THE ANGEL UNDER THE OAK
Also named Jerubbaal (Judges 6:32) and Jerubbesheth (2 Samuel 11:21), youngest son of Joash, of the clan of Abiezer in the tribe of Manasseh. Gideon or Gedeon (Hebrew: גִּדְעוֹן, Modern Gid'on Tiberian Giḏʻôn), which means "Destroyer," "Mighty warrior," or from the Hebrew word meaning hewer or feller. He was the son of Joash, an Abiezrite (Judges 6:11), from the town of Ophrah in the Manasseh territory (see Tribal Lands) of Samaria, a short distance from Mount Gerizim"Feller (of trees)" was judge of the Hebrews. Gideon was Israel's fourth major Judge after the birth of Joshua. A large army of Midianites and other nations united against Israel. With the calling of Gideon the second period in the history of the Judges commences. It lasted altogether less than a century. During its course events were rapidly hastening towards the final crisis.
1 And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD: and the LORD delivered them into the hand of Mid'i-an seven years. The Midianites were among the most ancient and inveterate of the enemies of Israel. They joined with the Moabites to seduce them to idolatry, and were nearly extirpated by them; Numbers 31:1-12. The Midianites dwelt on the eastern borders of the Dead Sea, and their capital was Arnon.
2 And the hand of Mid'i-an prevailed against Israel: and because of the Mid'i-anites the children of Israel made them the dens which are in the mountains, and caves, and strongholds.
3 And so it was, when Israel had sown, that the Mid'i-anites came up, and the Amal'ekites, and the children of the east, even they came up against them;
4 and they encamped against them, and destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass. The Midianites weapon was "the camel," which made quick, efficient raids possible. "It is clear that the use of this angular and imposing beast struck terror in the hearts of the Israelites." The entire breadth of the land, from Jordan to the coast of the Mediterranean Sea is meant. The whole land was ravaged, and the inhabitants deprived of the necessaries of life.
5 For they came up with their cattle and their tents, and they came as grasshoppers for multitude; for both they and their camels were without number: and they entered into the land to destroy it.
6 And Israel was greatly impoverished because of the Mid'i-anites; and the children of Israel cried unto the LORD.
7 ¶ And it came to pass, when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD because of the Mid'i-anites,
8 that the LORD sent a prophet unto the children of Israel, which said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you forth out of the house of bondage. They cried to God for a deliverer, and God sent them a prophet to instruct them, and to make them ready for deliverance. This prophet is not named, but he was a man, a prophet, not an angel, as Judges 2:1. The message God sent them by a prophet, by convincing them of sin, to prepare them for deliverance, Judges 6:7-10.
9 and I delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of all that oppressed you, and drave them out from before you, and gave you their land;
10 and I said unto you, I am the LORD your God; fear not the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but ye have not obeyed my voice.
11 And there came an angel of the LORD, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the Abiezrite: and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites. 12 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him, and said unto him, The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.
Or Ephra, was a city, or village rather, in the half tribe of Manasseh, beyond Jordan, approximately sixteen miles north of Jericho, in the district belonging to the family of Abiezer (Jos 17:2).
This is not the only instance in which a man taken from agricultural employments was made general of an army, and the deliverer of his country. Shamgar was evidently a ploughman, and with his ox-goad he slew many Philistines, and became one of the deliverers of Israel.
In Gideon's day the winepress was always put at the foot of the hill because they brought the grapes down from the vineyard. Naturally, they would carry the heavy grapes downhill; they carried them to the lowest place. In contrast, the threshing floor was always put up on the top of the hill, the highest hill that was available, in order to catch the wind which would drive the chaff away. Here we find Gideon, down at the bottom of the hill, threshing. Now that would be the place to take the grapes, but that is no place to take your crop in order to do your threshing. Can you see the frustration of this man? Why doesn’t he go to the hilltop? Well, he is afraid of the Midianites. He does not want them to see that he is threshing wheat. And you can imagine his frustration. There is no air getting to him down there, certainly no wind. So he pitches the grain up into the air. And what happens? Does the chaff blow away? No. It comes down around his neck and gets into his clothes making him very uncomfortable. There he is, trying his best to thresh in a place like that, and all the time rebuking himself for being a coward, afraid to go to the hilltop.
