🤍 Context & Key Themes
The Midianites have been oppressing Israel for seven years, sweeping in at harvest time and destroying everything, reducing Israel to living in caves in the mountains. Into this context comes an angel of the Lord, sitting under a terebinth tree, delivering a commission to a man hiding in a winepress threshing wheat. Gideon is not what anyone would call a likely deliverer. He is the youngest son of the weakest clan in Manasseh. His first response to being called a mighty man of valor is to ask why all of this is happening. His second response is to ask for a sign. His third response is to ask for another sign. Chapter 6 is the story of how God gets a reluctant, fearful, doubting man into position to do something remarkable.
📖 Key Verse
“The Lord turned to him and said, ‘Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?'”
— Judges 6:14
🔍 Summary
Israel does evil and the Lord gives them into the hand of Midian for seven years. The Midianites are devastating — they come with their livestock and tents like locusts at planting time and devour everything until nothing is left for Israel. Israel is impoverished and cries out to the Lord. God sends a prophet who reminds them: I brought you out of Egypt. I delivered you from the hand of your oppressors. I gave you their land. I told you not to fear the gods of the Amorites. But you have not obeyed my voice.
Then the angel of the Lord comes and sits under the terebinth at Ophrah, belonging to Joash the Abiezrite. His son Gideon is beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites. The angel says: The Lord is with you, O mighty man of valor. Gideon’s response is blunt: if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonderful deeds that our fathers recounted to us? The Lord has forsaken us and given us into the hand of Midian. The Lord says: go in this might of yours and save Israel. Do not I send you? Gideon: please, Lord, how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house. The Lord: but I will be with you, and you shall strike the Midianites as one man.
Gideon asks for a sign. He prepares a meal. The angel touches it with his staff, fire springs from the rock and consumes it, and the angel vanishes. Gideon builds an altar there: the Lord is peace.
That night God tells Gideon to tear down his father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah beside it, and to build an altar to the Lord on top of the stronghold and offer the second bull as a burnt offering. Gideon does it at night because he is afraid of his father’s household and the men of the town. In the morning they find the altar torn down and demand Gideon’s life. His father defends him: if Baal is a god, let him contend for himself. The Spirit of the Lord clothes Gideon. He blows a trumpet. Thousands gather. He asks for two more signs with a fleece, and receives both — the fleece wet and the ground dry, then the fleece dry and the ground wet. God gives him both without rebuke.
✨ Reflection
Gideon’s opening question to the angel — if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened? — is the most honest question in the book and one of the most honest questions in the entire Bible. It is not faithlessness. It is the cry of someone who knows the stories and is looking at a reality that does not match them. The Lord does not rebuke him for asking. He answers with a commission: go. The theology is embedded in the assignment, not delivered as a lecture before the assignment begins. The answer to why this is happening is: go and end it.
The double fleece is often cited as an example of doubt that God graciously accommodates. But look at what Gideon already did before asking for the second sign: he tore down his father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah at night, alone, with ten servants. That is not nothing. He is acting in fear, but he is acting. The signs are not a substitute for faith — they are the scaffolding God provides to get a fearful man moving, knowing that once he is moving, the fear will lose its grip. God is not frustrated by Gideon’s hesitation. He is patient with it, precisely as He is patient with all of us who need more confirmation than we probably should before stepping out.
Joash’s defense of his son is one of the better arguments in the book: if Baal is a god, let him plead his own cause. It does not quite rise to monotheism, but it is the right logic. A deity that cannot defend his own altar does not deserve the name.