Victory Gives Way to Retaliation, Wealth, and a Snare

“Chide with him sharply” is literally “contended with him with strength”. Ephraim will bring almost the same complaint to Jephthah (12:1), and that time it ends in a slaughter at the fords. The largest tribe of the north resents being left out of victories.

The gleanings are the olelot, the small clusters left after the harvest. Gideon ranks Ephraim’s leftovers above Abi-ezer’s whole vintage. Proverbs puts the principle in one line: “A soft answer turneth away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1).

“Their anger was abated” is literally “their spirit sank”, using ruach, the word for the Spirit that clothed Gideon (6:34). Gideon gives God the credit, “God hath delivered”, and Ephraim the glory.

“Faint, yet pursuing” has become a motto in English. The verse returns to tell the crossing that 7:25 had already assumed: the three hundred wade the Jordan exhausted and keep going.

Succoth was a town of Gad east of the Jordan (Joshua 13:27), so Gideon is asking fellow Israelites for bread. The names Zebah and Zalmunna have been explained as “sacrifice” and “shelter refused”, possibly mocking names given by Israel; the meanings are proposals.

“The hands of Zebah and Zalmunna” may be literal: Egyptian battle reliefs show piles of severed hands used to count the enemy dead. Succoth’s princes ask for proof of victory before they commit, in the grimmest form of receipt.

“Tear” is dush, to thresh. A threshing sledge was a board studded with sharp stones dragged over grain, and Amos condemns Damascus for having “threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron” (Amos 1:3). Gideon threatens to thresh the princes like wheat.

Penuel means “face of God”, the place where Jacob wrestled and said, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Genesis 32:30). The town at that holy spot refuses bread to Israel’s deliverer.

“In peace” here means safe and victorious, returning whole from battle. Penuel’s tower was its stronghold. Jeroboam later rebuilt Penuel as a royal fortress in the first years of the northern kingdom (1 Kings 12:25).

Karkor is otherwise unknown, somewhere in the eastern desert. The figures mean that of a hundred and thirty five thousand, only fifteen thousand remained: nine in ten had fallen. “That drew sword” counts only fighting men.

“Secure” is betach, off guard, trusting in distance; the same word describes Laish, “quiet and secure”, before the Danites fall on it (18:7, 27). Nobah was named after a Manassite who took Kenath and called it by his own name (Numbers 32:42).

“Discomfited” is hecherid, “terrified”, from charad, to tremble, the root of the spring of Harod (7:1) where the campaign began. The trembling that was sent home from Israel’s army ends up in Midian’s.

“Before the sun was up” can be read as a place: “from the ascent of Heres”, since heres means sun. Many translations take it as the pass by which Gideon returned rather than the time of day.

“Described” is literally “wrote”: the young man of Succoth wrote down the names of seventy seven officials. It is often cited as evidence that an ordinary young man in early Israel could write.

“Upbraid” is cheref, to taunt or reproach. Gideon quotes their taunt back almost word for word, then produces the two kings. The proof they demanded in verse 6 now stands before them.

“Taught” is literally “made to know”. The Greek and many modern versions read “threshed” instead, a one letter difference in Hebrew, which matches the threat of verse 7. Either way, the elders learned by thorns.

At Penuel Gideon does more than he threatened: in verse 9 he promised to break down the tower, and here he also kills the men of the city. The account does not say that the LORD commanded this, as it says of the battle.

The killing at Tabor has not been mentioned before; the reader learns of it only through this question. “Each one resembled the children of a king” is the kings’ answer: they describe Gideon’s brothers as princely, perhaps to flatter him.

“The sons of my mother” means full brothers, not the half brothers of a large household. Gideon acts as the goel haddam, the avenger of blood for his kin (Numbers 35:19), and says so under oath: “as the LORD liveth”.

Jether means “remnant” or “abundance”. To die by a boy’s hand was a disgrace for a warrior. Abimelech, Gideon’s other son, will ask his armour bearer to kill him so that no one could say a woman killed him (9:54).

“As the man is, so is his strength” sounds like a proverb: a man’s strength matches his age. The camel ornaments are saharonim, crescent moons, the same word as the “round tires like the moon” worn by the women of Jerusalem in Isaiah 3:18.

The offer is for mashal, rule, rather than the title king, but it asks for a dynasty: “thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son”. It is the first time in the Bible that Israel offers any man hereditary rule.

When Israel later asks Samuel for a king, God says, “they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Samuel 8:7). Gideon’s answer puts that principle a generation or more earlier in his own words.

The request echoes Aaron at Sinai: “Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives” (Exodus 32:2), and a golden object follows there too. “Ishmaelites” and “Midianites” are used interchangeably here, as in the account of Joseph’s sale (Genesis 37:25–28).

The spread garment becomes a collection plate. The same kinds of gift, earrings and jewels of gold, were given freely for building the tabernacle: “every man that offered offered an offering of gold unto the LORD” (Exodus 35:22).

Seventeen hundred shekels of gold is about forty three pounds. “Purple raiment” is argaman, the costly dye from sea snails worn by kings. The weight is given before the other spoil, as if the gold were the point of the whole list.

An ephod was a priestly garment used in seeking an answer from God; David later said, “Bring hither the ephod,” when he needed guidance (1 Samuel 23:9). Gideon’s ephod at Ophrah may have served the same purpose, away from the sanctuary, which would explain why all Israel went after it.

“Lifted up their heads no more” is the idiom Psalm 83:2 uses for enemies who rise up: “they that hate thee have lifted up the head.” The same psalm prays, “Make their nobles... as Zebah, and as Zalmunna” (Psalm 83:11). Forty years of quiet follow.

The name Jerubbaal returns as Gideon retires to “his own house”. The phrase is ordinary, but the next chapter will be about exactly that house: seventy sons and the struggle over who rules it.

Seventy sons is the size of a royal house: Ahab also had seventy sons in Samaria (2 Kings 10:1). Deuteronomy 17:17 had warned the king not to “multiply wives to himself”. The man who refused a crown kept a king’s household.

A concubine in Shechem seems to have lived with her own family there rather than in Gideon’s house, so her son grew up among the Shechemites. The next chapter turns on that divided loyalty, and the son’s name, Abimelech, means “my father is king”.

“A good old age” is said of only three men: Abraham (Genesis 25:8), Gideon, and David (1 Chronicles 29:28). Gideon is buried in his father’s tomb at Ophrah, where the altar he built still stood (6:24).

Baal-berith means “Baal of the covenant”, and his temple stood at Shechem (9:4), the very place where Joshua had made the people covenant to serve the LORD (Joshua 24:25). The god of the covenant has been replaced by a Baal named after one.

Moses had said, “thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power” (Deuteronomy 8:18). “Remembered not” is the verse’s charge: forgetting is named as the sin before any altar is mentioned.

“Kindness” is chesed, loyal love. David will later ask, “Is there yet any that is left of the house of Saul, that I may shew him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” (2 Samuel 9:1). Israel shows no such loyalty to Gideon’s household, and the next chapter shows what that costs.