Judges 7:5

God gives his reason in verse 2: “The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.” The whole passage hangs on this sentence. God means to save Israel, and he means Israel to know who saved them.

The word behind “too many”, rab, is the everyday adjective for much, many or great. Set beside the enemy, Israel was already outnumbered. The Midianites came with the Amalekites and the people of the East, and their camels were “without number, as the sand by the sea side for multitude” (Judges 7:12). From the figures in Judges 8:10 the eastern armies come to about 135,000 men. In the warfare of that day the size of an army was the plainest measure of its strength, and any commander facing such a host would have wanted more men. Set beside God’s purpose, 32,000 was still too great a number, because a victory by so many would have had a human explanation.

“Too many for me to give” puts God at the centre. He is the one who gives the enemy into Israel’s hands, and he speaks in human terms of what he will do so that his purpose is plain. His concern is how clearly his own hand will be seen in the deliverance.

To “vaunt themselves”, pâʼar, is to glorify oneself, to boast or show off, and the word can also mean to adorn oneself. Israel would be dressing itself in the honour of a victory God had won. God calls that boasting “against me”, because it takes from him what is his. Through Isaiah he says that he will not give his glory to another (Isaiah 48:11).

The boast God names is “Mine own hand hath saved me.” The Hebrew yâd is the hand of the body, and it also stands for power, means, and the agent through whom something is done. To say “mine own hand” is to say “I saved myself.” Moses warned Israel against the same thought in days of plenty, when they might say that their own power and the might of their hand had gained their wealth, and he told them to remember the LORD, who gives the power to gain it (Deuteronomy 8:17–18). A psalm takes the opposite stand. The singer will trust neither his bow nor his sword to save him, because God is the one who has saved his people from their enemies (Psalm 44:6–7).

The lesson was needed. Israel was under Midian because of its own disobedience, and for seven years the raiders had taken its crops and livestock and driven the people into caves and strongholds in the mountains (Judges 6:1–6). The book of Judges turns again and again through the same cycle: Israel turns from God, falls under an oppressor, cries out, and God raises up a deliverer. A victory that only God could have won would leave Israel no room to forget who had saved them. Paul traces the same purpose through all of God’s work. God has chosen the weak and foolish things of the world to confound the mighty and the wise, so that no flesh may glory in his presence (1 Corinthians 1:27–29). Zechariah heard it as a word from the LORD: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

Verse 1 picks up the story of Judges 6. God had called Gideon while he was threshing wheat in a winepress, and Gideon had hesitated and asked for signs. God answered him with fire that consumed his offering and with the tests of the fleece, and Gideon blew the trumpet and gathered men from the tribes (Judges 6:11–40).

The verse gives him both his names. Yᵉrubbaʻal, Jerubbaal, means “let Baal contend” or “Baal will contend”. He received it after he tore down his father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah beside it (Judges 6:32). Giving both names, “Jerubbaal, who is Gideon”, tells us this is the same man, and the name recalls the night he broke with Baal and stood openly with the LORD. The hesitant farmer of chapter 6 now leads Israel’s army.

They “rose up early”. The verb shâkam means to rise early, and by extension to persist. The army is up at first light and ready to act. They “pitched”, chânâh, which is to pitch tents or encamp, “beside the well of Harod”. The name in Hebrew is ʻÊyn Chărôd, the spring of Harod, and Harod comes from a root meaning to tremble, so the place is the spring of trembling. The name looks ahead. In verse 3 the men who are “afraid”, a word meaning trembling, leave from this very spring, and in the battle to come it is Midian’s turn to tremble and panic. A spring was also a practical place for a camp, since an army and its animals need water.

The enemy lay “on the north side of them”. The “host of the Midianites” is their machăneh, their camp, the place where people live in tents for a time, and so the army camped there. North is tsâphôwn. They were by the “hill”, gibʻâh, of Môwreh, Moreh, a Canaanite place name, “in the valley”. The word for valley, ʻêmeq, is a vale, a broad stretch of low-lying land. This is the Valley of Jezreel, also called the valley of Esdraelon or Megiddo, a fertile plain in northern Israel whose flat ground suited large armies. Verse 8 adds that the host of Midian was “beneath him in the valley”, so Gideon’s men held the higher ground.

Israel went into that camp with a promise from the law. When they went out to battle, the LORD their God would go with them to fight for them (Deuteronomy 20:1–4).

God’s first step is to let the frightened leave. “Now therefore go to, proclaim in the ears of the people.” The small Hebrew word nâʼ behind “go to” presses for action now, and the proclamation is public, so that every man hears it.

The two words for the men who may leave are close in meaning. “Fearful” is yârêʼ, the adjective for one who fears. It comes from the verb yârêʼ, which reaches from reverent awe to plain terror, and here it is terror of the battle. “Afraid” is chârêd, trembling, fear that shows in the body. Together they describe men whose dread would make them a burden in the fight. Such a man may “return”, shûwb, to turn back, “and depart early”, tsâphar.

The command rests on the law of war. Before a battle the officers were to ask whether any man was “fearful and fainthearted” and send him home, so that his fear would not spread to his brothers (Deuteronomy 20:8). God uses that provision here for his own purpose, to make the army small.

The answer was stark. Twenty-two thousand men went home and ten thousand remained, under a third of the army. Seven years of raids had left deep fear in Israel. The ten thousand who stayed showed at least some trust in God’s promise, and Gideon showed his by obeying a command that cut his own army down.

“The people are yet too many,” God says in verse 4, using the same word, rab, as in verse 2. Ten thousand men could still claim the credit. So God tells Gideon to bring them down to the water, “and I will try them for thee there.”

