The Song of Deborah as Ritual Theatre
The Song of Deborah in Judges 5 is one of the oldest stories in the Bible, dating back to the 12th or 11th century BCE (Ackerman 30). The poem relates, in very loose chronological order, the story of Deborah and Barak, and their battle with the Canaanites. It focuses heavily not only on Yahweh’s influence over the battle, but on Deborah’s contribution, most likely through her inspirational singing. She brings the tribes of Israel together, which gives the song a distinctly nationalistic flavor – it is not just a hymn to Yahweh. While the song may have been redacted over the centuries, the poem seems, for the most part, to have been respected – Judges 4, which might have been written around the 7th century BCE, seems to dictate the monarchich/Deuteronomistic interpretation, while the original poem itself was not changed. Like many other stories in the Old Testament, the Song of Deborah was probably written down many centuries after it was composed, and it was originally transmitted orally; unlike many other scholars, however, I believe that the song was transmitted through ritual theatre or performance, possibly at annual festivals or civic ceremonies. Many other cultures used this religio-political theatre as their primary means of story-telling. The poetry lends itself well to an ancient model of theatre – call and response choral odes based on heroic epics.
The most studied form of theatre in the ancient world is Greek theatre, and many modern scholars feel that, rather than springing from prehistoric festivals dedicated to Dionysus and seasonal earth worship, Greek tragedy began at the tombs of tribal ancestors; this theory explains why playwrights like Aeschylus and Sophocles focus on royal families, especially the House of Atreus, rather than on myths of the Greek gods. “The content of the overwhelming majority of known tragedies (and we know the titles and/or the content of many more than are now extant) is heroic myth and legend, from Homer and the epic cycle. Affiliations with cult-myths and cult-rituals, especially those of Dionysus, are secondary both in extent and importance. In other words, the regular source of tragic materials is heroic epic, not religious cult” (Else 63). Since the worship was centered around tombs, that might also explain why tragedies classically end in the death of the hero, rather than vanquishing of enemies; additionally, the poetry for the Greek chorus in early tragedies is very similar to a liturgical hymn, which might relate to ancestor worship. However, the stories are primarily hero-centric, and are therefore entertainment and not merely religious worship.
Likewise, the Song of Deborah, while a very religious tale, is a story that entertains and teaches cultural, not merely cultic, morals. J. Alberto Soggin mentions in his Judges’ commentary that “in vv. 9-11, 13 we have other invocations of the Yahwistic type, while the song concludes with the invocation-curse-blessing of v.31a. These are elements which seem to support the theory of A. Weiser, 1959, that the hymn has a setting in a cultic festival in honour of Yahweh” (94). Similarly, Aeschylus’ Oresteia was presented at a festival called the City Dionysia, an Athenian theatre festival dedicated to the worship of Dionysus (Brockett 14); however, Greek plays rarely mentioned, much less featured, any god in the pantheon. They were about individual human beings, and so is the Song of Deborah; Deborah is a judge and a prophet called by Yahweh, Barak is a general called into Yahweh’s service, and Jael is a modest Kenite woman who breaks the rules of hospitality in the service of Yahweh. The song focuses primarily human beings’ heroic role in saving Israel. The Hebrews’ reliance on and love of Yahweh saves them and destroys the Canaanites. Soggin continues that “In the second part, on the other hand, we have various descriptions of a heroic type… It is apparently quite simple to determine the literary genre of the song; it is a heroic poem, surrounded with liturgical elements (vv. 2-5, 9-11, 31a); its aim is to arouse among the audience a sense of identification with the tribes which responded positively to the call, and condemnation for those who stayed at home (… that is, a song which is aimed at arousing dedication in the community in which it is sung)” (94-96).
Soggin’s quote mentions that not only the Song of Deborah was a national epic, but that it was, in fact, an actual song. The footnotes in The HarperCollins Study Bible mention that the “genre (victory hymn) was well known from Egypt to Assyria in the fifteenth to twelfth centuries BCE” (note 5.1-31). In order for the hymn to arouse the dedication of the community, the poem had to be performed for the community. Many textual clues hint that the written poem might be a script for the actual performance; for example, the first lines of the poem reads simply, “Then Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang on that day, saying: …”(Jdgs 5:1). This introduction might have set the scene for actors or choral leaders, who represented Deborah and Barak; they would then sing the song, beginning with verse 2. Verse 3 intones “Hear, O kings; give ear, / O princes; / to the Lord I will sing” (Jdgs 5:3), which might have been a request to the audience to listen, a supplication to the nobles in the audience, as Homer called to the Muses in the introduction to his Iliad: “Let us begin, goddess of song, with the angry parting that took place …” (23). In this same fashion, the epic Song of Deborah sets the scene in verse 2 and entreats to the audience and Yahweh in verse 3 – 5.
