Gideon

Gideon is a judge of Israel from the tribe of Manasseh, son of Joash the Abiezrite, whose household lived at Ophrah, and the man whom God raised up to deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. The narrative says he was threshing wheat inside a wine press to hide it from the Midianites when the angel of Yahweh came and sat under the oak at Ophrah (Judges 6:11). Told to go and save Israel, he answered that his family was the poorest in Manasseh and he the least in his father's house (Judges 6:15); the call given to him was, "Go in this your might, and save Israel from the hand of Midian. Haven’t I sent you?" (Judges 6:14). After the angel touched the meat and unleavened cakes with his staff and fire came from the rock, Gideon feared he had seen Yahweh's angel face to face (Judges 6:21–22), and he built an altar there called "Yahweh is Peace," which the text says stood in Ophrah of the Abiezrites (Judges 6:24). He was also given the name Jerubbaal, explained in the narrative by his having broken down his father's altar of Baal (Judges 6:32); the later form Jerubbesheth in 2 Samuel 11:21 substitutes the word for "shame" for the name of Baal, a known scribal convention in the Hebrew text.

Scripture records that the Spirit of Yahweh came on Gideon and he blew a trumpet, and Abiezer was gathered to follow him (Judges 6:34). The deliverance itself was credited to a reduced force: Gideon and the hundred men with him reached the outermost part of the Midianite camp at the beginning of the middle watch and blew their trumpets and broke the pitchers in their hands (Judges 7:19), and the camp was thrown into confusion. The account also preserves his request for two signs with a fleece of wool, and, after the victory, his refusal of hereditary kingship on the ground that Yahweh should rule over the people, together with his making of a gold ephod at Ophrah that became a snare to his family and to Israel (Judges 8:22–27). He died in good old age and was buried at Ophrah (Judges 8:32), but the curse of his son Jotham came upon the men of Shechem after Abimelech's slaughter of Gideon's sons (Judges 9:57). Later Scripture reckons him among the deliverers Yahweh sent (1 Samuel 12:11) and among the examples of faith (Hebrews 11:32, where his name appears in the Greek form Gedeon).

Christian traditions read him differently. Hebrews 11:32 lists him without qualification among the faithful, and much Christian preaching and hymnography treat him as a model of faith and, in some Eastern and patristic reading, read the fleece and the dew as a figure of the Virgin Mary and the incarnation. Other readers, weighing the same narrative, emphasize his hesitancy, his repeated requests for signs, and the ephod as warnings against faith mixed with compromise, and treat the fleece either as legitimate confirmation or as presumption. Historical-critical scholarship commonly treats the Jerubbaal and Jerubbesheth forms as evidence of the text's transmission and later editing rather than as two separate figures.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.