Judges 6-8
July 28, 2013
Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
Amy Sullivan
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Over the next six weeks, we’re going to be going through the stories of six separate men from the book of Judges. This exercise is not just to introduce you to interesting characters, but also because Calvary has a tradition I admire a lot, of forcing us to go through some of the trickier stories of the Bible, some of the ones where maybe we know half of the story but not the entire story. And some others that perhaps aren’t ever told in churches—and for good reason, as you’ll find out later this summer. They can be truly nasty texts, and they sometimes lead us to wonder what they are doing in our sacred texts.
So one of the things I’ll be doing with the story of Gideon is going into more detail than you may want or have ever heard, so that you’ll have a better sense of what it’s doing in the Bible, and what meaning we might draw from it. We’re kind of easing into the series today with Gideon. There’s no sexual violence, some dismemberment, but really just a few beheadings. In the book of Judges, that’s what passes for tame.
During the entire book of Judges and particularly this story, Israel is in a downward spiral of moral and religious sin. The people have been engaging in idolatry, and God is not happy. One of the ways He is showing his displeasure is to allow the Midianites to come back, retake the land, and drive some of the Israelites off their own land. So at the beginning of Gideon’s story, the Midianites have taken their land, taken their crops and their cattle. Many of the Israelites are hiding out in caves in the hills. They have very little food, they may be starving. Sometimes they may creep down under cover of darkness to get some food for their families, but things aren’t going well for them.
As the Israelites often do when things aren’t going well, they call out to God for help, and to ask Him to ease their suffering. And, following the pattern that often occurs, God sends them a prophet. But this is where we break from the normal pattern of God’s intervention from the Israelites. Because usually when He sends a prophet, He sends someone to deliver the people out of their suffering. In this case, the prophet appears in order to tell them that the current situation is really all their fault.
“This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I brought you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians. And I delivered you from the hand of all your oppressors; I drove them out before you and gave you their land. I said to you, ‘I am the Lord your God; do not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.’ But you have not listened to me.”
That’s all the prophet tells them. He reminds them of all God has done for them. And reminds them that He just asked one simple thing of them, and they couldn’t do it. It’s not clear what happens to the prophet—he either left them to chew on that for a while or they decided to kill the messenger. But in any case, he disappears, and what we know is that sometime later, an angel of the Lord appears to Gideon while he is out threshing some wheat in secret.
That’s the first clue we have that Gideon is not exactly an upstanding hero for the nation of Israel to stand behind. This is somebody who is fearful and who, instead of threshing his wheat out in the open—which would have been the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff—is hiding in a winepress and trying to get the job done there.
This marks the beginning of the tale that many of us have heard before. This story might sound even more familiar to us, and certainly would have sounded more familiar to the listeners, because there are elements that are designed to remind us of the story of Moses. There is the flawed figure who the angel appears to—Gideon who is threshing in secret, and Moses, who very clearly did not want to accept God’s command to him. When the angel appears to Gideon, we get a rare example of some biblical humor, because the angel hails him with, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” As we already know, Gideon is far from a mighty warrior. In fact, he may be one of the most fearful characters we have in the Bible.
True to form, Gideon responds to the angel’s greeting with cynicism, saying essentially: “Oh yeah? Well, if the Lord was really with us, why would we be living in caves and starving?” But the Lord continues to speak through the angel, and tells him that he, in fact, will save Israel and drive out the Midianites. This is where we get Gideon’s first protest. He says, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. My family is very weak, and I am the least of all of them.” Now Gideon is overstating things a little bit. We find out later in the book that his father is a particularly respected figure in their tribe. But he just doesn’t want to do what the angel of the Lord is telling him, kind of like Moses.
