Joshua and Judges

9. Choosing Sides in Judges 4–5: Rethinking Representations of Jael

9 Choosing Sides in Judges 4–5 Rethinking Representations of Jael Ryan P. Bonfiglio Introduction: Contextual Readings of Judges 4–5 Judges 4–5 juxtaposes two accounts of Jael’s murder of Sisera, one in prose (Judges 4) and the other in poetry (Judges 5).1 These texts, which describe an Israelite victory over the Canaanites, have long since attracted the interest of biblical scholars. While past interpretive approaches tended to concentrate on how these texts might provide clues about the historical background of early Israel, more recent studies have surfaced important ideological concerns about the role and function of a non-Israelite heroine in a book that predominantly focuses on Israelite heroes.2 Such interests are notably on display in Katherine Doob Sakenfeld’s 2007 presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Sakenfeld challenged her fellow scholars to open biblical texts to a diverse array of contextual perspectives and, as a test case, offered her own postcolonial reading of the story of Jael in Judges 4–5 (Sakenfeld 2008: 12). In Sakenfeld’s view, Jael, as neither Israelite nor Canaanite, functions as a type of borderland figure in the overarching drama of Israelite-Canaanite conflict and, as such, offers a potential point of contact for contemporary postcolonial subjects who likewise find themselves caught between competing sociocultural or political forces.3 Be it from the vantage point of readers from the developing world who face the lingering specter of colonialism or immigrants in industrialized nations who must negotiate complex issues surrounding assimilation and acceptance, Sakenfeld’s research is suggestive of the variety of ways in which Judges 4–5 might be read from different contextual perspectives. In the course of this essay, I hope to join in the conversation Sakenfeld and others have already begun about contextual readings of Judges 4–5. I choose 161 to do so with an awareness that I might be a somewhat unusual—or at least unexpected—conversation partner. As an American-born white male, I do not claim firsthand knowledge of the sorts of contexts mentioned above, and my own place as a reader can only be described as being pro-postcolonial in terms of my theological convictions and political commitments. Nevertheless, as a second-generation Italian American, I do come to the text bearing countless stories about how my maternal grandparents, Dominic and Florence, struggled to forge a life together in a steel town outside of Philadelphia in the early 1900s. Although I do not claim their experiences as my own, I find that my contextual concerns as a reader of Judges 4–5 are informed by this history and how it has come to shape what it means for me to occupy an advantaged place in a country once so foreign to my grandparents. Like many other European immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century, my grandparents felt the pinch of discrimination in a variety of ways. They were ridiculed for their broken English, limited to certain jobs, and marginalized for being one of the few Italians members of their Catholic parish. Their “hyphenated condition” as Italian Americans at times entailed being caught between competing sociocultural forces, torn between loyalty to their old Italian heritage and integration into their new American context.4 Even as my grandparents’ experience might only partially overlap with that of contemporary immigrants, the stories they told and the struggles they had bear witness to the conflictual nature of being cultural outsiders. Yet the difficulties my grandparents faced in their early years in America eventually gave way to numerous successes. They started and ran a profitable small business, and my grandfather was elected to various political offices over the course of two decades—not a small feat for an Italian Democrat in a staunchly Republican town with a sizable Irish population. But in their view, the most tangible realization of the “American Dream” was the fact that they had three children—and eight grandchildren—who became thoroughly assimilated into and accepted by the dominant culture. For us grandchildren, whatever tension might remain in our hyphenated condition all but fully has been resolved in favor of being full-fledged Americans. We are now the “us” in contrast to the “them” of present-day immigrants. In just two generations, what was once a foreign land to my grandparents is now our entitled home. Thus my own family’s history reflects competing stories of difficulty and triumph, discrimination and assimilation. In fact, I...