Many of the ancient wine presses remain to the present day. Ordinarily they consisted of two rectangular or circular excavations, hewn (Isa 5:2) in the solid rock to a depth of 2 or 3 feet. Where possible one was always higher than the other and they were connected by a pipe or channel. Their size, of course, varied greatly, but the upper vat was always wider and shallower than the lower and was the press proper, into which the grapes were thrown, to be crushed by the feet of the treaders (Isa 63:1-3, etc.). The juice flowed down through the pipe into the lower vat, from which it was removed into jars (Hag 2:16) or where it was allowed to remain during the first fermentation. Many modifications of this form of the press are found. Where there was no rock close to the surface, the vats were dug in the earth and lined with stonework or cement, covered with pitch.
Heb for "threshed" is “beating out.” By this terebinth tree was Gideon the son of Joash "knocking out wheat in the wine-press." חבט does not mean to thresh, but to knock with a stick. The wheat was threshed upon open floors, or in places in the open field that were rolled hard for the purpose, with threshing carriages or threshing shoes, or else with oxen, which they drove about over the scattered sheaves to tread out the grains with their hoofs. Only poor people knocked out the little corn that they had gleaned with a stick (Ruth 2:17), and Gideon did it in the existing times of distress, namely in the pressing-tub, which, like all wine-presses, was sunk in the ground, in a hole that had been dug out or hewn in the rock (for a description of cisterns of this kind, see Rob. Bibl. Res. pp. 135-6), "to make the wheat fly" (i.e., to make it safe) "from the Midianites" (הנים as in Exodus 9:20).
This was a private place; he could not make a threshing-floor in the open as the custom was, and bring either the wheel over the grain, or tread it out with the feet of the oxen, for fear of the Midianites, who were accustomed to come and take it away as soon as threshed. He got a few sheaves from the field, and brought them home to have them privately threshed for the support of the family. As there could be no vintage among the Israelites in their present distressed circumstances, the winepress would never be suspected by the Midianites to be the place of threshing corn. The Biblical name for angel, מלאך mal'ach, which translates simply as "messenger," obtained the further signification of "angel" only through the addition of God's name, as ("angel of the Lord," or "angel of God", Zech. 12:8).
12 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him, and said unto him, The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valor.
Verse 12 states that the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon and said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” This time God didn't send a prophet, or even an angel; He sends the “Angel of the Lord,” which is the thophany or manifestation of God Himself! The Hebrew, this phrase, “The Lord is with you” is the root to the name “Immanuel,” God with us, which was the name used for Jesus in Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23.
13 And Gideon said unto him, O my Lord, if the LORD be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt? but now the LORD hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of the Mid'i-anites.
Miracles (pala') is a verb meaning to do something wonderful, to do something extraordinary, or difficult. It frequently signifies the wondrous works of God, especially His deliverance and judgments. The verbal root of pala' has the basic meaning be surpassing and conveys the ideas "be extraordinary, beyond one's imagination or expectations" or "be too difficult, beyond one's capability." 14 And the LORD looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel from the hand of the Mid'i-anites: have not I sent thee? What does the angel mean?
"Then Jehovah turned to him and said, Go in this thy strength, and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian. Have not I sent thee?" The writer very appropriately uses the name Jehovah here, instead of the angel of Jehovah; for by his reply the angel distinctly manifested himself as Jehovah, more especially in the closing words, "Have not I sent thee?" (הלא, in the sense of lively assurance), which are so suggestive of the call of Moses to be the deliverer of Israel (Exodus 3:12). "In this thy strength," i.e., the strength which thou now hast, since Jehovah is with thee-Jehovah, who can still perform miracles as in the days of the fathers. The demonstrative "this" points to the strength which had just been given to him through the promise of God.
