquent early American rhetoric in defense of “republican civic virtue” – the willingness to forego personal pursuits and private concerns for the sake of the common good. Here’s a representative excerpt:

Whitaker is describing here both the inhabitants of Meroz and the Tories of his own day. In contrast to outright betrayals benefiting the enemy or active efforts to discourage the nation’s wartime resolves, the sin of Meroz is that they simply failed to do their part:

According to Whitaker’s exposition, God requires a nation, like ancient Israel and its successor America, to treat those who will not join them in their cause for liberty as “open enemies” and to “reject them as unworthy of the privileges of society.” The song articulates a basic criterion of affiliation to the political community, one that restricts privileges of membership to those who make sacrifices on behalf of the nation in arms.

Those who dodged their duty must not be allowed to enjoy a place of honor in the government; instead, they should be deprived of “that delightful freedom and liberty Israel had regained from the tyranny of Jabin.” At one point, Whitaker calls for the enslavement of these dodgers:

Later, he refers to more mild punishments, such as taxation without representation. In conclusion, the Massachusetts minister makes it clear that the punishment of Meroz is an enduring, if not timeless, moral duty, not confined to a period of military conflict. Indeed, it must be a fundamental feature of the ongoing program of reform that paves the way to the nation’s happiness:

Whitaker’s sermon demonstrates the song’s potential to mobilize a political community around (republican) ideals of communal volunteerism, without looking to a monarch to define its identity. But there are important differences to be noted between the song itself and Whitaker’s appropriation of it for the American colonial context.

In Chapter 11, we observed how during World War II, the US armed forces appealed to a “Judeo-Christian tradition” in an effort to unite the nation and its troops, and we noted that the formation of the song – and by extension, much of the biblical corpus – was likewise propelled and sustained by concerns to bring together rival communities as one people. The difference is that the biblical project is not about mobilizing a nation for war, but creating a nation in the aftermath of defeat.

Similarly, Whitaker applied the song to a war of liberation and emergent statehood; however, we’ve seen that the song seeks to consolidate a nation in the wake of defeat and the demise of statehood. In focusing on one strophe of the song (the curse of Meroz), Whitaker’s exegetical sermon misses the overarching message of his biblical text: the song does not celebrate the victory of a nation-state; rather, it affirms that a nation (Israel) can exist without a state.

What is perhaps even more jarring than the way Whitaker adapts the song to the politics of statehood is the manner in which he masculinizes its contents: men are to do the fighting, while women are to support them from their family homes. His audience never learns that the song abolishes this gender binary, celebrating a “mother in Israel” alongside a woman who defies her husband’s politics and deftly dispatches the enemy leader from her domestic confines. Indeed, the macho tenor of Whitaker’s sermon helps us appreciate the song’s revolutionary gender-bending agenda. In Chapter 13, we explore this important dimension of the song.

A Nation Without a King

In interpreting the song as a “national anthem,” I do not mean to suggest that it was performed in ancient Israel in the manner that, for instance, Americans sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” My point is rather that the intention driving the composition of this work anticipates the creation of modern anthems that began in the nineteen century.Footnote ²²

National anthems promote and celebrate symbols unifying the members of their political communities. Frequently, these anthems mimic military marches or relive a battle, summoning the nation’s citizens to demonstrate their belonging through devotion and deed. While most contemporary anthems extol the country and the core values that bind its diverse populations (e.g., “La Marseillaise”), some have their origins in praise and supplications for monarchs (e.g., “God Save the Queen”). In intoning the hymn, the subjects pray collectively for their king’s or queen’s military success and long life, as the prosperity and security of the monarch presumably redound to their subjects’ benefit.

While the Song of Deborah has many features in common with these anthems, the nation it imagines is not governed by a human king; he’s been dethroned and his place assigned to a deity named Yhwh and to “a mother in Israel” named Deborah. Indomitable volunteerism, selfless sacrifice on the behalf of Yhwh and his people, and the courage to face fearsome opposition – these are the national virtues held high in this poetic monument.

The song imagines a nation consisting solely of Northern communities, and it likely emerged among scribes from these communities who were writing shortly before and especially after the downfall of their kingdom in 722 BCE. For more than a century, the Southern kingdom managed to maintain its existence, and, during this time, the Davidic kings enthroned in Jerusalem urged Northern communities to recognize them as their divinely appointed rulers.Footnote ²³ As a memorial to the battle fought against the kings of Canaan during the birth of the nation, the song responds to, and repudiates, these political overtures, conveying a momentous message to its vanquished audience: Long before the reigns of their kings, Northern communities had come together from far and wide and collectively surmounted formidable challenges, and they could do so again now that their kings had been exiled.

Voluntary service and sacrifice are the basic expressions of national belonging. After all, a nation exists only to the extent that a group continues to will it through collective action. Such is what the Breton philosopher and Semiticist Ernest Renan meant by “daily plebiscite” when, in 1882 at the Sorbonne, he delivered his influential response to the question “What is a Nation?”

Renan here underscores the voluntary nature of the nation. While the nation presupposes a past and therefore a narrative (see Part II), what is most important is the fact that and the manner in which its members translate past sacrifices into a shared desire to continue a common life.

Mothers of Soldiers

At first glance, women appear in ancient discourses on war primarily as objects: victims, trophies, and causa belli. In stereotypical laments, they give voice to suffering, and their bodies, along with those of the children in their care, give graphic expression to the costs of war. A closer examination of the sources, however, discloses the much more complex nature of women’s roles and destinies in wartime. Far from being passive objects, they were active agents who consciously and directly shaped how their societies interpreted events on the battlefield.

Women in ancient Mediterranean societies usually did not partake in fighting on the front lines, and societies often went to great lengths to evacuate them from the scene of conflict.Footnote ¹ Even so, women contributed to war efforts in a variety of ways – from outfitting and provisioning soldiers to pelting aggressors from atop city walls and even engaging directly in (alternative forms of) combat.Footnote ² In accounts of the past penned by male writers, their varied contributions have been consigned to oblivion, since memories of women saving the day had the potential to undermine what many considered to be the essential and primary contribution of women to war efforts: bearing male babies and rearing them to be soldiers.

In the book of Genesis, the family of Rebekah sends her off to marry Isaac with the following blessing: “May you, our sister, become thousands of ten thousands, and may your offspring take possession of the gates of their enemies” (Gen. 24:60).Footnote ³ Since states have conventionally fostered procreation, scholars often evaluate the Bible’s “natalism” in relation to (pre-state and state) realities during the Iron Age.Footnote ⁴ To be sure, state-sponsored fertility and reproductive politics deserve consideration, yet the biblical corpus was decisively shaped by the experience of defeat and the demise of statehood. The most pressing concern for the scribes who produced this corpus was not to raise a new army, but to survive in a new age, and hence procreation had a new role to play. (Closely tied to procreation is the enculturation/education of future generations in the nation’s collective memories and traditions.)

The ways in which progeny and procreation replace a native army and combat is illustrated in a variety of biblical texts. The book of Genesis expresses the point symbolically in the scene of Jacob’s and Esau’s reunion: the patriarch of Israel is accompanied by his wives and numerous children, while Esau is accompanied by his 400 warriors (Gen. 32–33, discussed in Chapter 2). The book of Ruth imagines “the days of the judges” as an idyllic period, when war was completely absent and the nation was sustained by acts of ḥesed (loyalty, hospitality, generosity) that result in offspring. The male protagonist Boaz is called a gibbôr ḥayil; the designation is usually translated as mighty warrior, but here it refers to a man of noble virtue who assumes his social duty, marries a widow, and produces a child with her. The story explicitly plays on the title. When the community blesses Boaz on his marriage with Ruth, it encourages him to act heroically: “May you do a mighty deed of valor (ḥayil) in Ephrathah, and make a name in Bethlehem” (Ruth 4:11). The expressions “do a mighty deed of valor” and “make a name” here refer not to martial courage or noble death, as they do elsewhere, but to acts of marriage and procreation.Footnote ⁵

Throughout the biblical corpus, the home competes with the battlefield as the principal stage of national life, and in rethinking the nature of peoplehood, the biblical scribes de-gendered procreation so that it’s no longer solely a woman’s duty. Infertility becomes an agonistic struggle for men rather than simply the fault of women. The choice to place household stories at the center of Israel’s history is a bold statement that power resides in the inner workings of the family and that the project of creating a nation is a collaborative effort.

