The narrator of the book of Judges, like the other writers of the Bible, is interested in real people. The men and women whose experiences he records are not the simplistic, flattened out figures of morality tales. They are three-dimensional, fully formed characters with strengths and weaknesses, who win victories and experience failures, whose lives, in short, are just like ours. And the human writers of Scripture are interested in these real men and women because the Holy Spirit, who moved them as they wrote, is interested in real human beings. Failure to recognise this fact will mean that we never really “get” the book of Judges, and that we miss what it has to tell us about the weaknesses of our own character and about the grace and faithfulness of God.
Gideon is a great man; his story leaves us in no doubt about that. His humility, his courage (if, at times, reluctant), and his desire for the blessing of God’s people all mark him out as an admirable character. And our impression is given divine confirmation by his inclusion among the worthies of faith in Hebrews 11. But Gideon failed. And, while different interpreters might draw up different lists of the ways in which Gideon failed, only the most determined effort to whitewash his character could ignore his failure in terms of his family, or the devastating consequences that failure had for the nation. It is sobering that in the previous article in this series, we identified Gideon’s family life as the arena of one of his greatest victories. Not for the last time in this book, we learn the lesson that, even at our strongest, we are all so very weak.
Another solemn lesson that we learn from Gideon’s failure is, as has often been pointed out, the fact that it occurred towards the end of his life, when the battle had been fought, the victory won, the offer of a crown denied, and the pressure was finally off. Gideon personifies the principle of 1 Corinthians 10:12 – “let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall”1 – and offers a serious warning about the dangers of complacency at any stage in our Christian experience.
Gideon’s example also reminds us that, in spiritual things, success and failure can stand cheek-to-cheek. In Judges 8:23, Gideon reveals his spiritual stature as he declines the offer of kingship: “And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you.” In the next breath, however, he requests the gold earrings of the Ishmaelites, and, just a handful of verses later, has made the golden ephod after which all Israel went “a whoring.” We have often been taught that Gideon rejected kingship but grasped after priesthood, and that seems a plausible interpretation of the biblical data.2 It was most likely not that he set the ephod up as an idol; that would have been a very sad decline for the man who had begun his career by pulling down the altar of Baal. 3 Rather, “it is far more probable that Gideon put on the ephod and wore it as a priest, when he wished to inquire and learn the will of the Lord …. Gideon, to whom the Lord had manifested himself directly … might suppose that he was not acting in violation of the law, when he had an ephod made, and thus provided himself with a substratum or vehicle for inquiring the will of the Lord. His sin therefore consisted chiefly in his invading the prerogative of the Aaronic priesthood, drawing away the people from the one legitimate sanctuary, and thereby not only undermining the theocratic unity of Israel, but also giving an impetus to the relapse of the nation into the worship of Baal after his death.”4
The narrator, as ever, gives us little to go on in terms of Gideon’s motivation – thus the radically differing conclusions reached by commentators. But he is explicit about the consequences of Gideon’s actions: “which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house” (8:27). The emphasis on the implications of Gideon’s actions for his house (or household) specifically is striking. There were negative consequences for the nation, certainly, but the focus seems to be on Gideon’s household. Just how the ephod became a snare or trap is not explained but it is surely significant that the other occurrence of the word “snare” in Judges is found in 2:3, where Jehovah warns the nation, “I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.” That, along with the fact that the language of prostitution, used here of the nation’s response to the ephod, is also used in 2:17 and 8:27 (just at the end of the Gideon narrative) to describe Israel’s pursuit of foreign gods, strongly suggests that, whether Gideon had intended it or not, the ephod had become the object of idolatrous veneration. Tragically, the man who had transcended the idolatry of his upbringing had led his own family back into – or at the very least towards – idolatry.
The lesson here is no less crucial for being obvious: the things that we allow into our homes have enormous potential to impact our families for good or for evil. This has always been true, but in an era where much of what comes into our homes comes in an intangible stream of data, piped to an ever-increasing array of devices, with the potential to offer a range of corruption that is – quite literally – unimaginable, the policing of our homes is both more challenging and more necessary than for any previous generation.
That we need to protect our homes and our families from what is evil is obvious – more obvious, perhaps, than our practice might sometimes suggest. But the real tragedy of Gideon’s failure lies in this: the snare he introduced was most likely motivated by his desire for greater communion with God. His intentions were good, but the approach that he adopted was contrary to the teaching of God’s Word. Although the priesthood and the tabernacle are strangely absent in the book of Judges and although 1 Samuel gives us little hope that things there were operating as God intended, Gideon had no licence to innovate upon the divine pattern of approach to God. Good intentions were no substitute for scriptural faithfulness. By making his own ephod – and likely establishing his own priesthood – Gideon was drawing himself, his family and the nation as a whole away from the divinely-sanctioned centre of worship. And, notwithstanding his desire to serve the true God, it remains the fact that Gideon’s ephod had its origins, ultimately, in the gold of the Ishmaelite earrings. His novel approach to God was linked not just with the world, but with pagan idolatry too. It is not easy to live in times when there is failure in the house of God or among those who serve there. Difficulties in the assembly, or even just a sense of ennui with the divine pattern, can tempt us to introduce into our homes expedients that seem to be sensible and spiritual supplements to the scriptural pattern and the local assembly. But we need to be so very careful that what we allow in our homes does not end up, as Gideon’s ephod did, as a snare, a trap, a dangerous distraction to ourselves and our households.
1 Bible quotations in this article are from the KJV.
2 It should be noted that not all commentators take such a generous view of Gideon’s response to the invitation to become king. Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth, New American Commentary (Nashville, TN: B&H Group, 1999), 300, maintains his generally negative view of the latter part of Gideon’s life, arguing he “assumed a king’s role as sponsor of the cult by creating an ephod and erecting it in his city” and suggesting that the term “ephod” here describes an idol.
3 However, as noted by Barry G. Webb, The Book of Judges, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 264, inter alia, the imagery and language of Judges 8:24-27 echo that of Exodus 28:8 and 32:2-4 in a way which seems to align Gideon’s ephod with the golden calf.
4 C.F. Keil, F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, Vol. IV (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1880), 358-9.
