Gideon

Gideon, also known as Jerubbaal, is the Israelite leader whose career occupies Judges 6–8 in the Hebrew Bible. He is described as the son of Joash the Abiezrite, belonging to the clan of Abiezer in the tribe of Manasseh, and as living at Ophrah of the Abiezrites, a town in Manassite territory whose precise archaeological identification remains uncertain. The story is set in the era of the judges, before the Israelite monarchy, a period that historians often correlate in broad terms with the late second millennium BCE, commonly the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE. The biblical book is a later theological composition rather than a contemporary chronicle, and no independent inscription or extra-biblical archive of the time names Gideon, so neither a birth year nor a death year can be verified from a reliable historical source.

The narrative opens with Israel under Midianite and Amalekite pressure, reduced to hiding in mountains and caves. An angel of the Lord finds Gideon threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites and greets him as a mighty warrior. Gideon protests his family's weakness and his own insignificance, then asks for signs: fire consuming a prepared offering, and the two tests with a fleece left on the threshing floor—dew on the fleece alone, then dew on the ground alone. At divine command he demolishes his father's Baal altar and the Asherah beside it by night, using a second bull as a burnt offering on the new altar of the Lord. The townsmen demand his death, but Joash defends him with the challenge that Baal should contend for himself, whence the name Jerubbaal. The Spirit of the Lord is said to clothe Gideon; he sounds the trumpet and sends messengers through Manasseh, Asher, Zebulun, and Naphtali.

A large force assembles at the spring of Harod, opposite the Midianite camp in the Valley of Jezreel. God instructs Gideon to reduce the army so that Israel cannot claim the victory as its own: first those who are fearful depart, then those who kneel to drink water are dismissed, leaving three hundred who lap the water from their hands. Gideon overhears a Midianite recounting a dream of a barley loaf tumbling into the camp and overturning a tent, interpreted as the sword of Gideon. He divides the three hundred into three companies, each man with a trumpet, an empty jar, and a torch inside the jar. At the beginning of the middle watch they blow the trumpets, smash the jars, and shout, throwing the camp into confusion. The Midianites flee toward the Jordan. Oreb and Zeeb are captured and killed; Zebah and Zalmunna are later taken beyond the Jordan and executed after Gideon questions them about the killing of his brothers at Tabor. Men of Ephraim quarrel with Gideon for not summoning them earlier; he mollifies them by praising their capture of the Midianite commanders.

When the Israelites invite Gideon to rule over them, he refuses hereditary kingship and says that the Lord will rule. He requests golden earrings from the Ishmaelite plunder and fashions an ephod, which he places in Ophrah; the text states that all Israel prostituted themselves to it there and that it became a snare to Gideon and his family. He is said to have had seventy sons by many wives, and Abimelech by a concubine who lived in Shechem. After Gideon's death at a good old age, he was buried in the tomb of his father Joash at Ophrah of the Abiezrites. The people then turned again to the Baals, making Baal-berith their god, and did not remember the Lord or deal kindly with the house of Jerubbaal. Subsequent tradition in Judaism treats him as one of the judges who saved Israel; the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews includes him in a catalogue of those who through faith conquered kingdoms. Christian hagiographical calendars have at times numbered him among the righteous of the Old Covenant, but he held no later ecclesiastical dignity, was not a pope or patriarch, and was not the object of a documented papal canonization of the medieval or modern type.