Judges 7
God reduces Gideon's army from thirty-two thousand to three hundred by design, then routes the Midianite camp with trumpets, torches, and panic in the night.
Summary
Gideon and all the people with him — thirty-two thousand — rise early and camp by the spring of Harod, with the Midianites below them in the valley. The Lord tells Gideon the people are too many; if they defeat Midian with this force, they will boast that their own hand saved them. Proclaim that whoever is afraid may turn back. Twenty-two thousand go home; ten thousand remain. Still too many, the Lord says. Bring them to the water and I will sort them there. Three hundred lap the water with their tongues as a dog laps; the rest kneel to drink. Keep the three hundred, send the rest home. Gideon divides the three hundred into three companies and equips each man with a trumpet and an empty jar with a torch inside.
That night the Lord tells Gideon to go down to the camp, for he has given it into his hand; if he is afraid, he should take his servant Purah and listen to what they say in the camp. Gideon goes down to the edge of the Midianite camp and hears a man telling a dream — a barley loaf tumbling into the camp, striking a tent and overturning it. His companion interprets it as the sword of Gideon, and Gideon bows in worship. He returns, divides the three hundred into three companies surrounding the camp. At the beginning of the middle watch they blow the trumpets and smash the jars, hold torches in their left hands and trumpets in their right, and shout: a sword for the Lord and for Gideon! The Lord sets every man's sword against his fellow and against all the army throughout the camp. The Midianites flee toward the Jordan, and Gideon calls out the men of Ephraim to seize the fords.
- 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.