Political Performances

Teddy Roosevelt famously compared a woman who “shirks her duty to bear children” to a man who “fears to do his duty in battle when his country calls him.”Footnote ⁶ This gender polarity is not unique to modernity. As the French historian Nicole Loraux demonstrated in an important essay, classical Greek sources juxtapose the birthing bed of women with the battlefield of men.Footnote ⁷ A common motif in classical Greek art is the departure scene, which features a hoplite warrior taking leave of his wife, his son, and often the family dog. To perform aristocratic manhood, the hoplite leaves hearth and home – the domain of women – and fights fearlessly alongside other men of the same class. Greco-Roman literature reports many cases of men returning too early from the front lines, only to confront the public scorn of their women.Footnote ⁸ By appealing to their manhood, the women made sure that their men fulfilled their societal role.Footnote ⁹

Just as women were expected to send off their men and boys and encourage them to carry out their duties with valor, they performed rituals that involved going out to meet their homecoming heroes. Such performances are well attested in many places and times – from nineteenth-century German society in which girls robed in white gowns greeted returning soldiers, to the Wankas in sixteenth-century Peru, whose women, according to Francisco’s de Toledo’s account, “came forth with pitchers of chichi and other things” to confer honor on their triumphant men.Footnote ¹⁰ In other cases – from Sparta to Achaemenid Persia and pre-Islamic Arabia – women and girls (were) paraded before soldiers on the eve of battle. Their appearance served to stimulate the men to fight and reminded them what they were fighting for. Thus, as the Banū Bakr prepared for war against the Banū Taglib in the early sixth century, two women chanted lyric verses that roused the men to undertake great deeds of valor:

Arabian women played drums in battle to encourage the warriors to victory, as well as when performing laments (marthiya or nawh) for heroes. Thus, Mohammad’s enemy, a woman named Hind bin Utba, used drums when commemorating the war dead with songs and lamentation.Footnote ¹²

Closer to the biblical period, archeologists uncovered at Achziv (15 km north of Acco) 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 Sarit Paz notes in Drums, Women, and Goddesses, 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.”Footnote ¹³

This “victory song” tradition to which Paz refers is well attested in biblical literature. Thus, the daughter of the triumphant Jephthah comes out to welcome him, at his homecoming, with dance and tuppîm (Judg. 11:34). The latter are likely frame drums, similar to the Greek tympanum or the Arabic duff.Footnote ¹⁴ Women do the same for Saul and David when they return from their battles with the Philistines (1 Sam. 18:6–7), 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).

Such performances had extraordinary political potential. For example, in the story of Saul and David, the praise chanted by the women has a subversive ring to it: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his myriads.” The lyrics seem harmless enough, since they extol the deeds of the reigning king. However, by paying tribute to an upstart and ambitious warrior and singing his name in tandem with the king’s, the celebration paves the way for that upstart to seize the throne. When Saul hears the words of their song, he furiously concedes that: “the only thing he has yet to gain is the kingdom itself!” (1 Sam. 18:8–9). The performance by these women has an impact far beyond Israel’s borders, and the Philistines cite their song twice as evidence of David’s political ambitions (1 Sam. 21:12, 29:5).

In the case of Jephthah, his rule over Gilead depends on his success in battle. Hence, he utters a vow to sacrifice whoever comes out first to meet him if he returns triumphantly. Since he has only one daughter, it was likely that either she or his wife would be the sacrificial victim. When he returns from vanquishing the enemy, it’s his daughter who comes out to greet him, and the text suggests that she does so knowingly:

The song that Miriam sings at the exodus is equally political inasmuch as it pays homage to Yhwh alone without mentioning Moses or any human warrior in the nation’s ranks:

It is their song that determines how that battle is commemorated, and it may have directly influenced the composition of the longer Song of the Sea (compare Exod. 15:21 with Exod. 15:1).

In these and other texts, we witness how 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.Footnote ¹⁵

Between Bed and Battlefield

Our accounts of Deborah and Jael presuppose these conventional wartime roles. Like Arabian prebattle rituals, the poetic version 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.Footnote ¹⁶ 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.Footnote ¹⁷

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.”Footnote ¹⁸

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; cf. the use of y-š-b in Judg. 5 and Num. 32).

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:

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.

Defying this spatial polarity, Jael transforms her bed into a battleground.Footnote ¹⁹ 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.Footnote ²⁰ 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.”Footnote ²¹ Little can she imagine, as the reader knows, that one of those damsels had assassinated her warrior-son.

For many contemporary readers, Jael’s tent peg is a phallic symbol. When she plunges the object into Sisera, she murders the male warrior with a kind of violent sexual penetration.Footnote ²² Yet while the account is undeniably suggestive in this direction, and highlights Jael’s seductive ploy, one should not lose sight of the more basic manner in which it depicts Jael seizing quotidian objects to achieve something that the male warrior Barak could not. Her creativity reminds us of the women in the Aegean world who hurled house tiles upon invading armies, or the unnamed figure in Judges 9 who launches a millstone – simultaneously the implement and symbol of her role as a woman – from atop a tower, crushing the skull of Abimelech, Israel’s first king. Moreover, the tent peg, hammer, and milk symbolize Jael’s identities not only as a woman but also as a tent-dwelling nomad and a member of an ethnic group known for animal herding and metalworking. (In Chapter 14, we consider aspects of her ethnic identity.)

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).

Memory as a Moral Imperative

Societies rarely recognize the critical role women have played in war commemoration, just as they rarely commemorate women’s direct contributions to war efforts.Footnote ²³ 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.

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.Footnote ²⁴

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.

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:

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 are capable of performing to make a name for themselves.Footnote ²⁶

The Kenites’ Solidarity with Israel

At the beginning of our investigation, we saw that the episode in which Jael assassinates the Canaanite commander appears to have been appended to the prose account in Judges 4. Connected to this episode is a statement that appears earlier in the narration:

This statement interrupts the flow of the story and was likely not part of its original iteration. To understand why a scribe would have added it, we need to consider the introduction to the Jael episode:

This introduction begs a basic question for the readers: In making an alliance with Israel’s enemy, was the house of Heber representative of, or an exception among, the Kenites? The insertion of 4:11 responds by declaring that Heber had “separated from the Kenites” and pitched his tent apart from them. Accordingly, Sisera’s flight to Heber’s camp doesn’t mean that the Kenites as a whole were on the side of Sisera and Jabin.Footnote ¹

Heber’s political associations were not representative of the Kenite population corporately, and in fact they had caused a division within Heber’s own household. The name Heber means “friend” or “ally” in most Semitic languages; in Akkadian, the verb ḫabarum refers to the act of leaving one’s house (i.e., moving to a new political domain).Footnote ² Yet contrary to Heber’s intentions, the alliance he makes with the Canaanites ultimately works in Israel’s favor. As Israel routs the enemy forces, Sisera seeks refuge in Heber’s camp, and it is there that this Canaanite general meets his violent death at the hands of Heber’s own wife.Footnote ³ In executing the general with remarkable finesse and guile, Jael openly opposes her deviant husband and tangibly reaffirms the Kenites’ collective and enduring loyalty to Israel.

