An Afterthought about an Afterthought

“As soon as Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its interpretation, he worshiped.”

By his own admission, Gideon was the least accomplished son in the household of a father whose clan was a mere afterthought within its tribe. Worse, in the latest recorded Israelite census, the tribe of Manasseh had finished dead last in the number of fighting men it was able to supply to Israel’s army, less than half the number available from Judah and well behind even small-but-pugnacious Benjamin.

To top things off, the tribe of Manasseh then voluntarily split itself in half.

On the Mount (22)

Towards the end of the children of Israel’s multi-century sojourn in Egypt, they were enslaved by a king with no appreciation for the history his people shared with the Hebrew minority living among them, and no understanding of how Israel’s presence in his land had been of unprecedented benefit to his nation. So Pharaoh used force to put God’s people to work, and they built him his legendary treasure cities, places where the king could store up his excess goods against the remote possibility of bad times.

The irony is that it was Joseph, a son of Israel, who had first taught the Pharaohs the principle of laying up excess wealth as insurance against those all-too-frequent “evil days”.