Judges 8
Gideon pursues the Midianite kings, punishes the towns that refused him aid, refuses the crown — then makes an ephod that becomes a snare and fathers Abimelech.
Summary
Ephraim quarrels with Gideon for not calling them to the battle earlier. Gideon's diplomatic response — is not the gleaning of Ephraim's grapes better than the vintage of Abiezer? — pacifies them. He crosses the Jordan with his three hundred, exhausted but still pursuing the two Midianite kings, Zebah and Zalmunna. He asks the city of Succoth for loaves of bread; the officials refuse — are the hands of Zebah and Zalmunna already in your hand, that we should give bread to your army? He asks Penuel; they give the same answer. He promises to tear down Penuel's tower when he returns. He captures the two kings, returns, punishes Succoth by taking the city's elders and teaching them with the thorns and briers of the wilderness, and tears down the tower of Penuel and kills the men of the city. He asks Zebah and Zalmunna about men they killed at Tabor; they describe men who resembled the sons of a king — your brothers, Gideon says. He commands his son Jether to strike them; the boy is afraid. The kings say, rise and fall on us, for as the man is, so is his strength. Gideon kills them and takes the ornaments from their camels' necks.
The men of Israel ask Gideon to rule over them, and his son, and his son's son, for you have saved us from the hand of Midian. Gideon says: I will not rule over you; my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you. He then asks each of them for an earring from the spoil — the Ishmaelites wore gold earrings. They give willingly and he collects seventeen hundred shekels of gold. He makes an ephod from the gold and puts it in his city Ophrah, and all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to all his house. Midian is subdued; the land has rest forty years in the days of Gideon. Gideon goes home and has seventy sons, for he has many wives. His concubine in Shechem also bears him a son, and he names him Abimelech. Gideon the son of Joash dies in good old age. As soon as Gideon died, the people return to the Baals and make Baal-berith their god, and do not remember the Lord who rescued them, and do not show steadfast love to the house of Gideon.
- 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.