Then, Gideon requests his first test, of the angel and of the Lord. He says, “I’m going to go away and prepare a meal, and then I’m going to come back. If you’re still here, then I’ll listen to what you have to say.” So he goes away, and when Gideon returns with the meal, the angel kind of turns it up a bit, and sets the meal on fire with his staff and then disappears. Which is enough to convince Gideon that maybe something special is going on here. But the fire is also supposed to remind us of the fire from Moses and the burning bush. It’s a sign that readers and listeners would have known is a divine sign.
After that, the Lord appears to Gideon again and gives him a task, which is to go into the land where his tribesmen are living and destroy an altar of Baal, which in fact his father had constructed, and replace it with an altar to Yahweh. Gideon is willing to do this, but he doesn’t want to stick his neck out too far, so he decides to do it at night, when nobody will be around. He doesn’t want anyone to figure out it was him. They figure out it was him anyway, and come for him in an angry mob. Gideon hides behind his father, who figures out kind of an ingenious way to save him—but certainly, the savior of Israel is not usually thought of as somebody who cowers behind his daddy when an angry mob comes to get him.
Gideon then calls men from his own tribe, which was Manasseh, and from the neighboring territories of Asher, Zebulon, and Nephtali to form an army. This is the army that will drive out the Midianites. But he still hasn’t completely bought into the Lord’s plan here. So he asks for yet another test. Gideon asks for the Lord to make the wool fleece wet with dew in the morning while the ground around it is dry. And the Lord does. But that’s not enough for Gideon, so he also asks for the opposite—for the fleece to be dry in the morning and the ground around it wet with dew. And the Lord does that as well.
Those tests complete, the Lord has a few of His own for Gideon. Because the men to whom Gideon issues this call to form the army gather. There are about 32,000 of them. And God says, “If you go a battle with an army this big, no one’s going to give me credit when you win. The whole point here is that I am delivering the nation of Israel. So you need a smaller army. I want you to tell everybody who is afraid that they can go home.” Which is a pretty good way to thin out an army. And in fact, about two-thirds of them leave and go home.
But God looks at the remaining men and says again, “Mmmm, this is still too big. I think we need to winnow this a little bit more. I want you to tell the men to go down to the water to drink. And we’re going to watch how they choose to do this. Those who lift the water to their mouths with their hands can go home. The ones who kneel and just lap up the water with their tongues like animals, they get to stay. Those are the guys who are going to be your army.”
And so those are the 300 guys who form Gideon’s army. It’s 300 men, led by the mighty warrior Gideon, against the assembled armies of the Midianites and the Amalekites. This, we should note, is a pattern in the Bible—how God makes clear His sovereignty through holy way. In order for everyone to know and recognize God’s strength and power, He chooses unlikely leaders—like Gideon—and then He stacks the deck to make victory seem impossible. So when they do eventually succeed and triumph over their enemies, everyone has to give praise and acknowledgement to God as the one who made this happen.
But before we can get to the battle—and I know it’s a long time coming here, but Gideon keeps losing his nerve—Gideon requires one more test of God. God sends him down to eavesdrop on the Midianite army. He overhears two soldiers talking and interpreting a dream as Gideon getting ready to defeat them, as unlikely as that might seem. This makes Gideon pretty happy and they get ready to go to battle.
Once again, they follow the pattern of biblical holy war. Instead of arming themselves with traditional weapons, they use things you wouldn’t necessarily think of, like trumpets, to go march on their enemies. What Gideon does is he gives each of the 300 soldiers a torch and a jar to cover it up with and a trumpet. They sneak down to the Midianite camp at dark, and when he gives them a sign, they all smash their jars, hold up their torches and blow their trumpets. This is apparently confusing enough to all the Midianites that they wake up all discombobulated, and they end up fighting each other and then retreating.
That’s something that also happens again and again throughout the Bible when it’s an instance of holy war. Often the Israelites are able to achieve victory without using any weapons of their own. God confuses their enemies, and their enemies flee and retreat.
