Sisera, a Canaanite commander, survives a battle after escaping. Jael, a woman, offers him shelter, gives him milk, then proceeds to kill him by pounding a tent peg into his head with the use of a mallet, and he lies dead. In Judges 4, this story is told in only six verses. In Judges 5, it is told in four verses. Jael’s story is found in the history of the only female judge. Moreover, Jael is one of the very few women in the Hebrew Bible that does physical violence. It is also one of the earliest proofs of gender interaction ever recorded.
According to Susan Niditch in “Eroticism and Death in the Tale of Jael,” the killing of Sisera is a reversal of roles in rape. Jael is not the object of sexual desire. She is the aggressor. For Niditch, the biblical story of Jael is full of sexual language and imagery. Even the killing used, pounding a peg into the head, is an ‘aggressively phallic’ symbol in the murder/rape. An example of this eroticized imagery is that of Sisera’s death throes between Jael’s legs in Judges 5.
What makes the story uncomfortable for some readers is that it explores ‘man’s fear of death and his own sexuality.’ It is also a powerful scene of reversed rape. But above all these is the portrait of a sexual woman who does “the womanizing, the man despoiled just as he is in a position of sexual seducer himself.” The strongest gender statement may, thus, be that the woman Jael invited a warrior rapist, and that a woman spoils a spoiler of women. A woman conquers a sinner and extinguishes him.
It’s been said that Jael symbolizes the church. Her name means ‘ascent.’ She rises from the physical being to a spiritual being. From her earthly reality, she becomes heavenly. Some biblical interpreters have analyzed that the woman Jael kills Sisera who is a male symbol of carnal vices and the despoiling of women. Jael, symbolic of the church, defeats Sisera, symbolic of vices. The church defeats earthly weaknesses and transgressions.