“In Hebrew poetry, alternate lines echo the meaning of the previous line. So, even without the insertion of a refrain, the structure of many psalms is ideally suited for call and response singing. We simply don’t know how much of this potential was exploited. However, there are several Scriptural hints that antiphonal singing actually occurred. … Hervey suggested the song of Deborah and Barak was ideally suited for this type of rendition, with the first two lines (Jdgs 5:2) forming an antiphon sung by the opposite sex” (“Mortal Music’s Pinnacle”). Indeed, repetitive lines like “Awake, awake, Deborah! / Awake, awake, utter a song!” (Jdgs 5:12) and “He sank, he fell, / he lay still at her feet; at her feet he sank, he fell; / where he sank, there he fell / dead” (Jdgs 5:27) lend themselves well to song, and lose their effectiveness when simply spoken. This format is very similar to the dithyramb, which many scholars believe to be one of the many types of performance that influenced Greek tragedy. John McKenzie mentions that the Song of Deborah “is an ode, almost dithyrambic in style. Nearly every line is composed in a breathless tone of high quality” (126, emphasis mine). Scholars believe that dithyrambs were originally hymns, more similar to the Psalms than to either Greek theatre or the Song of Deborah, simply because of their length. However, it is thought that dithyrambs were inserted into Greek tragedy as choral odes; in Oedipus Rex, the chorus calls to the gods for strength and judgment: “There are no swords in this attack by fire, / No shields, but we are ringed with crieds. / Send the besieger plunging from our homes / … Destroy our enemy, lord of the thunder! Let him be riven by lightning from heaven!” (sc.i, 198-205). (Brocket, 15). Similarly, early psalms, or the “psalmic formula”, may have inspired passages in the Song of Deborah; for example, “Lord, when you went out from / Seir, / when you marched from the region of Edom, / the earth trembled, / and the heavens poured / water. / The mountains quaked before the Lord, the God of / Israel” (Jdgs 5:4-5). The verses might be related to an ancient psalm or a proto-psalm that was inserted, as the original choral odes might have been, into the rest of the Song of Deborah. Susan Ackerman, in retaliation, writes,
Commentators generally assume that the song Deborah proposes to sing here is some version of the poem as we have it in Judges 5, meaning that the reference is to the hymn that was sung “after the fact,” so to speak, recounting the victory the Israelites had secured against the Canaanites and describing the means by which that battle had been won. Such an interpretation is certainly possible, especially since it is consistent with other Israelite traditions that describe women as the singers of Israel’s victory songs. But it is not without its problems. In particular, one would not typically expect an announcement concerning the singing of a victory hymn to be found in verse 3, in what appears to be the midst of the Judges 5 narrative flow. Rather, the announcement should more properly come at the beginning of the poem’s description of the battle, and as I have already noted, such an announcement is in fact found in the poem’s first verse. To interpret verse 3 as referring also to a postwar victory song is thus to brand the text as redundant and impugn it as disruptive. (34).
This so-called redundancy is the very nature of the call and response song. Positioning a self-conscious mention of a victory hymn (which is the basis of the Song of Deborah) twice in the poem is also found in Greek theatre; the chorus in Oedipus Rex interrupts the action with a pseudo-prayer, “Let me be reverent in the ways of right, / Lowly the paths I journey on; / Let all my words and actions keep / The laws of the pure universe / From highest Heaven handed down. / For heaven is their bright nurse, / Those generations of the realms of Light; / Ah, never of mortal kind were they begot, / Nor are they slaves of memory, lost in sleep; / Their Father is greater than Time, and ages not” (sc ii, 389-398). The chorus in almost all other Greek plays seems to interrupt the action with their elaborate poetry. It is this “redundancy” that makes the Song of Deborah more likely to be a kind of choral-theatrical performance, simply because other performances from the ancient world had a very similar model.
The Song of Deborah is also very similar to what Theodor Gaster calls a “ritual combat” – an archetypal battle performed for a community, recreating a myth or an historical event which has become mythologized. The actual description of the battle in the Song of Deborah is relatively short, and does not feature either of the two main characters – Deborah and Barak. It is the Israelites, aided by Yahweh, fighting against the Canaanites, their most common archetypal enemy. Gaster writes, “In course of time, the real significance of the Combat tends to be forgotten and it then comes to be explained as the commemoration of some historic encounter” (22). The battle in the Song of Deborah might be a commemoration of an historic encounter, but it might also be a more general, symbolic reference to the Israelites’ constant cultural struggle with Canaan, which is referenced many other times in the Old Testament. Gaster also asserts that “there is constant reference in those compositions [the Psalms] to the battle between the god and the Dragon” (38-39). The Israelites’ ultimate “dragon” was Canaan. The battle might in fact be based on a more general formula in Hebrew mythology, which persists to this day: in her study of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, Barbara Kirghenblatt-Gimblett writes, “The performance of a Purim-shpil is an old and continuous tradition among the Bobover Hasidim. The repertory consists of plays on Biblical themes … The plays invariably work out of a constant paradigm – there is a threat to Jewish survival. The Jews’ faith is challenged. They are pressed to convert or assimilate, or they are threatened with physical annihilation. Through faith in God or a divine miracle, the Jews are saved” (113). Being such a nearby culture, the Canaanites represented the constant threat of cultural annihilation to the Hebrews. This paradigm would have worked itself into cultural institutions, such as theatre, song, and poetry; the basic ideas remain in religious celebration and performance to this day.