Jael’s bravery illustrates, according to these scribes, the solidarity that had long defined the relationship between the Kenites and Israel. In 4:11, an interjected clause describes the Kenites as the “descendants of Hobab, Moses’s father-in-law.” The first chapter of the book contains a verse with similar information:

Within the context of Judges, the line anticipates the material about Jael that was added to the Deborah story; as we shall see, it also represents a piece of an extended narrative that earlier scribes had produced through piecemeal insertions at key points in the exodus-conquest account. Although this narrative originally had nothing to do with the Kenites, it now serves a new purpose: Readers of the nation’s story should understand that the Kenites had long been close allies. During the days of the exodus and wilderness wanderings, Moses had forged a personal bond with their eponymous ancestor, who was none other than his father-in-law. During the conquest and settlement, the Kenites had inherited a portion of the Promised Land with the tribe of Judah. Therefore, by flouting her husband’s political alliance, Jael reaffirmed the Kenites’ long-standing loyalty to the nation.

In the Deborah-Barak story, we can retrace the steps scribes took as they responded to polemical attacks on the Kenites. The prose version of the story has been expanded with a new culminating scene that ingeniously admits a case of Kenite betrayal while simultaneously making it exceptional. Likewise, the song has been augmented with lengthy strophes that go even further: Jael is praised as the “wife of Heber the Kenite,” without anything being said about this man’s ties to the enemy. Jael’s deed is offered here as both illustration and evidence of the special relationship with the Kenites. They are exemplary “friends” of Yhwh (lit. those who love him).Footnote ⁶

The Kenites on the Biblical Landscape

In the book of Judges, the Kenites are descendants of Hobab, Moses’s father-in-law. Describing Israel’s departure from Sinai (or “the Mountain of Yhwh”), the book of Numbers presents Moses approaching Hobab with a petition that he join them as their guide through the wilderness. Yet in this account, Hobab is designated as the son of Moses’s father-in-law, who here is called “Reuel the Midianite” (Num. 10:29–32). In addition to being the name of one of Esau’s sons and thus a prominent figure in the Edomite genealogy (Gen. 36),Footnote ⁷ Reuel appears in the tale of Moses’s flight from Egypt, where he bears the title “the Midianite priest” (Exod. 2:11–22). The sequel to that episode is the story of the burning bush, and there he is called by yet another name: Jethro.

Over the centuries, interpreters have offered various solutions to the confusion of these three names, an issue that does not merit our attention here. What’s more important for our purposes is how our texts conceive of the Kenites as descendants from the family of Moses’s wife and thus related to the Midianites. Strangely, other biblical texts provide little in the way of support for a historical relationship between the Kenites and the Midianites. The reason for this fact is that the identification of the Kenites as descendants of Moses’s Midianite in-laws has really little, if anything, to do with the Midianites; rather, it represents a clever scribal attempt to connect the Kenites’ story to the nation’s narrative by linking them to none other than the founder’s own family.

The origins of the Kenites are treated in a genealogy that later scribes connected to the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4). The name “Cain” (qayin) and the ethnonym “Kenite” (qêynî) are closely related.Footnote ⁸ The Semitic root is related to “forge” and “metalworker” in Arabic, Syriac, and Palmyrene. In the description of Cain’s progeny, one of his descendants, named Tubal-cain, is honored as the father of metallurgy, “a smith of all kinds of bronze and iron tools” (Gen. 4:22). The genealogy also ascribes to the Kenites’ ancestors a number of technological and cultural achievements. In addition to being a pioneer in agriculture, Cain builds the first city (Gen. 4:17; agricultural innovations indeed paved the way for urbanism), and his offspring are identified as the first nomadic herders, musicians, and smiths (Gen. 4:20–22).

In the context of Genesis, the Kenite genealogy paints these Promethean achievements in dark tones. The metallurgical innovations served, not least, the needs of warfare. (The word qayin can also mean spear.) Cain murders his brother and, as consequence, is doomed to a vagabond existence.Footnote ⁹ Like their eponymous ancestor, the Kenites are depicted as nomads in biblical texts. The authors of Genesis may not have intended that their readers attribute these characteristics to the Kenites of their own time, since the flood destroys the antediluvian population; the flood story may have been added subsequently, however.Footnote ¹⁰ Whatever the case may be, the genealogy serves the needs of the narrative, which portrays the gradual emergence of human civilization characterized by the tragic dichotomy between technological progress and a propensity for violence.

The Kenites make an appearance in the “Story of David’s Rise” in the book of Samuel, which tells how the Judean king spends his early days as a warlord providing protection and robbing marauders of the wealth they had seized. Three of the regions in which he and his men roam are the Negeb of Judah, the Negeb of the Jerahmeelites, and the Negeb of the Kenites (1 Sam. 27:10). In order to win the favor of those who could make him king, David behaves like a mafioso and shares “the spoils of the enemies of Yhwh” with his people. These enemies include “the towns of the Jerahmeelites and the towns of the Kenites” (1 Sam. 30:29). The next episode in this older narrative portrays David and his men moving to the Hebron, where he is made king over the federation he had created, designated “the House of Judah” (2 Sam. 2:1–4). This narrative implies that the Kenites were the enemies of the Judean population that appointed David to be their king.

I discuss these texts and the process of Judah’s consolidation elsewhere.Footnote ¹¹ Many of the populations that formed the kingdom of Judah continued to play a key role in the centuries that followed, and the narrative of David’s rise and reign reflects not the actual origins so much as (early) dynamics and political concerns in the kingdom after David’s reign. The Kenites may, accordingly, have been a population that the historical David plundered on his way to kingship. However, the reference to them may indicate only that they were a political issue in Judah at the time when scribes were composing the account. In the latter scenario, it’s noteworthy that the scribes, presumably working for the palace in Jerusalem, used a form of war commemoration when polemicizing against them. Instead of the allies of Israel and friends of Yhwh, they are remembered here as outsiders opposing the nation’s hero as he used his private army to carve out a kingdom in the Judean desert.Footnote ¹²

The Bible refers frequently to many little-known population groups; as a rough-and-ready rule, one can posit that the frequency with which these populations are mentioned is indirectly related to the degree to which they were integrated and assimilated into the larger political communities of Israel and Judah. In the case of Judah, some peoples, such as the Jerahmeelites, are mentioned very rarely, and the likely reason for their low profile is that they were fully absorbed into Judah, gradually relinquishing their identity as a distinctive clan. If we hear about the Kenites more than the Jerahmeelites, it’s because the Kenites either struggled longer to maintain a distinct identity, were more important as a population, and/or presented more obstacles to their integration.Footnote ¹³

The image of the Kenites as indigenous outsiders who must be subjugated is found not only in the story of David’s rise to power. In the Abraham account in the book of Genesis, Yhwh makes a covenant with the patriarch, promising his offspring a vast stretch of land from Egypt to the Euphrates. This land is occupied by ten peoples whom Abraham’s descendants would have to dispossess, and the Kenites are the first group in this list (Gen. 15:18–21).Footnote ¹⁴

A more vociferous attack on the Kenites is found in the Balaam account from the book of Numbers. Balaam is hired by King Balak of Moab, together with the elders of Midian, to pronounce a curse on Israel (see the discussion in Chapter 1). At the end of the account, the seer finally delivers the long-awaited imprecation, but it is directed solely at Israel’s enemies, which include the Amalekites and the Kenites:

The language plays on the consonance of Cain or Kenite (qāyin/qênî) and “your nest” (qinnekā); as noted, the name Cain/Kenite can also mean smith, which matches the fate of this population being purged/burned. It’s remarkable that the curse of the Kenites is twice as long as that of the Amalekites, even though the latter are the most despised of Israel’s enemies in the Bible.Footnote ¹⁵

From Saul to Moses

The association of the Kenites with the Amalekites is reflected also in 1 Samuel 15, which presents Saul going to war with the latter. What motivates his bellicosity is a war memory from the earliest days of the nation, when Israelite refugees were making their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. The Amalekites attacked them when they were most vulnerable, and now that Israel has finally, after many centuries, become strong, Saul intends to exact revenge on the Amalekites.

