Of those who bringeth their own cup, take them straight away, for they come prepared…
“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”
No it isn’t. The reason for turning away the number of men is given explicitly in the Bible. The reason is to shrink the numbers so that the Israelis will know they won due to God’s power, not any virtue of their own. Nothing you said in your explanation is in the text.
Gideon doesn’t exist apart from his description in the Bible. Its our only source for him, and if he was ever a real person (unlikely) it doesn’t really matter, when people talk about Gideon, they’re talking about the character found in Judges. And in Judges, he sends men home explicitly to prove that his victory is due to God, not the virtues of his army.
Saying Gideon wasn’t motivated by Gods commands is like saying Harry Potter isn’t upset about being an orphan, or Frodo Baggins was really working for Sauron. Their characters in stories, their personalties and motivations are the ones that are described by their authors. Arguing with Rawlings or Tolkien that they don’t understand their own characters is silly.
God wasn’t saying that it was all up to him. He was teaching Gideon that sometimes cunning is a better approach than brute strength.
That’s the difference between ultra-Orthodox, *galuti *thinking and Israeli thinking - the former think that God will do everything if we just prey hard enough, while the latter think that if we fight for ourselves, God will lend a hand. By and large, the Jews of the Tanach were of the second sort.
The Bible isn’t a religious tract, designed to prove a religious point. It was written as a history book by people who thought it was their history. It’s a work contemporary with those of Homer, and shares many of the same characteristics. It was Odysseus who poked out the cyclops’ eye, not the gods.
And yes, Leo, that’s what I learned in Bible classes in school, where we studied the Bible as literature and myth (with a touch of history), rather than as religion. I was honestly surprised by this thread - I’ve never heard of a different interpretation than the one I gave.
God specifically says what lesson he’s trying to teach. There’s nothing in there about cunning vs brute strength. This is just projection, the story of Gideon explicitly reiterates its message several times. Its not subtle. If the writers wanted to say that it was Gideon’s cunning that defeated the Midians, they would’ve said so. Instead they say its God, multiple times, and that the virtues of the Israeli army are irrelevant. All that matters is that they’re obedient to God and knock it off with the Baal worship.
In this case, they thought their history was that God delivered the Midians to Gideon, while going out of his way to stress the point that it was he doing the delivering, and not any virtue of Gideon or his men. (also, you need a pretty loose definition of the word “contemporary” to say Judges and The Odyssey qualify.)
And it was God, not the Israelis, who defeated the Midians. Judges reiterates this several times.
ETA: The whole story is just a few paragraphs long, so people can read it for themselves. Again, its not subtle, God says exactly what he’s trying to do.
[With your permission, Alessan and other threadniks, a GD introductory answer to a question I believe is begged by this thread. No doubt Alessan has heard variants of it:]
And right there we see why the secular/religious mindsets, and conflicts, are set in stone in Israel.
God forbid an Israeli secular institution would impart, by example, that a Jewish religious interpretation is interesting, valid, or worth knowing about, not to speak that it has had pride and place for millennia of Jewish culture.
Yes, as I said and you agreed, waiting for/on Gods help sounds like the classic thing-to-be-crushed thinking held by exilic Jews, as defined by the mainstream of early Zionists.
But now, when that thing-to-be-crushed is not a threat, it nonetheless lingers. The religous (“exilic”) Jews were challenged by the Zionists from the beginning with–as you know–“we [not God] will it and it’s not a dream.” And thank God (:)) that battle of Zionism is over. The Haredim (”ultra"-Orthodox) can freeload on the Army and jabber in Yiddish and piss off as many seculars as they want, or dick around with some bureaucratic strangleholds, but the secular Zionists won. It’s over.
So, if the religious cocoon themselves with their millennia of commentary, the bulk of which, I believe, is equally rejected unthinkingly by the secular, the more’s the pity for the Israeli comity.
So the Dope-worthy Zionist success story of Israeli intellectual men of the world–ironically enough, a sound description and even definition of so much exilic culture–is surprisingly (as you said) not really such a success, when these men are misinformed about the depth and breadth of Jewish culture, dating from back when until now.
And this failure to produce this complete Israeli Jewish intellectual man, a lofty goal of Zionism, stems from the oldest thing in the book: unrelenting politics. And “grudges,” if by grudges one considers offenses taken by those wresting away and redefining concepts affecting an entire culture born of religion, and offenses by those holding onto or trying to cope with these changes made by the dominant population.
As they say, being a Jew isn’t easy. The same for an Israeli Jew.
[/GD introductory post]
I find it hard to see anybody either just bending down and sucking water out of a stream or lapping it up like a dog; I would cup it in my hands then drink out of it like you might finish off liquid left in a bowl (bring cupped hands to my mouth and tilt them into my mouth).
Me, too.
I imagine there is no translation error since the Rabbis mention lapping in commentary.
In the original passage, does “kneel” mean “on your knees” or the whole deal, bowed right over with the head near the ground/water? Is this a word meaning/translation issue?
I would worry about anyone who tried to pick up water in one or both hands and get it to their mouth without getting on their knees. sounds far too awkward.
It depends entirely at how you look at the story.
The stories of the OT (and particularly this one) can be looked at as if it were mythologized stories concerning real events - either actually happening at the time alleged, or at least, inspired by similar events that happened later.
The story of Gideon describes with some accuracy (dismissing for the moment the divine intervention aspect) a typical night attack designed to stampede a foe whose numbers may be large but whose morale is rotted. For such an attack, large numbers of men are actively dangerous - what Gideon needed was a small number of highly devoted men, enough to keep under his direct control.
