Critical in the relationships between warriors are women. They frequently serve as prizes ofwar and as valuable items of exchange. Michal is David’s reward, promised by King Saul, her father, in return for a hundred Philistine foreskins (1 Sam. 18: 17-29). Likewise Achsah is the prize meted out by Caleb to the hero Othniel (Judg. 1: 12-15). The women create relationships between the men. In the case of Saul and David, however, as in the case of Samson’s marriage to the Philistine Timnite woman and the affair with Delilah, the relationship leads to or reflects enmity rather than accord. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter as a war vow in Judg. 11: 29-40 also reflects this theme of exchange between males, but in this case the demanding receiver of the valuable woman prize is God himself. The girl is offered as a sacrifice to the Lord in return for Jephthah’s success in battle. Jael, slayer of the enemy general Sisera, is mistakenly perceived by Sisera as a helper because of his king, Jabin’s, relationship to her husband (Judg. 4: 17). The characters are portrayed to assume certain kinds of bonds between men of power, bonds often mediated by women. Instead of serving as a mediator of this positive relationship, however, Jael serves the cause of the Israelites, a subversive manifestation of the folk motif of‘‘the iron fist in the velvet glove.’’
Women’s treatment is sometimes involved in causes of war as in the case of the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine in Judg. 19. This crime leads to civil war when the men of Benjamin side with their kinsmen in Gibeah, where the heinous incident occurred, rather than back pan-Israelite vengeance. In 1 Sam. 30, David attacks and defeats the Amalekites who had stolen his women in a raid. Women are also involved in the process of reconciliation while their voices and experiences offer a critique of men’s wars. It is the stealing of women of Shiloh at the end of the war and the forced marriage of daughters of the town of Jabesh-gilead that close the hostilities in Judg. 21. The words of Sisera’s mother and her ladies in waiting in Judges 5 serve as an implicit woman’s critique of the phenomenon of war, which creates heroes but eliminates sons. The receivers of this exquisite tale know that Sisera, for whom the mother waits, has been killed by Jael, an Israelite woman warrior.
Finally, the Israelite war tradition that may be characterized as epic equates death on the battlefield with sex. As shown by Emily Vermeule (1979) for Homeric material (see also Shulman 1986 on Tamil tradition), the defeated warrior metaphorically is the woman who has been raped. The language and imagery of the tale of Jael and Sisera drip with the confusion between battle death and sexual conquest. Terms such as ‘‘kneel’’ and ‘‘lie,’’ and the phrase, ‘‘between her legs,’’ found in Judg. 5: 27, create the double-entendre in a traditional Israelite medium (Niditch 1989). Tales of the heroes Ehud (Judg. 3: 12-30) and Samson (Judg. 16) are similarly informed (See Niditch 1990: 116-17, 1993b: 113-19).
World History
