Gideon was a son of Joash from the Abiezrite clan of Manasseh. When Israel again did evil in God’s sight, God gave Israel into the hands of Midian for seven years. Midianites, Amalekites, and eastern peoples came up to destroy crops and livestock, and the Israelites hid in mountain caves and strongholds. When they cried for help, a prophet rebuked them: God had rescued them from Egypt, but they had worshiped other gods. At that time Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from Midian.
God’s messenger appeared and called Gideon a mighty warrior. Gideon asked why all this had happened if God was with them and where the wonders described by their ancestors had gone. When God sent him to save Israel, Gideon replied that his clan was the weakest in Manasseh and he was the least in his father’s house. He requested a sign and brought a young goat and unleavened bread. The messenger touched the food with a staff, and fire rose from the rock and consumed it. Gideon feared because he had seen God’s messenger, but God promised peace. He built an altar there and named it “The Lord Is Peace.”
That night Gideon was commanded to tear down his father’s altar to Baal, cut down the Asherah pole, build an altar to God, and sacrifice a bull. Afraid of his family and townspeople, he carried out the order at night with ten servants. When the people discovered the act and demanded Gideon’s death, his father Joash said that if Baal was a god he could contend for himself over the demolished altar. Gideon was thereafter called Jerubbaal, meaning that Baal should contend with him. When the Midianite coalition gathered in the Jezreel Valley, God’s spirit clothed Gideon, and he blew a trumpet to summon troops.
Gideon requested two signs with a fleece. First he asked that dew appear only on the fleece while the ground remained dry. The next night he asked that the fleece remain dry while dew covered the ground. Both requests were fulfilled. After the army gathered, God said there were too many troops, lest Israel boast that it had saved itself. When the fearful were dismissed, twenty-two thousand left and ten thousand remained. At the water, another selection based on how the men drank left only three hundred, and the others went home.
The Midianite camp filled the valley like locusts. God told Gideon that if he was afraid he could go down with his servant Purah. Gideon heard one soldier describe a dream in which a loaf of barley rolled into the camp and overturned a tent. Another interpreted it as Gideon’s sword and a coming victory. Gideon worshiped, returned, and announced that God had given Midian into their hands. He divided the three hundred into three companies and supplied each man with a trumpet, an empty jar, and a torch inside it.
At the change of the midnight watch, Gideon’s men blew their trumpets, shattered the jars, and raised the torches. They cried, “A sword for God and for Gideon!” Panic spread through the Midianite camp, where men struck one another with swords and fled. Gideon called nearby tribes to block the escape. The Ephraimites angrily challenged him for not summoning them at the beginning, but Gideon answered humbly that their capture of the Midianite commanders Oreb and Zeeb outweighed his own achievements. His answer calmed their anger.
Gideon and the three hundred crossed the Jordan exhausted but still pursuing the Midianite kings Zebah and Zalmunna. The people of Succoth and Penuel refused bread because the two kings had not yet been captured. Gideon warned that on his return he would punish Succoth’s elders with desert thorns and tear down Penuel’s tower. After a surprise attack captured the kings, he seized Succoth’s elders and punished the town’s men with desert thorns and briers. He demolished the Penuel tower and killed the town’s men. This retaliation after victory remains part of Gideon’s story.
Gideon asked Zebah and Zalmunna about men they had killed at Tabor. When they described men who resembled Gideon and looked like princes, he identified them as his brothers. He ordered his young firstborn son Jether to kill the kings, but the boy was afraid and did not draw his sword. After the kings challenged Gideon to do it himself, he killed them and took the ornaments from their camels’ necks. The Israelites then asked Gideon, his son, and his grandson to rule them. Gideon answered that neither he nor his son would rule because God would rule them.
Gideon nevertheless asked each man for a gold earring from the plunder. The collected gold weighed 1,700 shekels, and he made it into an ephod placed in his town of Ophrah. All Israel prostituted itself after the ephod, which became a snare to Gideon and his household. Midian was subdued, and the land had rest for forty years during Gideon’s lifetime. He had many wives and seventy sons. A concubine in Shechem also bore him Abimelech.
Gideon died at an old age and was buried in the tomb of his father Joash at Ophrah. After his death Israel again worshiped the Baals and made Baal-berith their god. They did not remember God or show loyalty to Gideon’s household in return for all the good Gideon had done for Israel. Abimelech persuaded his mother’s relatives at Shechem that rule by one man was better than rule by Gideon’s seventy sons. With silver from Baal-berith’s temple, he hired followers and killed his half brothers on one stone at Ophrah. Only the youngest, Jotham, escaped by hiding. The leaders of Shechem made Abimelech king. Judges places this event after Gideon to show the complicated legacy that his victory and choices left to his family and Israel.