Judges 4

Remember in elementary school (or even middle school) when everyone was so passionate about cooties and silly boy vs. girl competitions? I'd wager that the vast majority of kids rooted for their own sex; when I was a kid, I definitely thought that most boys were awesome and that girls were weird, unfathomable ditzes who were way too obsessed (and I'm aging myself here) with that Spice Girls and Olsen twins crap. Of course, we boys were better because we liked cool s*** like Power Rangers and Beast Wars: Transformers.

Needless to say, my stance today is very different. OK, I would probably still think that the Spice Girls and Olsen twins were crap if I ever had the inclination to actually watch/listen to them, but the proliferation of the kick-ass heroine in pop culture offers a refreshing alternative to the pretty pretty princesses of yesteryear. Now, we recognize cheerleading and gymnastics as legitimate sports that require real effort, skill, and strength (perhaps no more definitively manifested than through Simone Biles's jaw-dropping domination at this year's Olympics), and more schools are encouraging girls and women to pursue STEM courses. It's a heartening trend--one young kid I tutor walked in one day wearing a Frozen dress and carrying an Avengers lunchbox. Awesome. Of course, like anything, the trend of invincible heroines in fiction can go too far--do we really need all those Hunger Games copycats? And do the males in those films/books always have to be pathetic losers or one-note stoics?

Deborah is certainly in the mold of the proactive heroine; such is her mental acumen that she actually leads/judges the traditionally patriarchal Israel (verse 4). She tells a fellow Israelite named Barak to conquer a Canaanite army led by one Sisera. Barak balks, asking if Mommy can come with him, which prompts Deborah to basically say, "Of course I'll come along, but stop acting like such a kitty" (verse 9). Once Barak reaches the enemy encampment, we can read between the lines of Deborah's prompting in verse 14 and infer that he hesitated upon seeing all those scary iron chariots. To his credit, though, he follows the directions of God through Deborah, throwing Sisera's army into a rout.

But Deborah is not the only driven woman in this story. After Sisera flees from Deborah and Barak's army with his tail between his legs, he encounters Jael, the wife of one of his allies. Perhaps seeing the way the wind is blowing, Jael invites Sisera into her tent, waits until he's asleep, and then hammers a tent peg though his skull (verse 21). Improvisational weaponry strikes again! And Jael doesn't just drive the peg into Sisera's head--she pounds it all the way through the head and into the ground. So Sisera's head is attached to the ground with basically a giant one-pronged staple.

Women do come across as better than men in this story. I don't think one sex is generally superior to the other, but I do welcome the progress Western society is making toward equity. Because as strong a character as Deborah is, accounts of admirable men in the Bible still vastly outnumber accounts of admirable women.