If the Song of Deborah was a chorus-based theatrical performance, who was performing the song? In ancient Greek theatre, the chorus and actors were all men; however, there is some evidence that, if the Israelites did in fact have ritual theatre, it was performed by women. “As a prophetic leader, her [Deborah’s] job would be to sing encouraging war chants and a victory song (such as Judges 5); the actual fighting would be Barak’s job” (Women in Scripture 67). Deborah’s call to the tribes was, probably, literally a song; the poem calls to Deborah to arise and sing a song (Jdgs 5:12). “The song to be sung is not this song of Deborah, but the song which the women, who remained behind the camp, used to sing during battle” (Soggin 88). The song Deborah, and possibly other women, sings in the realm of the poem itself is a song of inspiration, bringing the blessings of Yahweh to the troops. She performs a necessary priestly function. That function is immortalized in the Song of Deborah; if the invocations were performed for troops, then perhaps the Song of Deborah was later immortalized, not just in writing, but in a ritual, theatrical recreation of Deborah’s actions, with actors representing Deborah, Barak, Sisera, and Jael. Scholars further write about later female performers at civic celebrations: in a discussion on Greek ancestor worship, William Ridgeway diverts to mention, “In life the dead may have loved the dance and been honoured with dances, as David was by the Hebrew women on his return from the overthrow of the Philistines” (Ridgeway, emphasis mine). In 1 Samuel 18, the story relates that David was met by women, “singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with tambourines, with songs of joy, and with musical instruments. And the women sang to one another as they made merry, ‘Saul has killed his thousands, / and David his ten thousands’.” (vv. 6-7). The women here are portrayed performing specific lyrics, and dancing as well as singing. Although this brief mention makes the performance seem spontaneous, the fact that women gathered together and sang and danced insinuates that they had a certain pattern that they followed, and that pattern is the essence of ritual performance. Susan Ackerman also mentions, in her feminist study of Deborah, that “although both Deborah and Barak are described as singing the Israelites’ postwar victory song, she seems to have been the major performer, as her name comes first, in the verse” (31). The emphasis on Deborah insinuates that, if the Song was performed repeatedly at ceremonies, then she was the main character, possibly the leader of the chorus who played the character of Deborah.
It seems clear from the evidence that the Song of Deborah was a form of heroic poetry infused with hymns to Yahweh, and one can deduce from this that the Song, in order to be transmitted through the community, was probably performed. A modern thinker would define theatre differently – “theatre” in a Western sense is a performance on a stage with set dialogue, little singing (unless it is a musical or opera), and, most importantly, no ties to religion. However, the Western theatre tradition classically stems from ancient Greece, and the Greek theatre was tied to a semi-religious civic festival, the City Dionysia, which was dedicated to the worship of Dionysus. It was religion, politics, and entertainment in one festival. Although scholars study transcripts of what seem to be plays from Mesopotamia, the only evidence they have to work with is textual; they did not have an equivalent of the Roman Empire that absorbed, and thereby saved, some of their theatre traditions. I believe, based on the research on choral odes, heroic poems, and the performances and epic cycles, that the Song of Deborah is a prime example of an entertaining story that would teach a clear set of specifically Hebrew religious and cultural values to an audience. I believe that it evolved out of choruses made of women, or equal numbers of women and men; this probably changed during the monarchy, or the tradition was destroyed as more patriarchal traditions began to take over. But the poem itself was preserved in writing because it was very important to the Israelite tradition, and the poetry continues to inspire readers.
Bibliography:
The HarperCollins Study Bible. Ed. Wayne A. Meeks. HarperCollins, 1989.
Homer’s The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. Baltimore; Penguin, 1950.
“Deborah, 2.” Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament. Ed. Carol Meyers. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
“Mortal Music’s Pinnacle.” The Quest for Music Miracles. http://net-burst.net/dove/music.htm
Ackerman, Susan. Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel. New York; Doubleday, 1998.
Brockett, Oscar G. “Theatre and Drama in Ancient Greece: The City Dionysia in the Sixth Century.” History of the Theatre: Ninth Edition. Boston; Allyn and Bacon, 2003.
Else, G. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Harvard University, 1965.
Gaster, Theodor H. Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East. New York; Henry Schuman, 1950.
Kirghenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Ch.6: Performance of Precepts/Precepts of Performance, Hasidic Celebrations of Purim in Brooklyn.” By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre Ritual. Ed. Richard Schener and Willa Appel. New York; Cambridge, 1990.
McKenzie, John. The World of the Judges. Englewood Cliffs; Hale, 1966.
Ridgeway, William. “Theory of the Origins of Tragedy.” Theatre History.com: Origins of Theatre. 2002. http://www.theatrehistory.com/origins/index.html
Soggin, J. Alberto. Judges: A Commentary. Philadelphia; Westminster, 1981.