As the troops of Israel approach “the city of Amalek” and are about to wreak carnage on its inhabitants, Saul sends a message to the Kenites, who were living in their midst:

The Kenites deserve special protection because, in contrast to the Amalekites, they demonstrated ḥesed (loyalty, hospitality, generosity) to the Israelites when they were making their way from Egypt to Canaan.

The Pentateuch records the belligerent actions of the Amalekites after the exodus from Egypt, yet what about the Kenites and their act of ḥesed? Where is that “memory” recorded? In Part I, we saw that a number of texts negotiate relations with Israel’s neighbors (the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and others) by reporting their responses to Israel’s conventional petitions for permission to pass through their lands. Thus, in the books of Deuteronomy and Nehemiah, the Ammonites and Moabites are barred from the “congregation of Yhwh” because they failed to meet Israel with bread and water in the wilderness (Deut. 23:4–5; Neh. 13:1–3). While a number of texts relate to the hospitality/belligerence displayed by the various peoples whom Israel encountered in the wilderness, we search in vain for one that describes interactions with the Kenites.

It’s entirely conceivable that the authors of 1 Samuel 15 used allusion to concoct an ad hoc memory that affirms the Kenites’ historic loyalty to Israel. After all, the cases of Deuteronomy and Nehemiah cited above fabricate wartime memories for two other peoples – the Ammonites and the Moabites – in an effort to disqualify them from cultic rights and societal privileges, while other texts flatly contradict this memory in an effort to present these neighbors in a more favorable light.

However, in light of the connections between the Kenites and the Midianites that we observed in the figure of Moses’s father-in-law, it seems more likely that the authors of the Saul account intended that their readers (re-)interpret several “Midianite” accounts as illustrations of the ḥesed the Kenites manifested to Israel. When Moses flees from the Egyptian court into the wilderness, the figure of Reuel, “the priest of Midian,” performs exemplary hospitality by feeding him, convincing him to stay with him, and extending to him the hand of one of his seven daughters (Exod. 2:16–22). Later, after Israel had escaped from the Egyptians and was encamped at “the Mountain of God,” this same figure, now called Jethro, travels to meet his son-in-law (Exod. 18). The account of their warm reunion comes directly on the heels of the story of the Amalekites attacking Israel. Along with Aaron and the elders of Israel, Jethro and Moses enjoy a covenantal meal, with Jethro bringing burnt offerings and sacrifices to God. In what appears to be a supplementary section (vv. 13–26), Jethro advises Moses to establish a system of judges to alleviate the burden of adjudicating Israel’s disputes.Footnote ¹⁷

It’s important to distinguish here between what the authors of 1 Samuel 15 intended their readers to understand and the interpretation of these Pentateuchal texts on their own terms. The latter do not refer to Moses’s in-laws as “Kenites,” and the Kenites likely had little, if any, historical relationship to the Midianites. When critical scholars today use these texts to reconstruct the history of Israelite-Kenite relations, they are simply following the suggestion of the biblical scribes and harmonizing competing texts. To study Israel’s ethnogenesis in a careful manner, we must appreciate the political dimensions of the scribal discourse in our sources. The participants in this discourse were less concerned to provide an accurate account of the past; instead, they were answering such basic questions as: Who belongs to the people of Israel? Who are our friends? Who are our foes? They routinely addressed these questions by creating new texts and reworking older ones as a way of creating memories of a given group’s loyalty (or betrayal) in times of conflict. In this case, they honored the Kenites by linking their story to that of Moses’s illustrious father-in-law, a Midianite who plays a pivotal role in Israel’s emergence as a nation as it made its way from Egypt to the Promised Land.

Fellow Travelers

The book of Exodus presents Moses ultimately sending his father-in-law away to “his own country” (Exod. 18:27).Footnote ¹⁸ The only ones who remain with Israel are Jethro’s daughter and the two sons she bore to Moses. Yet as the narrative progresses, we get a different view: In the book of Numbers, this man – now called “Hobab, son of Reuel the Midianite” (see Judg. 4:11) – is still with Israel as they are camped at Sinai. Moses now implores him to accompany Israel as they voyage to their new homeland: “Come with us, and we will be sure to show you favor, for Yhwh has declared favor toward Israel” (Num. 10:29). The offer is initially declined: “I will not go [with you], but will go instead to my own country and native land” (cf. Exod. 18:27). Moses doesn’t allow this to be the final word: “Please do not abandon us, for you know where we should camp in the wilderness and can be our guide (lit. eyes). If you come with us, we will be sure to extend the same favor that Yhwh grants us!” (Num. 10:30–32). The petition implies that Hobab’s clan will inherit a portion of the Promised Land.

The following lines (Num. 10:33–36) describe the departure, with the cloud of Yhwh and the ark of Yhwh’s covenant guiding Israel to its encampments. Since Hobab’s response is not provided, many scholars assume that something has been deleted; however, the account likely presupposes the statements in Judges, which affirm that the descendants of Moses’s father-in-law, now identified explicitly as “Kenites,” did indeed become fellow travelers with Israel. This is the only instance in which an outside group joins the nation after it leaves Egypt.Footnote ¹⁹ During the conquest of Canaan, the Kenites fought alongside the tribe of Judah and inherited a portion of the land with them. Accordingly, the account in Numbers implies that Hobab acquiesced, taking his place near the cloud and ark at the front of the camp.Footnote ²⁰

The promise Moses makes to Hobab sounds like an invitation to join the Israelite fold. As Jacob Milgrom pointed out, the language is covenantal and as such may be compared to the description of the treaty sacrifices and commensality between Jethro, Aaron, and the elders of Israel in Exodus 18.Footnote ²¹ As with Rahab, the favor Hobab shows Israel is eventually repaid to his descendants in the form of rights to settle in the Negeb of Arad “among the people.” The directly preceding lines (Judg. 1:10–15) tell how the Calebite clan came to possess a prized portion of the Promised Land, also in the Negeb, as a reward for the martial valor of its eponymous ancestor.Footnote ²²

By creating memories of early encounters with outsiders, the biblical scribes made a case for a political posture toward the group in question. As we saw in Part I, many of these memories relate to the nation’s future neighbors; in this case, the memory relates to a group that became fellow travelers with the nation. All these texts are not easily assigned to the conventional documentary sources, especially if they are assumed to have originated independently of each other.Footnote ²³ The memories betray not only knowledge of each other; they also directly engage and challenge each other, exemplifying the combative character of war commemoration in which rival groups negotiate belonging and status in their communities by constructing competing memories of wartime loyalty and betrayal.

Thus, we see how a group of biblical scribes, by means of an extended history of supplementation, affirmed a special relationship with the Kenites by linking them to Moses’s own in-laws.Footnote ²⁴ Writing in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods, the authors of Chronicles grafted the Kenites onto Israel’s family tree. Instead of joining Israel along the way, the Kenites are, according to this work, descendants of the illustrious Calebites, related to the devout Rechabites, and include scribal families who lived in the town of Jabez (1 Chron. 2:55).Footnote ²⁵ Rejecting this positive posture, other scribes cast hostile aspersions on this people, as we observed in both the promise to Abraham and the curse of Balaam. Here again, we see how biblical war commemoration is not only a decentralized discourse but also a relentlessly disputatious one.