And that’s kind of the end of the story that many of us know of Gideon. But it’s not where the story ends in the book of Judges. Because the book of Judges is not just a tale about the sovereignty of God and how God delivers the people of Israel. It’s also a story about the steady dissolution of the tribes of Israel and the chaos that begins to rise as they fight amongst each other. The writers of the book of Judges are building a theological case for the monarchy. What they want to impress upon us is that this bunch of unruly tribes is really desperately in need of one leader to bring them together.
So while Gideon has now done what the Lord asked of him, he decides that it’s not over quite yet. He has now moved from being our fearful, cowardly Gideon who we know and love to someone whose head has gotten a little too big for himself. What he does is send out messages to the people of Ephraim. It would have been the most powerful and wealthy tribe in the area at that point. He gives them an assignment and asks them to head off the retreating Midianites at the Jordan River.
They do this, and they bring Gideon the heads of two of the Midianite leaders. But they’re not paying homage to Gideon as the leader of this army. They’re mad at him. And here is where we begin to see this discord that has been bubbling up already in the book of Judges and that exists between the Israelite tribes. Their pride is hurt at the fact that he didn’t originally call them to be part of the army. He called on these other tribes to the north, but Gideon didn’t invite the people of Ephraim. Gideon manages to handle this situation with some diplomacy and soothes their egos.
Gideon continues to pursue the Midianites to get them completely out of the Israelite territories. As he does, he passes through two different Israelite cities and asks for provisions. He says, “My men have been fighting, we’ve been on the road. We really need some bread to eat.” These folks haven’t been in the midst of the battle. All they know is that the Midianites have been terrorizing them, and they’re a little scared of providing comfort to people who are battling them.
Gideon shouldn’t have been surprised to come across people who were scared of the Midianites—that’s where he was at the beginning of this story. But isn’t of showing mercy to the residents of these cities, as he was shown himself, Gideon essentially calls a pox on their houses. He says, alright, we’ll go ahead and do this without you. But I’m coming back here after I capture the kings of Midian. And he does return to torture and slaughter the residents of these cities who would not give him provisions.
Finally, we have the last act. Gideon has the kings of Midian and wants to execute them. He tells his son to kill them, but his son doesn’t want to. The kings as well talk back to Gideon, telling him that if he wants them dead, he should be the one to do it. For those of you who watch “Game of Thrones,” this would be the Ned Stark Theory of Leadership—if you want somebody dead, you should have to swing the sword yourself.
Gideon then goes to the Israelites and collects gold from them. He uses the gold to build an ephrod, an idol that he sets up. He leads the people of Israel back to idol worship, which is where they were in the first place, when God got mad and set the Midianites upon them, and they had to call for help. In this case, God does not punish them immediately but gives them 40 years of peace. But all is not well in Israel. When Gideon dies, the people immediately fall back to worshipping Baal.
What are we to make of this story? The first part of it would have given hope to the Israelites in exile. While these events happened a long time ago, they would have been written down around the 6th century BCE, which was during the Babylonian Exile. The message for them would have been: no matter what the odds, God will deliver you. It would have been a sign that they should not give up, that no matter how the situation appears to them, their God has not forgotten them.
But the rest of the story is not so cheery in its message for the Israelites. Because Gideon, for all his doubt and fear, is really a stand-in for Israel in general in this story. No one in the book of Judges receives more divine assurance, but no one displays more doubt than Gideon. He’s constantly shown signs of God’s power and might, but always asks for more. Rather than leading the people of Israel, even after he’s defeated the Midianites, Gideon turns around and uses his power to instigate strife between the tribes, to act on petty grudges, and to lead the people back into idol worship.
This is a story that will only get worse as we move through the book of Judges. But it’s also essential in order for the nation of Israel to have its eventual redemption.
The book of Judges is not just a revised history of the people of Israel. It’s also a message to the people of Israel. The greater message is that God uses flawed heroes to do His will. That’s a theme that should provide us with some hope in the midst of our imperfection.