Gideon and the Three Hundred against Midian
For seven years Midianite raiders destroyed Israel's harvests. An angel finds Gideon secretly threshing wheat and sends him out—and three hundred men with horns and torches rout an entire camp.
Every year when the harvest ripened, Midianites and Amalekites crossed the Jordan "like locusts without number" and trampled the fields. Israelites hid in caves. This went on for seven years.
An angel appeared to a man named Gideon at Ophrah—he was threshing wheat inside a winepress so the raiders would not see. The greeting sounded almost ironic: "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior." Gideon answered with the question people have repeated ever since: if God is with us, why is all this happening, and where are the wonders our fathers told us about?
His first assignment was internal: tear down the altar of Baal his own father had built. He did it at night, out of fear, and earned the nickname Jerubbaal—"let Baal contend with him." Then came the two signs with the fleece and the dew.
Thirty-two thousand men gathered to him. God said: too many, or Israel will say "my own hand saved me." After two siftings—by fear, and by how men drank at the stream—three hundred remained. At night they surrounded the camp with horns and torches hidden in jars; at the signal they smashed the jars, blew and shouted. The camp panicked and fled.
Afterwards the people offered Gideon hereditary kingship. He refused: "the Lord will rule over you."
How we know
On the chronology
Academic scholarship fits the age of the Judges roughly into 1200–1030 BCE — from the appearance of Israelite settlements in the highlands to the accession of Saul. Seder Olam stretches it about a century and a half longer. The dates of individual judges are conventional placements within that frame, not established years: there is no extra-biblical evidence for them, and the order is known better than the timing.
Sources
Tanakh
- Shoftim 6–8 — the angel at Ofrah, the signs with the fleece, the choosing of three hundred, and the night attack
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Rosh Hashanah 25b — “Yerubaal in his generation is as Moshe in his”
- Midrash Tanchuma, Shoftim — Gidon’s merit — protecting his father and Israel (the exact passage to be checked)
- Seder Olam Rabbah 12 — the forty years of quiet under Gidon in the count of the era
Basis: stated in the Tanakh.