Female Slayers and Other Heroines in the Book of Judges

I am a folklorist by trade and one of my favorite courses to teach is feminist folk and fairy tales. It’s a course that studies the relationship between women and folklore, asking questions like, “Why should women study folk and fairy tales? Do these stories empower or disempower women? And what exactly does it mean to be a fairy tale heroine?”

The question of female heroines and, in particular, female super heroes is an interesting one. In fact, in the opening week of my course, I have my students read an article called “The Useful Dangers of Fairy Tales” in which the author questions the purpose of stories like Wonder Woman and Tangled in which female action heroes save the day. She writes, “We can write as many books as we want about heroine princesses conquering the world—and I welcome them—but it doesn’t stop women from being stalked, from being doxxed, from being harassed, silenced, raped, married off, targeted.” In other words, women need to accept the harrowing reality that, nine times out of ten, they won’t win a physical fight against a man. The ability to beat up, attack, or defend oneself against men is just a fantasy.

I’ve believed that truth for a long time. In light of the stories from the #metoo movement and even the late Ford/Kavanaugh trial, we know that women continue to be victims around the world. Better to teach women how to avoid, cope, heal and seek justice from these horrors than fill their mind with false ideals about fighting back. Right?

Well, now that I’ve re-read Judges recently, I’m rethinking this idea. Right smack dab in the middle of the Bible, we see stories of female action heroes, physically fighting against men, killing men even, and winning battles by both outsmarting and outmuscling them. These women are a force to contend with. I want to give them due justice by discussing their stories here, and I want to know how their lives make sense within the ruckus of abuse and other injustices against women throughout the Book of Judges. Let’s get started, shall we?

Achsah, Jael and Deborah

There are three separate stories of powerful women in the Book of Judges.

The first comes in the very first chapter. In Judges 1, as Judah is in the midst of battling the Canaanites, there is a paragraph interjected that almost seems out of place. It is an account about Achsah, the daughter of Caleb and the wife of the first judge, Othniel. Caleb promises his daughter as bride to whoever attacks the enemy at Kiriath-sepehr and captures the city and sure enough Otniel is the victor. Initially, I thought this was just another passive woman, whose female body is controlled and domesticated by men. But then Achsah speaks. In Judges 1:14–15, she’s actually telling both her husband and father what to do! Though her marriage is arranged, she takes the rest of her living situation into her own hands, choosing where she will live, demanding a blessing and taking the best of the territory for herself. Not bad for a domestic woman.

Truth be told, Achsah’s story is not very provocative. But the stories of Deborah and Jael are. This brings us to Judges 4. Here, we see Israel in battle again, this time against Jabin king of Canaan and the commander of his army, Sisera. It’s important to note that it is a woman named Deborah who presides as judge over Israel during this time (v. 4). In essence, Deborah holds one of the highest political positions in the land, determining social, religion and military outcomes for her people. This is an incredible example of female leadership that we must consider alongside of passages like Proverbs 31 and Titus 2. For not only do women hold the power here, but the passage describes it in positive terms.

In the article, “Yes! Women can be leaders too!”, Rebekah Hargraves uses the example of Deborah to argue, “God clearly blessed His people through the leadership of this faithful woman, this mother in Israel. Judges 2:18 makes it clear that God Himself is the One Who rose up Deborah and put her into this position of leadership.” Paul Carter also argues that Deborah’s leadership “reminds us that God made us male and female and that a country benefits from a plurality of mixed gendered leaders just as much as does a family.”

In Judges 4, Deborah has the seeming audacity to tell the commander of the Israelite army, Barak, that he will not be victorious over the Canaanites, but rather “the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.” Thus, we see a woman determining the political and military outcomes of her nation, while another woman is about to become the celebrated soldier! As prophesied, a woman does indeed destroy Sisera. Jael, a supposed friend of Sisera, tricks him into hiding in her tent when the battle turns; she feeds him and encourages him to lie down for a nap. Then, “Jael the wife of Heber took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to [Sisera] and drove the peg into his temple until it went down into the ground while he was lying fast asleep from weariness. So, he died.”

Woah! What’s crazy about this passage is that not only is a male abuser punished via death at the hands of a woman (an issue we discuss in this article here), but Jael is also praised for this murder! God empowers a female warrior to save both herself and her people, intentionally making her a slayer of men, and this is seen as a noble deed.

Reading These Women Alongside of Jephthah’s Daughter, Samson’s Bride and the Levite’s Wife

How do we make sense of the stories of Achsah, Deborah and Jael in light of the other tales we’ve read, from Jephthah’s daughter to Samson’s bride and the Levite’s wife?

I think it’s important that we read all these stories side-by-side – the stories of powerful women and abused woman together – so that we can understand the complex gender narrative at work in the Book of Judges. There is no one, reductive image of woman here. Rather, women in the Book of Judges and by extension the while Bible are good and bad, passive and active, wise and foolish just like the men.

Isn’t that more close to reality? Not every woman is a victim. But not every woman is a warrior, either. Reading both stories together reminds us of the complicated world in which we live.

There are moments in which God empowers women to be powerful agents of change, using their wits and muscles alike to take down the oppressor, and this is a good thing! Let me be the first to declare that active women can be just as godly as their passive counterparts. Being passionate about justice and fighting for it, even physically at times, is not unbiblical. Jael is proof of that. In fact, Jael shows us that God uses strong women to expose evil men. Paul Maxwell argues in his TGC article, “Real Men Love Strong Women,” that “Thank God Jael wasn’t meek and submissive and respectful toward this friend of her wayward husband. She wasn’t one to be trampled on. Strong women reject the requests of evil men.”

However, that doesn’t mean that many, many women will still suffer at the hands of merciless men. In fact, the same woman could experience both victory and victimhood in her life. So, when we read the stories of Jael and Jephthah’s daughter, Deborah and the Levite’s wife in tandem, we see that our goal should never be reduce ourselves to one category. Just because we want to fight, to be active, to war, if you will, that doesn’t mean that we may also suffer and be wounded. Neither slaying fantasies nor reductive victimhood should control our thinking in whole.

Let us, rather, seek to be warriors for God, while never forgetting the fact that we live in a sin-soaked world.

The point of this article is not to make some sort of feminist manifesto or to support egalitarianism. I simply want to point out that God depicts female strength as captivatingly attractive. Certainly, there are examples in the Bible of women using their power and influence to do harm. I’m thinking of Delilah and Sephira here. However, there are plenty of examples, such as Achsah, Jael and Deborah, in which female strength is glorious for the right reasons, and those are stories that we should definitely be reading to our daughters. The Bible paints a compelling picture of what it means to fight like a girl and, even if we do experience the horrors of this world, we can be assured that God calls us to get back up and keep fighting; for he is on our side.