Devotion to a Deity

According to a line of rabbinic interpretation, scripture refers to Jethro as “Hobab” after his visit to Moses because he “embraced” Israel’s God. Since the place where he appeared is called the “Mountain of God,” Jethro must have undergone a change of heart upon learning about Israel’s experience in Egypt. The biblical text states that “Jethro rejoiced for all the good that Yhwh had done for Israel in delivering them from the Egyptians” (Exod. 18:9). Concluding his blessing, he makes a broad declaration: “Now I know that Yhwh is greater than all gods” (Exod. 18:10–11). Thereafter, he performs sacrifices and breaks bread with Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel “in the presence of God.” These biblical statements prompted the rabbis to search for other clues showing that he underwent the formal rites of conversion. They discovered a deeper meaning in the root of the Hebrew word describing Jethro’s reaction (“and he rejoiced,” wayyiḥad), taking it to mean either that he circumcised himself with a “sharp” knife or that he proclaimed the “oneness” of Israel’s deity.Footnote ²⁶

Many modern scholars have adopted the opposite approach: instead of Jethro embracing Israel’s God, Israel embraced Jethro’s God. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and persisting to the present, scholars have invoked these texts in support of the so-called Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis. Jethro’s affirmation, “Now I know that Yhwh is greater than all gods,” is taken to mean that this Midianite-Kenite priest is asserting that the deity he had long venerated and served (i.e., Yhwh) was indeed the greatest of all gods. This interpretation of the biblical text is highly problematic, yet some inscriptional evidence from Egypt does suggest that the veneration of Yhwh originated among proto-Arabian tribes east and west of the Arabah and the Gulf of Aqaba.Footnote ²⁷ The matter is beyond the scope of our study; it suffices for the present to recognize that the assumption of connection between the Kenites and Midianites rests on late supplements to the book of Judges and has little to do with a historical relationship between these groups.

This double-sided history of interpretation – with the rabbis, on the one side, reading the account as a description of Jethro’s conversion, and modern scholars, on the other side, constructing theories like the Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis – is a result of the manner in which these texts negotiate matters of national belonging.

In the case of Rahab, we saw in Part III how scribes supplemented her deeds with words acclaiming the superiority of Israel’s national deity. With respect to Jethro, notice the supplementary character of the passage (Exod. 18:8–11) in which this figure rejoices over the favor that Yhwh showed the nation and then declares this deity to be greater than all others.Footnote ²⁸ The rest of the account uses the generic term for god (ʿelōhîm), while only this passage refers to Yhwh.Footnote ²⁹ This passage has much in common with Numbers 10:29–32, where Moses petitions his father-in-law to accompany them to the Promised Land. (For example, both texts highlight the “good” Yhwh does for Israel.) The addition of Exodus 18:8–11 serves a much wider narrative arc, yet its author apparently deemed this to be the best place to present Jethro acknowledging Yhwh’s supremacy. Another large supplement to the chapter goes a step further, presenting Jethro as one who not only acknowledges that Yhwh is greater than all gods but also recognizes the importance of divine laws and statutes.Footnote ³⁰

Thus, we again see how biblical scribes added theological words to political deeds, pointing to a particular deity as both the emblem and the source of the nation’s unity. Israel may consist of rival communities and regions, each with their own history and tradition; nevertheless, they can be one people if they remain devoted to one god and his one law.

Jael as a Kenite and a Jew

The various strands of our study coalesce in the character of Jael. Like Rahab, Jael is an archetype of the marginalized outsider. As a woman, she is left back in her tent while the men take part in a military campaign. As a tent-dwelling nomad, she pursues an existence on the periphery of society. And as a member of the Kenites, her allegiance is in doubt. She surmounts the obstacles presented by her identity not by circumventing them, but rather by wielding them to her advantage.

The depiction of the murder plays on markers of her identity as a Kenite woman: just as she transforms her personal domestic confines into a battlefield, the milk she feeds Sisera and the tent peg and hammer she brandishes as weapons fuse the characteristic features of her nomadic people who dwell in tents, herd flocks, and forge metal objects.Footnote ³¹ We noted the Kenites’ violent associations in a number of biblical texts, beginning with Cain’s murder of his brother, and these associations may make themselves felt in the characterization of Jael. If so, the author would be introducing a twist on the Kenites’ putative capacity for violence: Jael directs this aggression not against Israel, but against the nation’s enemies.

Because Jael courageously and creatively exploits her distinctive qualities, she is honored in the Song of Deborah with the remarkable approbation: “Most blessed of women is Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. Of tent-dwelling women she is most blessed” (Judg. 5:24).Footnote ³² For early readers, this glowing praise provoked questions that are taken up in rabbinic sources: Does Jael deserve more praise than Deborah? Is she more blessed than the nation’s greatest matriarchs such as Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah, who were also tent dwellers (Gen. 18:9, 24:67, 31:33)? Although one should perhaps not make too much of the song’s hyperbole, the text contains clues as to what makes her case so special: she is not an Israelite, yet she risks her life on the behalf of the nation and thereby violates the political allegiances of her husband (Judg. 4:17). Responding to these questions, Rabbi Eliezer points out that the matriarchs of Genesis deserve praise since they gave birth to Israel, yet the nation (their children) would have ceased to exist had it not been for Jael’s valorous deeds.Footnote ³³

A strophe from the Song of Deborah begins “in the days of Shamgar ben Anat, in the days of Jael.” Throughout the book of Judges, the expression “in the days of” consistently denotes the discrete era in which a particular Israelite deliverer/judge governs. Likewise, the story of Ruth begins “in the days when the judges governed.” On the basis of this text, Ruth Rabbah and other rabbinic sources identify Jael as not only an Israelite but also as a full-fledged “judge” like Deborah and Gideon.

When the rabbis defend Jael’s identity as an Israelite, they do so by arguing that she complied closely with Jewish law: if she “went out” of her tent to greet Sisera, it’s because the war was a milḥemet mitzvah (an obligatory war), when “all go out to war, even the groom leaves his chamber and the bride her chuppah”). An Aramaic translation (the Targum Yerushalmi) inserts right before Judges 5:26 that Jael “fulfilled that which is written in the Teaching of Moses: ‘Weaponry of a man shall not be on a woman neither shall a man wear a woman’s garment.’ Therefore she reached for the tent peg.” Here the translator refers to Deuteronomy 22:5 and the prohibition of “Lo Yilbash,” which forbids women to bear the “weapons of men” (kelî-gever). If Jael used milk, a peg, and a hammer, instead of conventional weaponry, it must have been, according to this line of reasoning, because she strives to comport herself in keeping with the Torah.Footnote ³⁴

In these ways, Jewish interpreters added a new dimension to the societal expectations of women in wartime that we surveyed in Chapter 13. Their creative interpretations illustrate what we have repeatedly observed about biblical war commemoration – namely, that it gradually assumed a more pronounced theological disposition. In Part II, we witnessed how scribes expanded a narrative about kinship by affirming the deity and a body of divine, written law as the foundation of national unity and belonging. In the stories of Jael and the Kenites, the principles of kinship and divine law coalesce, and while this coalescence reaches a zenith in the postbiblical imagination, it’s on display already in the work of the anonymous scribes who connected Jael and her people to the remarkable stories of Moses’s father-in-law.

Fighting for the King: War Commemoration in the Ancient Near East

The biblical narrative presents the nation of Israel naturally evolving from a family into an extended clan and eventually into a full-fledged nation. What makes the nation is first and foremost procreation, not political negotiation. However, when we examine the seams in this narrative, we can see how its authors used war commemoration to construct Israel’s national identity from originally separate groups and regions long before they were grafted onto the nation’s family tree. In the framework of this narrative, scribes affirmed that a given group belongs to the people of Israel, or denied their membership, by reporting how its members discharged, or dodged, their duties in major war efforts and battles. War commemoration thus served as a means of both demarcating the contours of the nation and defining the status of its members. The biblical narrative grew gradually through a process of successive supplementation over centuries, and our study has situated the genesis of this narrative in relation to the commemorative activities through which political communities have long negotiated their identities.