The verb for “try”, tsâraph, means to smelt or refine, the way metal is tested for its purity. A psalm uses it of God testing his people as silver is tried (Psalm 66:10). God himself sets this test and carries it out, and Gideon only has to bring the men. God already knows every heart, so the test serves to show what is in the men and to teach Gideon and all Israel that “the battle is the LORD’s” (1 Samuel 17:47).

God keeps the choice in his own hands. “This shall go with thee, the same shall go with thee; and of whomsoever I say unto thee, This shall not go with thee, the same shall not go.” The word “go” comes four times in this verse. The verb is yâlak, to walk or go, and the repetition makes God’s word final: whoever he names goes, and whoever he leaves out stays behind.

In verse 5 Gideon obeys and brings the men down. Then God gives the test. Every man “that lappeth of the water with his tongue, as a dog lappeth” is to be set by himself, and likewise every man “that boweth down upon his knees to drink.” The verb lâqaq means to lick or lap. The verb kâraʻ means to bend the knee, to kneel or sink down low. Verse 6 shows what lapping meant here. Three hundred men lapped, “putting their hand to their mouth”, so they scooped the water up in a hand, the yâd again, and lapped it from there. All the rest, nine thousand seven hundred men, knelt down to drink.

Verse 7 is God’s promise. The little Hebrew preposition bə, “by”, makes the three hundred the means through which God will act. The one who saves is God: “will I save you.” The verb yâshaʻ means to save, free, rescue or deliver, and Strong’s traces it to the idea of being open, wide and free. For Israel, hemmed in by raiders for seven years, salvation meant release from that oppression.

God will “deliver the Midianites into thine hand.” This is the same word, yâd, as in verse 2. The hand Israel might have boasted of will receive the enemy as God’s gift. God speaks to Gideon by name, and his name, Gidʻôwn, comes from a root meaning to fell or cut down, so it means a feller or warrior. Through the man who once hid his wheat-threshing in a winepress, God will cut down Midian.

Then comes the hardest part of obedience: “let all the other people go every man unto his place.” The verb is yâlak again. Gideon has to send away nine thousand seven hundred men whom any commander would have counted essential. A psalm says the same thing as this verse: “There is no king saved by the multitude of an host” (Psalm 33:16–17).

In verse 8 the chosen men “took victuals in their hand, and their trumpets.” The word for victuals, tsêydâh, means provisions, especially food for a journey, so the three hundred were supplied for a short campaign. The trumpet is the shôwphâr, the curved horn, used in Israel to give signals, call the people together and mark the feasts. It was a signal horn, and a sword or spear was what a soldier would have expected to carry. Its mention here points to the kind of battle God had planned. In the night attack the three hundred blew their trumpets, broke the pitchers that hid their lamps, and cried “The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon,” and the Midianites, thrown into confusion, turned on one another (Judges 7:16–22).

Gideon “sent all the rest of Israel every man unto his tent”, that is, home, “and retained those three hundred men.” The verb for “retained”, châzaq, means to take firm hold, and it is also the ordinary word for being strong or making someone strong. Here Gideon keeps a firm hold on the small band God gave him.

The verse ends where verse 1 began: “the host of Midian was beneath him in the valley.” Three hundred men on the higher ground look down on a camp that fills the plain, and the rest of the chapter tells what God did that night (Judges 7:9–25).

The New Testament shows the same pattern at the centre of the gospel. The Lord told Paul, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness,” and Paul learned to glory in his weaknesses so that the power of Christ might rest on him (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).

God saved the world by a cross, which the world counts as weakness and foolishness. The preaching of the cross is foolishness to those who perish and the power of God to those who are saved (1 Corinthians 1:18), and the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God stronger than men (1 Corinthians 1:23–25). Jesus came as a servant, humbling himself to death on the cross (Philippians 2:6–8). He came as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and he said his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). God, who gave Midian into Gideon’s hand, allowed his own Son to be betrayed into the hands of sinners (Matthew 26:45), and by that apparent defeat Christ triumphed over principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15) and destroyed the power of death, freeing those who lived in fear of it (Hebrews 2:14–15).

The reason God gives in verse 2 is the reason Paul gives for salvation by grace. We are saved through faith, as the gift of God, “not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Gideon’s army could not say “mine own hand hath saved me”, and neither can anyone Christ saves.

The church began like Gideon’s band, with a few disciples and little standing in the world, and Christ promised them power when the Holy Spirit came upon them to be his witnesses (Acts 1:8). The weapons of our warfare are spiritual and mighty through God (2 Corinthians 10:3–4). The fearful went home in verse 3, and Jesus tells his followers to fear God rather than those who can kill only the body (Matthew 10:28). On the reading that the three hundred were chosen for their alertness, they also picture the watchfulness Christ asks of his people, who are to watch for his coming (Matthew 24:42), to watch and pray (Matthew 26:41), and to be sober and vigilant against the devil, who walks about as a roaring lion (1 Peter 5:8). The end of the story is glory given to the Lamb who was slain (Revelation 5:12–13).

These eight verses show us a God who will save his people and wants them to know that he did it. He cares about the glory as much as the victory, because the glory is the truth about who saved them. He is patient with fear. He sends the frightened home without reproach, and he keeps the ones he chooses by his own word.

He also takes away what we would lean on. Gideon watched his army go from 32,000 to 10,000 and then to 300, each step by God’s command, and each step left more room for God’s own hand to be seen. When our resources look small beside what we face, this passage reminds us that God has saved by few before, and that “there is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few.” The victory that followed belonged to him, and so does ours in Christ.