Judges 6
The Midianites devastate Israel's harvests for seven years until a reluctant Gideon, threshing wheat in secret, receives his call from the angel of the Lord.
Summary
Israel does evil; the Lord gives them into Midian's hand for seven years. The Midianites and Amalekites sweep in at harvest time like locusts, destroying crops and livestock, leaving the Israelites to hide in dens in the mountains. Israel cries out. The Lord sends a prophet who reminds them of what the Lord did in Egypt and at the exodus, then accuses them of not listening to his voice. The angel of the Lord comes to Gideon, who is beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites. The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Gideon replies with the theological challenge the situation warrants: if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonderful deeds our ancestors recounted? Has the Lord abandoned us? The Lord responds by appointing him to go save Israel from Midian — and Gideon objects that his clan is the weakest in Manasseh and he the least in his father's house.
The Lord promises his presence and promises that Gideon will strike Midian as one man. Gideon asks for a sign and prepares an offering of a young goat and unleavened cakes. The angel touches the meat and bread with the tip of his staff and fire consumes the offering; the angel vanishes. Gideon builds an altar and calls it The Lord is Peace. That night the Lord commands Gideon to tear down his father's altar to Baal and the Asherah pole beside it, and to build a proper altar on which to sacrifice a bull using the wood of the Asherah. Gideon does it by night with ten servants — afraid of his family and the men of the town. The townsmen find it in the morning, demand Gideon's death; his father Joash defends him — let Baal contend for himself, if he is a god. The Spirit of the Lord clothes Gideon, the tribes rally to him, and he still asks God for two confirming signs with the fleece before he will commit.
- Judges 1Chapter 1 functions as a historiographical preface to the whole book, cataloguing the success or failure of each tribe to dispossess the Canaanites after Joshua's death.
- Judges 2Chapter 2 is the hermeneutical key to Judges.
- Judges 3Chapter 3 introduces the judge cycle in action for the first time.
- Judges 4Chapter 4 is the prose account of the same events that chapter 5 will sing.
- Judges 5The Song of Deborah in chapter 5 is widely considered one of the oldest pieces of Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE, nearly contemporaneous with the events it describes.
- Judges 6Chapter 6 is the opening of the Gideon narrative, which runs through chapter 8 and is the longest major-judge story in the book.
- Judges 7Chapter 7 is the central action of the Gideon narrative and one of the most memorable military scenes in the book.
- Judges 8Chapter 8 is the darkest portion of the Gideon narrative.
- Judges 9Chapter 9 is the longest chapter in Judges and the only episode in the book devoted to an anti-judge — a man who makes himself king by violence and holds it for exactly three years.
- Judges 10Chapter 10 performs two functions.
- Judges 11Chapter 11 is one of the most morally complex chapters in the Hebrew Bible.
- Judges 12Chapter 12 begins with a conflict that is structurally parallel to the Ephraimite quarrel after Gideon's battle in chapter 8, but this time Jephthah's response is not diplomacy — it is war.
- Judges 13Chapter 13 is the birth narrative of Samson, and it is the most elaborate annunciation scene in Judges.
- Judges 14Chapter 14 introduces the adult Samson and establishes the pattern that will govern the rest of his narrative: a desire for a Philistine woman, a display of supernatural strength, a riddle or trap, betrayal by intimacy.
- Judges 15Chapter 15 escalates the private vendetta between Samson and the Philistines into a series of increasingly spectacular acts of violence.
- Judges 16Chapter 16 is the climax and conclusion of the Samson narrative.
- Judges 17Chapter 17 begins the two-part appendix with which Judges closes, and the shift in tone is immediate.
- Judges 18Chapter 18 is the first of the book's two closing appendices.
- Judges 19Chapter 19 is one of the most disturbing chapters in the Hebrew Bible, and the text makes no attempt to soften it.
- Judges 20Chapter 20 is the longest military account in Judges and is remarkable for what it shows about what has gone wrong with Israel as a political and moral community.
- Judges 21Chapter 21 closes the book and extends the moral horror of chapter 19-20 in a different register: the horror of improvised solutions to self-inflicted catastrophe.