He had just stated that Jehovah was with him; and he now says, This is the might that you are to go in, i.e., in the might of Jehovah, who is with thee.
15 And he said unto him, O my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manas'seh, and I am the least in my father's house. Behold, my thousand is impoverished. Tribes were anciently divided into tens, and fifties, and hundreds, and thousands; the thousands therefore marked grand divisions, and consequently numerous families; Gideon here intimates that the families of which he made a part were very much diminished. But if we take alpey for the contracted form of the plural, which is frequently in Hebrew nouns joined with a verb in the singular, then the translation will be, "The thousands in Manasseh are thinned;" i.e., this tribe is greatly reduced, and can do little against their enemies.
16 And the LORD said unto him, Surely I will be with thee, and thou shalt smite the Mid'i-anites as one man. To this difficulty the Lord replies, "I will be with thee (see Exodus 3:12; Joshua 1:5), and thou wilt smite the Midianites as one man," i.e., at one blow, as they slay a single man (see Numbers 14:15).
17 And he said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight, then show me a sign that thou talkest with me.
18 Depart not hence, I pray thee, until I come unto thee, and bring forth my present, and set it before thee. And he said, I will tarry until thou come again. Hebrew, my mincha, or "meat offering"; and his idea probably was to prove, by his visitor's partaking of the entertainment, whether or not he was more than man.
19 ¶ And Gideon went in, and made ready a kid, and unleavened cakes of an ephah of flour: the flesh he put in a basket, and he put the broth in a pot, and brought it out unto him under the oak, and presented it.
20 And the angel of God said unto him, Take the flesh and the unleavened cakes, and lay them upon this rock, and pour out the broth. And he did so.
21 Then the angel of the LORD put forth the end of the staff that was in his hand, and touched the flesh and the unleavened cakes; and there rose up fire out of the rock, and consumed the flesh and the unleavened cakes. Then the angel of the LORD departed out of his sight.
22 And when Gideon perceived that he was an angel of the LORD, Gideon said, Alas, O Lord GOD! for because I have seen an angel of the LORD face to face.
23 And the LORD said unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou shalt not die.
The theophany here described resembles so far the appearance of the angel of the Lord to Abram in the grove of Mamre (Genesis 18), that he appears in perfect human form, comes as a traveller, and allows food to be set before him; but there is this essential difference between the two, that whereas the three men who came to Abraham took the food that was set before them and ate thereof - that is to say, allowed themselves to be hospitably entertained by Abraham - the angel of the Lord in the case before us did indeed accept the minchah that had been made ready for him, but only as a sacrifice of Jehovah which he caused to ascend in fire. The reason for this essential difference is to be found in the different purpose of the two theophanies. To Abraham the Lord came to seal that fellowship of grace into which He had entered with him through the covenant that He had made; but in the case of Gideon His purpose was simply to confirm the truth of His promise, that Jehovah would be with him and would send deliverance through him to His people, or to show that the person who had appeared to him was the God of the fathers, who could still deliver His people out of the power of their enemies by working such miracles as the fathers had seen. But the acceptance of the minchah prepared for Him as a sacrifice which the Lord himself caused to be miraculously consumed by fire, showed that the Lord would still graciously accept the prayers and sacrifices of Israel, if they would but forsake the worship of the dead idols of the heathen, and return to Him in sincerity. (Compare with this the similar theophany in Judges 13.) 24 Then Gideon built an altar there unto the LORD, and called it Jehovah–sha'lom: 2 unto this day it is yet in Ophrah of the Abi-ez'rites. Jehovah-shalom, meaning Jehovah peace, was the name that Gideon (see The Judges) gave to the altar that he built at the place where an angel of The Lord appeared to him during the time that the Israelites were being punitively invaded by the Midianites.
Breakthrough Intl 5214 South 2nd Avenue, Everett, Wa 98203-4113