When we take a step back and consider the larger picture, we can’t help but wonder about similar projects of war commemoration and nation-making in the ancient Near East. What do we know about parallel moves in neighboring societies of the Levant, Egypt, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia? As we will see, many ancient Near Eastern monuments affirm allegiance through wartime service and sacrifice, yet they do so in the name of rulers and dynastic houses, not on behalf of populations and political communities. As strategies of statecraft, they differ substantially from the national commemoration that we find in the Hebrew Bible and in the memorial cultures of modern nation-states.Footnote ¹

The typical Near Eastern war monument focuses on the king. The armed forces that partake in the fighting are conceived of as an extension of the right arm of both the ruler and the deity under whose aegis he fights. The point is often expressed in Neo-Assyrian art by depicting the king, larger than life, attacking a city with outstretched bow and a symbol of the state deity portrayed in the same pose hovering above him. A similar expression of monarchic singularity is found in Egyptian art: the pharaoh rides alone in his chariot, with the reigns tied around his waist and an outstretched bow in his arms; he is completely self-sufficient, requiring neither charioteer nor weapon bearer.Footnote ² We know that this riding technique was never actually practiced; the representation serves rather to communicate the matchless sovereignty of the king and the state he embodies.Footnote ³

Naturally, vassals and allies who had offered their military service to the throne would have been keen to draw attention in various ways to their sacrifice and contributions – not only in the hope of receiving a larger share of the war spoils but also with the aim of affirming their loyalty to the palace and laying claim to privileges and honors. Neo-Assyrian reliefs from the reigns of Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal show soldiers standing next to piles of decapitated enemy heads on the battlefield and receiving commemorative jewelry (manacles, bracelets) and other rewards. While these monuments memorialize wartime contributions, they rarely do so on behalf of a particular population or community. The message they send relates rather to the honors and material compensation that the state awards to soldiers (and the armed forces they represent) in recognition of their valorous service to the king.Footnote ⁴

For Assyrian as well as Achaemenid armies, various sources reveal that royal officials kept records of soldierly prowess and exceptional contributions on military campaigns. These records were not public inscriptions for purposes of political-collective commemoration; rather, they are documents that the crown, in keeping with the principle of Wissensmonopol, deemed worthy of preservation and to which only a select few were allowed access.Footnote ⁵

What can we say then about public commemoration? We know that Ashur-etel-ilani, one of the final Assyrian kings, issued decrees conferring honors, property, and tax privileges, along with gifts of colorful robes and golden bracelets, to a number of military commanders who had demonstrated their loyalty to him and had assisted him in laying claim to the throne during a vicious war of succession. One may compare these decrees to the Behistun Inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius, which at several points pays tribute to the names of a commander who rendered exceptional service on a military campaign or to six of the king’s “followers” who assisted him in his rise to power. In the case of the latter, Darius calls on his successors to protect the families of these men. Artaxerxes III is said to have bestowed gifts, honors, and titles upon Mentor, a Rhodian soldier, for contributing to the king’s reconquest of Egypt. According to legend, the Persian kings granted gold regularly to Persian women of Pasargadae for their role in Cyrus’s victory over the Medes. The Egyptian records are especially rich in this regard: inscriptions and deposits in private tombs allow us to retrace the careers of military officers as they rise in the ranks and receive military decorations along with public honors.Footnote ⁶

Closer to the land of Israel, an Anatolian king from the late eighth century set up a funerary monument that commemorates the great deeds of his father Panamuwa II. From his account, we learn that his father had served as a loyal vassal to the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III, and that when he was killed on the battlefield, the Assyrian king formally mourned his death and set up a memorial in his honor. A similar expression of service and reward is found in a mid-fifth-century funerary inscription from Sidon on the Lebanese coast; in it Eshmun-azar, king of Sidon, reports that “the lord of kings (ʿdn mlkm) gave us Dor and Joppa, and the rich grainlands in the Sharon Plain, as a reward for the mighty deeds I had done.”

One could point to other examples. However, what we don’t find in the societies of ancient Western Asia and Egypt is a culture of war commemoration through which communities collectively negotiated belonging and status in relation to a people. The biblical materials we’ve studied in this book commemorate the contributions and sacrifices of communities in relation to a national body (Israel); in contrast, the materials discovered in Mesopotamia and Egypt are fixated on rulers and their dynastic successors.Footnote ⁷

Saving Holy Hellas: War Commemoration in the East Aegean World

While we search in vain for ancient Near Eastern analogies to our biblical texts, we discover more decentralized, demotic forms of war commemoration in the ancient Aegean world. Greek city-states, and the classes within their societies, jockeyed with each other for power and privilege by constructing memories of extraordinary wartime service. The media for these memories range from paintings and physical monuments to works of drama and narrative histories.

Greek war commemoration has a long history; in Chapter 12, we noted the parallels between the Song of Deborah and the Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad. Yet some of the most important materials for study originated after the Persian Wars (499–449 BCE), when Greek city-states sought in various ways to draw attention to the pivotal roles they claim to have played in key battles, such as Thermopylae or Salamis. Thus, an epitaph ascribed to the lyric poet Simonides is said to have read:

This full two-couplet version is known only from later literary sources; fragments of the first couplet were found on a marble tablet discovered in 1895 in Salamis, which likely stood on the grave of the Corinthians who died in the sea battle (480 BCE). Despite its archaicizing script, the stela was likely erected long after the battle. The second couplet may represent an instance of inscriptions being expanded in the literary tradition; if so, the pan-Hellenic perspective (“saved holy Greece”) was not found in the original.

Herodotus reports that Corinth, already at an early point in the battle, panicked and retreated, returning only after victory was certain. This version of the story was still being circulated a century after the events. As most agree, Herodotus is here informed by an Athenian source that reflects a bias resulting from growing tensions with Corinth. A more reliable tradition claims that the Athenians allowed Corinth to set up the stela for its war dead on the island.Footnote ⁸

Other forms of commemoration of Corinthian contributions are known. At the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, there was supposedly a painting that portrayed women praying that their men may be roused to demonstrate exceptional valor; it was accompanied by a dedicatory epigram:

Many of these sources are cited by Plutarch in his essay “On the Malignity of Herodotus” as alleged proof of the subject’s prejudice. Not only is their authenticity problematic, but some may have nothing to do with the battle of Salamis. Even so, subsequent tradition, beginning long before Plutarch, collected these epigrams as evidence of Corinthian wartime sacrifice and contributions.

One of the monuments at Thermopylae commemorated the bravery of the Locrians, a population that later joined the Persian side. In response to doubts about their loyalty to Greece, the inscription proclaimed, “Opus, the mother-city of the Locrians with their just laws, laments these men who died fighting the Medes on behalf of holy Hellas.”

An example of a monument that salutes the contributions of multiple allied communities is the famous Serpent Column. Originally erected in Delphi and later moved to Constantinople, it lists the names of thirty-one (city-)states that contributed to the Persian War. The name of the Tenians was inscribed later, while five communities, including the Locrians, are conspicuously absent.

Other monuments, as well as works of historiography and drama, illustrate how population groups and social classes within the city-states used war commemoration in a manner strikingly similar to that of the biblical authors (and modern nation-states) – namely, to negotiate belonging and status in a larger political community.

Aeschylus’s Persians (472 BCE) furnishes an important testimony. Although the navy was responsible for the momentous victory at Salamis, the play asserts that the real strength of Athens is its hoplite infantry, representing the propertied class of “citizen-soldiers.” That the land battle was actually comparatively insignificant is suggested by the short shrift it receives later from Herodotus. It’s possible, however, that Herodotus may already have been influenced by a more democratic naval perspective, which had a vested interest in identifying Salamis as the pivotal battle in the Persian Wars. Since the Greek tragedian was writing so early after Salamis, the poorer citizen rowers may not yet have succeeded in making their voices heard in Athens.

