No King in Israel (11)

Today’s chapter begins with sad, familiar words: “The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” The writer does not specify the nature of this evil immediately, though we could surely guess by now, but God shortly sends his prophet to declare it. Our narrator will also tell us that the first instruction God gave Gideon, his next appointed deliverer of Israel, was to tear down his own father’s altar to Baal, then chop down his Asherah pole and use it for firewood.

This also would be a clue.

It’s the same old substitution of false for true, in pathetic imitation of the Canaanite nations whose gods could not save them from Israel only a few years prior. The logical disconnect in Israelite thinking is obvious to Christian readers. Perhaps with the passage of a few generations it was not so evident to Israel.

Moreover, if idolatry was characteristic of the soon-to-be-deliverer’s own family even while Israel was crying out for help to the Lord, it’s no surprise God had to save his people in the north through the gentle promptings of a maternal woman we read about in the previous chapter. It seems in those days there were not many uncorrupted options available for the Lord to use.

II. Twelve Judges in Chronological Order (continued)

5. Gideon

Judges 6:1-6 — The Problem

“The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord gave them into the hand of Midian seven years. And the hand of Midian overpowered Israel, and because of Midian the people of Israel made for themselves the dens that are in the mountains and the caves and the strongholds. For whenever the Israelites planted crops, the Midianites and the Amalekites and the people of the East would come up against them. They would encamp against them and devour the produce of the land, as far as Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel and no sheep or ox or donkey. For they would come up with their livestock and their tents; they would come like locusts in number — both they and their camels could not be counted — so that they laid waste the land as they came in. And Israel was brought very low because of Midian. And the people of Israel cried out for help to the Lord.”

Into the Hand

This concept of giving a nation “into the hand” of another (in this case, Midian) is embodied in a Hebrew expression first used by Melchizedek when he blessed Abraham. “The Most High God”, said the priest-king, had delivered Abraham’s enemies “into his hand”, and he blessed God on account of it even as he accepted Abraham’s grateful tithe. Joshua 21 uses the same phrase concerning Israel’s almost-complete conquest of Canaan. The Lord gave those nations into Israel’s hand.

Ironic, then, that in Judges, it repeatedly takes the same punishment God had meted out to the Canaanites to draw Israel back to himself. Truly, the Lord is fair in his dealings with all men. Also, some lessons take forever to learn.

Midianites, Amalekites, People of the East

Like Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites and others, Midianites were descended from Hebrew stock, in their case through Abraham by his wife Keturah. You might think a common ancestor, especially one of Abraham’s stature, might inspire better than average relationships with the other nations he fathered, but this was hardly ever the case with the passage of time, though it was certainly God’s preference. Midian lay in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea, to Israel’s southeast, so the invaders came from the opposite end of the country from Hazor, Israel’s most recent oppressor. Historians call the Midianites nomadic within their established territories. Due to their proximity to Israel during the latter wilderness years and their badly failed attempt to destroy God’s people through the aborted curse of Balaam, Midian had longstanding grudges to act upon when given opportunity.

At least one of Midian’s allies was even worse. Amalek was the bastard grandson of Jacob’s brother Esau. His descendants were also nomads from the Sinai Peninsula. Like Midian, the Amalekites had history with Israel. They ambushed Moses on the way to the Promised Land without provocation, becoming the first nation in history to actually do battle with Israel. (Egypt does not count; their army never got within striking distance.) As a result, God determined to blot Amalek out from under heaven, but it would not happen for many years, and not without much bloodshed along the way. In the meantime, Amalek harassed Israel at every opportunity.

As for the “people [literally, ‘sons’] of the East”, in Genesis 29 the expression refers to Laban and the group of Jacob’s relatives resident in Haran. By Jeremiah 49, however, the expression is being used to describe the peoples of Hazor and Kedar, which would be entirely different ethnic groups. The real question is “East of what?” We don’t have a concrete answer for that one, but it’s probably nomads from east of the Jordan that are in view.

So then, we have three allied groups of well-armed nomadic bandits migrating periodically into Israel to help themselves whenever there was anything worth taking. For seven long years, each harvest ended in hunger for Israel’s farmers and their increasingly impoverished families. For nomadic plunderers, this arrangement made perfect sense: why go to the trouble of settling, seeding and plowing when you can simply arrive like a cloud of locusts and seize whatever you want?

Seven Years

In this case, Israel’s cry for help took seven years to arise organically. How hard hearted do you have to be to endure the better part of a decade hiding in caves before you admit you’re in serious trouble and call on God for help? But such was the case with Israel.

This is the first of two periods of servitude in Judges that prompt questions about the possible symbolic significance of their duration. So far, Israel had served Cushan-rishathaim eight years, Eglon eighteen, and Jabin of Hazor twenty, none of which would mean much to numerologists. The only substantive conclusion we can draw from those figures is that the period of punishment got longer every time Israel fell back into the same sinful pattern. Makes sense. Seven is a more familiar number to students of scripture, and the shortest period to date. The seven-year-old bull Gideon sacrificed to the Lord had somehow survived through this entire period of Midianite oppression, a year of life for each year Israel suffered, protected by his owners. He was a truly valuable commodity and a sacrifice with a cost attached. Is there something in that? Perhaps.

Later periods of oppression noted by the author in Judges ran eighteen (again) and finally forty years prior to Samson’s tenure as judge. If there is some intentional spiritual significance in the seven- and forty-year periods of oppression, it is not obvious.

Judges 6:7-10 — The Prophet

“When the people of Israel cried out to the Lord on account of the Midianites, the Lord sent a prophet to the people of Israel. And he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt and brought you out of the house of slavery. And I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you and gave you their land. And I said to you, ‘I am the Lord your God; you shall not fear the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell.’ But you have not obeyed my voice.’ ”

A Prophet

The scripture names many of its prophets, but more than a few remain anonymous. This man is one of those. Scripture preserved his message these last few thousand years, but not his name. What is important is that the Lord spoke through him and he responded faithfully with a word that surely displeased many who heard him.

Led/Brought/Delivered/Drove/Gave/Said

Six verbs describe what God had done for Israel over a couple hundred years of history. The reader knows this story well. Gideon knew it too, as we will discover shortly. We might wonder why the prophet had to rehearse it for them, but perhaps not every member of that generation of Israelites knew what he did. Remember, Israelite intermarriage with the nations led to the worship of their gods, and the biggest influence on the men of Gideon’s generation might have been their Canaanite and foreign mothers. You rarely get godly offspring from ungodly parents.

Gideon, for a time at least, would be the rare exception.