After the battle of Salamis came to be recognized as the decisive moment in the Persian Wars, other classes claimed a share of the responsibility. As explained in The Athenian Constitution (attributed to Aristotle), the Areopagus Council, representing the highest classes, deserved the credit for the victory. Against this elitist claim, the thetes (serfs with only a small amount of property) seized on the memory of Salamis for their own interests. To bolster their newfound self-confidence, and to justify their claims to a larger piece of the political pie, they reminded others of the part they had played in the emergence of Athens as a hegemonic power.Footnote ¹⁰

The Athenian democracy was sired in a vigorous tug-of-war-commemoration, with various factions claiming rights and honors by appealing to a record of exceptional wartime contributions. As today, conservatives were wary of the “identity politics” that were reshaping their society.

Thus, in Aristophanes’s play The Knights, an old man named Demos represents “the people” who won the great victories at Salamis and Marathon (lines 781–785). Whereas the parabasis of this play (lines 576–580) allows the equestrians (or knights, hippeis) to claim for themselves “the defense of the city, gratis, nobly, and for the national gods as well,” his other works designate the men of the top rowing bench, where the citizens were stationed, “saviors of the city” (see Acharnians, lines 162–163; Wasps, lines 908–909).

The Knights pokes fun at a situation in which every social group sought to improve its political and social status by claiming an indispensable role in defending the community. Portraying the absurdity of this political contest, the play has the equestrian chorus lauding the wartime contributions of their horses, who seize the role of the democratic rowers:

War commemoration from the Aegean world has much in common with the incessant wrangling that characterizes political life in modern democracies. From the cited examples, one can see how it was conducted to negotiate status for social classes within Greek city-states as well as between city-states that considered themselves to be part of a larger (yet poorly defined) political community (e.g., “holy Hellas”). In contrast, biblical war commemoration is central to a project of peoplehood, whose architects were designing a national identity. Nevertheless, the parallels between Greek and biblical war commemoration are much closer than what we find in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.

From Athens to Jerusalem

We’ve seen that ancient Near Eastern war commemoration is decidedly king-focused. How then are we to explain the presence of demotic, decentralized war commemoration in the Bible and classical Greek sources? The question is complex, but two factors merit attention here: 1) the different character of statehood in the rocky terrain of the Aegean region and in the highlands of the southern Levant; 2) the appeal to a collective political entity (“Israel” or “Greece”) that was not coterminous with a single state or political power.

According to the Weberian notion of Gewaltmonopol, the state is a political community with a demarcated geographical territory and a monopoly of legitimate force (Gewalt). Yet as Mogens Hansen has observed, even major European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would fail to meet the criterion of Gewaltmonopol.Footnote ¹² The same applies even more to the ancient world. In the southern Levant throughout the Late Bronze Age and much of the Iron Age, states continued to compete with private armies (what Nadav Naʼaman calls “Ḫabiru-like bands”), which correspond to sea pirates in the East Aegean.Footnote ¹³ The exceptional cases in the ancient world are the imperial forces that emerged in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, where strong centralized states witnessed more success in monopolizing force and curbing dissent.

Vincent Gabrielsen argues that in order to maintain Charles Tilly’s maxim that “states make war and war makes states,” one would have to expand the definition of state to include polities in which legitimate force exists within a more pluralistic (or oligopolistic) rather than one that is monopolistic.Footnote ¹⁴ That the monopolistic system was not the norm in the Aegean world had a lot to do with geography. The hilly terrain and countless islands impeded the efforts of any state to achieve a level of centralization comparable to that of the territorial states in the large flat basins of the Nile delta and Mesopotamia. A modern analogy is the difference between France and Switzerland: the first is highly centralized, with Paris as the focus of national life, while the latter is extraordinarily decentralized, with its twenty-six cantons, each having its own constitution, legislature, government, and courts.Footnote ¹⁵

The states of Israel and Judah never achieved the level of centralization witnessed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. The highlands had always been home to recalcitrant elements (the “Ḫabiru-like bands”) that lowland states and imperial governments struggled to bridle and integrate into their military forces. The same goes for prophetic groups that stood on the periphery and that often eluded the efforts of the king to lure these groups to the courts, where an eye could be kept on them.Footnote ¹⁶

The states that emerged in the Iron Age faced many hurdles in maintaining control of the periphery as they expanded from the hill country into the Jezreel Valley, Galilee, the Transjordan, and the Shephelah, as well as into the Judean hills and the Negev. The number of putsches, dynasties, and shifting capitals reveals that the central highland states encountered great difficulties in achieving a Gewaltmonopol over other territories. This situation likely led to greater autonomy, diversity of political actors, dissent, and competition, which are expressed in the range of rival war memories (and prophetic antagonism) that characterize biblical literature.

But what was perhaps more decisive was the second factor: the appeal to a collective political entity (“Israel” or “sacred Greece”) that was not coterminous with a single state or political power. In the Aegean world, there had long existed central institutions and cultic sites serving a plurality of communities, yet it was the Persian Wars that were to catalyze a more robust sense of Greek identity. The assault by the Achaemenid armies forced Greek political communities to unite, even if recent scholarship is correct in insisting that this unification was ad hoc and, in most instances, failed to run very deeply. During the later Peloponnesian Wars, Athens and its competitors would vie for hegemony by claiming to have played the most significant role in the resistance against Persian imperial encroachment.

For biblical Israel, the situation is similar but also different. Many scholars begin with the (often unspoken) assumption that a primordial sense of kinship had long united the populations that later inhabited the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. While this assumption may not be completely unfounded, it is difficult to prove. What originally was more important than a primordial sense of kinship were the appeals by Israel’s and Judah’s kings to a collective identity as they sought to consolidate the diverse populations of their states. We can observe similar political dynamics in the neighboring kingdom of Moab during the reign of Mesha.Footnote ¹⁷ Like the Aegean heroes who claimed to have “saved holy Hellas,” these Levantine kings claimed to have “saved” their peoples in wars with their common foes, and a common designation for rulers in Israel and Judah was “savior” (môšîa‘), corresponding to a popular epithet for Hellenistic rulers (sōtēr).

Yet even these appeals by the royal courts of Israel and Judah are of minimal significance compared to the efforts of the biblical scribes who were working after the downfall of their kingdoms. The war commemoration that we find in the Bible is more national in character than what we witness in Greek sources, and the reason for this difference is “the long seventh century,” stretching from the fall of the Northern kingdom of Israel in 722 to the fall of the Southern kingdom of Judah in 587 BCE. Israel’s defeat paved the way for Judah, which had long felt Israel’s direct political and cultural influence, to seize upon, and strengthen, a national discourse that appears to have emerged first in Israel.

After the defeat of their kingdom, scribes from Israel appear to have drafted the earliest iterations of the patriarchal stories and the exodus-conquest narrative. These literary productions are not only focused on the North; they also diminish the role played by the monarchy in the formative moments of Israel’s history. Meanwhile, scribes working at the Judean court in the South drafted narratives that asserted the divine right of David and his dynasty to rule Israel. The nation transcends its (existing) territorial borders in these narratives, and on this point the statist agenda of the Southern scribes agreed with the stories of peoplehood that their Northern counterparts were composing in the years after Israel’s defeat.Footnote ¹⁸

The contest between these two perspectives – between the people-focused productions from the North and the palace-focused productions from the South – marks the point of departure for the biblical project. The resistance of Northern scribes to the monarchic program of the Davidic throne precipitated deeper reflection on the nature of peoplehood, and when the Davidic throne finally met its demise, the power of the Northern perspective proved itself to the vanquished of Judah. Southern scribes would later combine the accounts to create the extensive narrative of the nation, extending from the creation of the world to the destruction of Jerusalem. This new narrative includes the history of the monarchy, but in a heavily reworked form that demonstrates both its potential and its problems.

The prophets promised the reestablishment of “the fallen booth of David” (Amos 9:11), but no one really knew when that would happen. In the meantime, the nation might survive if its members joined in solidarity, both in their homeland and abroad in the diaspora. And one of the ways in which this solidarity expressed itself was by commemorating the contributions of rival communities in the major wars that shaped the nation’s history.

What’s most significant about biblical war commemoration is that it was done in the framework of a single, yet highly composite, national narrative. In Greece, communities made discrete monuments for themselves on the land they occupied; the biblical scribes, in contrast, engaged in commemorative activities by making supplements to a collaborative, literary monument, which was simultaneously a “portable homeland.” More than this, their commemorative activities honored the contributions of others, including both ethnicity and gender (Jael, Rahab, Esau, Jethro, etc.). Inspired by a vision of unity between North and South, the purview of their narrative reaches from the Gibeonites in the west to the Transjordanians in the east.

Back to Wellhausen and the Nation

In the Introduction, I situated our study of war commemoration and national identity in relation to the work of Julius Wellhausen, who was a torchbearer of modern biblical research and whose incisive studies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continue to shape the way in which we, as scholars, view both the origins and objectives of biblical literature. According to Wellhausen, the armies of the world’s first empires not only conquered the kingdoms of ancient Israel; they also destroyed Israel’s national identity. What emerged from the ashes of defeat was not a new form of peoplehood, but “an unpolitical and artificial construct” called Judaism.

Wellhausen was convinced that “God works more powerfully in the history of nations than in church history.”Footnote ¹⁹ Deeply discontent with the Christianity of his day, he took aim at the church by identifying it as the “heritage of Judaism.” Christianity represents, in his historical scheme, the culmination of a protracted process by which the once thriving nation of Israel devolved into “a mere religious community” that relinquished all political affairs to foreign governments. The separation of church and state, of sacred and secular, may have some value, he claims, but it’s inherently artificial and inferior to the ideal symbiosis of religious and national life.

In good Protestant fashion, Wellhausen argued his points exegetically, even if the critical quality of his exegesis led to a break with the theological faculty over the course of his career.Footnote ²⁰ His aim was to repristinate older sources and layers, and he did so by isolating later sources and accretions whose putative fixation on cultic matters now obscure the text’s original elegance. What is old in the text, according to Wellhausen, is natural and national, while what is late is abstract and unpolitical.

The findings of our study seriously undermine this polarity. We’ve seen how even the latest layers of biblical literature engage in war commemoration as they negotiate various aspects of Israel’s national identity. The authors of our texts were working not only before but also, and especially, after the downfall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Their aim was to establish a form of peoplehood that could unite and mobilize their communities at a time when colonial powers were beginning to constrict, or already had constricted, the conditions for the nation’s political sovereignty. The biblical corpus grew to its present proportions as scribes composed and collected a wide assortment of texts – from prophecies and proverbs to laments and love-poetry – for the instruction and edification of the nation.

Christian interpreters over the millennia have frequently stripped the biblical texts of their political character, either dismissing its war stories as reflections of a bellicose, “tribal,” pre-Christian people or reading them in terms of a disembodied theology. Our study has shown that a metamorphosis from nation to religion was not the objective of the scribes who composed and reworked these texts. To be sure, matters related to the nation’s deity and its cult figure prominently in advanced stages of the biblical corpus, when the palace no longer stood at the center of public life. But hopes for the reestablishment of the monarchy permeate this corpus. Moreover, after its demise, a body of written laws came to serve as the constitution for this national community, and these laws combine political and religious matters in an inseparable union. The biblical “project of peoplehood” must, accordingly, be appreciated as a political-theological discourse.

Law, Narrative, and Kinship

In the evolution of Israel’s national narrative, we discerned a diachronic shift of emphasis: from kinship to law, with the latter being understood as the will and words of the nation’s deity. This shift should not be confused with a quest for an alternative to national identity. The biblical scribes were not en route to the religious sphere with their backsides bared to their political past, as Wellhausen would have it. If later scribes found kinship limited and inadequate, it’s because families often quarrel. There need to be ideals and a code to which one can appeal when adjudicating disputes, especially when the family comprises many clans and tribes, towns and cities. Hence the law. As a divinely inscribed document to which all members of the nation formally subscribe, it represents a rallying point that simultaneously articulates the rules by which all are to play.

Now we might deem biblical law to be a far cry from an equitable, egalitarian social-political order. If the nation is required to worship a single deity at a single place and in a precise manner, where is there room for the most basic religious freedoms? To be sure, the biblical writers were after something different from the concerns of modern secular democracies. Yet their intellectual efforts deserve our attention, especially since they were engaged in one of the oldest and most elaborate projects of peoplehood.

By appealing to a history of wartime service and sacrifice, kinship, shared laws, and a single deity, the scribes who produced our texts were not seeking, first and foremost, to eliminate communities from the national fold. While they did use war commemoration for the purpose of ostracism, as we saw with the Gibeonites and Meroz, their primary intention was to transcend divisions and to set forth a broader national identity. The developments we’ve studied here are therefore more about inclusion than exclusion. Similarly, the process of canonization was more about the collection and incorporation of texts representing competing traditions and communities, even if it also meant the omission of that which was deemed to be deleterious to a sustainable national identity.

We explored the various ways in which the biblical texts construct bonds of filiation that hold together communities from North and South and from both sides of the Jordan, and we have much to learn from the authors of these texts. They realized that law without a story was ineffective. Thus, the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is followed throughout the narrative by stories that answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” Likewise, the command to “love the stranger” is embedded in a larger narrative that portrays Israel’s origins as a group of refugees who make their way to a new land after escaping bondage; this story of liberation lays the foundation for the law.

The promulgation of law can provoke deep resentment if it does not draw on shared experiences. This is the job of storytelling. Nations need narratives, and perhaps the biggest challenge faced by political communities is finding a way for our members to tell their stories – a way that, by being both honest and inclusive, has the capacity to engender a real sense of kinship and solicitude for our neighbor’s welfare. If there’s anything that the history of ancient Israel and its neighbors can teach us, it’s that without such a narrative, we are doomed to perish.

The Hebrew Bible models a robust and persistent engagement around issues of belonging. Though often wielded in contemporary political debates as if it were a static authority, this corpus of scripture is characterized by lively exchanges from competing perspectives and across generations. Our study of biblical war commemoration has laid bare the textured fabric of these exchanges, with scribes skillfully weaving new materials into the narrative tapestry they inherited from earlier generations.Footnote ²¹

We also witnessed how their war stories frequently feature not only marginalized communities but also women. Although, historically, women may have had a limited hand in actual fighting, their perceptions and interpretations of all aspects of the battle – why it was waged, what its implications are, who deserves responsibility for its outcome, etc. – were often determinative. The political potential of women’s performances, and their roles in memory-making, must be borne in mind when studying not only war commemoration but the formation of biblical literature more broadly.Footnote ²²

Is the biblical model of peoplehood adaptable to the exigencies of modern secular democracies? Perhaps not. But the task at hand is to find new ways of bolstering a sense of kinship, as the biblical authors did in their time. Both then and now, the most powerful means of creating community is to tell stories. At this moment of populistic upheaval – fomented by cynical, corrupt leaders who deem themselves to be above the law – we need narratives that reflect the diversity of our communities, temper the hostility that often characterizes national discourses, and offer tangible reasons why we should cultivate affection for our laws. As we create these narratives, perhaps we will discover a unifying force under whose aegis we will be able to face an otherwise frightening future.