Look at the events in thge story after the selection process. Gideon has his men take trumpets and torches in jars. He then sneaks close to the camp and overhears the men talking about bad omens in their dreams. Elated (as this confirms their morale was already shakey), he orders the attack just after the changing of the guard (i.e., at the moment of greatest confusion) - his men break the jars, uncover the torches, and shout and blow their horns. In the confusion the men of the Midanite confederacy all start fighing each other and stampede in panic - whereupon Gideon raises the countryside to hunt them down.
The text directly states that the “Lord caused the men throughout the camp to turn on each other with their swords”, but it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to realize that the shouting, the trumpet-blowing, the torches, and the fact this was all happening at night might have (to a less religious audience) had something to do with it, too: the fact that a night attack on a foe whose moral and cohesion was not of the highest might make them prone to panic doesn’t actually require divine intervention - even though the text states expressly that divine intervention happened.
Looked at in that light, the sory looks like a perfectly palusible “AAR” seen through a religious gloss. Rather than taking a small number so that people don’t claim God was powerless, Gideon takes a small number because if he took a larger number pulling off the surprise necessary to panic the Midianites at night would have been difficult or impossible … you can’t disguise the approach of 10,000 men in a night march as easily as 300 (numbers that should in any case probably be divided by a factor of 10, if this in fact happened in pre-Iron Age Israel).
That noted, there is no way of knowing why he chose one group over another; my own suspicion is that it was perfectly arbitrary - he just needed to get the group down to a small enough size to be managable for a night attack.
Let’s look at the facts:
Gideon wants to carry out a surprise attack against a superior enemy. Using his preferred selection method - which you may or may not agree with - he chose 300 out of 10,000 potential volunteers. He scouts the enemy camp to ascertain their morale, and then gives his small force torches and trumpets. At just the right moment, he has his troops come out of the hills in the dead of night, with fire and noise. The undisciplined, demoralized enemy panics, breaks and runs.
Now tell me this, **Simplicio ** - where in this story is God needed?
Look, I’m not trying to write God out of the Bible - after all, he’s the most interesting character. I’m not denying that God parted the Red Sea or brought down the walls of Jericho. It’s just that in this story, and in many others, God is there to provide guidance and support, while letting his people save themselves. God provides the tools; men do the work. I don’t see how this conflicts with the themes of the book - after all, the Bible is as much about the glory of Israel as it is about the glory of God. It’s a national epic, and what kind of pathetic national epic puts its nation in a passive role?
(P.S. - Judges and the Odyssey were both written around the 7th Century BC and were set some 500 years earlier. I’d say they’re basically contemporary works. In fact, a less respectful man would suggest that they are prime candidates for crossover - a veritable Crisis of Infinite Faiths.)
I’m curious how they translated “Loaf of bread knocks down a tent in my dream” to “That dream means Gideon’s gonna getcha!” Weird jump. I could understand it if it was a terrible fire, or something similarly intimidating.
Its not his preferred selection method, God tells it to him. This is explicit in the text.
No he scouts the enemy camp because God tells him to. This is explicit in the text.
Because God causes them to do so. This is explicit in the text.
In the story you tell he isn’t. In the Gideon story told in Judges, he’s the primary mover for pretty much every step.
You’d have to take that up with the author of Judges.
I don’t mind if people want to adapt the story of Gideon into a nationalistic story about the cunning of the Israelites or whatever. Lots of old stories get re-purposed for that kind of thing. But the OP was asking about the Bible story, and in the Bible story there is no ambiguity. God uses the selection method to weaken the Israeli force so that its clear that the victory is due to God, not Gideon or his men. That the victory is due to God and not the Israelis is reiterated several times, and in the book of Judges as a whole, almost ad nauseum.
Wikipedia gives 8th century as the most likely date for Homer, 6th for Judges, though admittedly there’s probably enough play in the dates you could argue for them being contemporaneous.
For a moment I thought you were with the Judean People’s Front, but now I realize you’re one of those wankers in the People’s Front of Judea. SPLITTER!
I goota go with Alessan here: while it is clear, as you say, that God motivates every single step in the Biblical account, if one assumes purely for the sake of argument that the text has some sort of historical basis (albeit a highly mythologized historical basis), it is perfectly possible that the writer of the text is simply inserting a God-based interpretation into the account.
We know that some parts of the OT are in fact mythologized history, as the kings and events for the later parts are corroborated by archaeology and other non-Biblical sources. The book of Judges is too early for such corroboration, but it is still possible to read the account of Gideon’s night attack as a perfectly realistic raid - either one that actually occurred at the time alleged, or a plasuible myth based on similar raids known to the writer of the account.
This realism is based purely on the text as stated. When analyzed with the eye of a soldier or anthropologist, it appears quite reasonable, and every step in the process - urged on by God according to the text - has a more mundane explaination.
To give but one example - in the text, Gideon scouts the camp because God wishes Gideon to be reinforced in his faith that the camp will fall. Another explaination is that Gideon scouted the camp because this is what a sensible military leader would do - to determine whether or not the attack, which was based primarily on the psychology of the victims, would succeed.
To the author of the text (and perhaps to Gideon as well) the explainations may have been complementary and not competing: one did God’s will by carrying out sensible plans, and had one’s faith strengthened thereby. Or, it could be that the propogandists of the Hebrew God simply attached a faith-affirming explaination to the story of a great victory. There is no way of knowing now.
I think I read a good while back that the IDF did a study on soldiers’ water use on the march.
They found that the water went further with each soldier rationing sips at his own pace, when he knew that one canteen was all the water left, as opposed to being commanded to drink x much at y intervals.
At the time it was considered a radical notion.
Did the IDF implement it?
Do other armies?
Leo
The Biblical account is the thing the OP asks about. I’m sure the story of Gideon has been adapted in books/plays/movies, and in those he might be given different motivations, but in Judges its God calling the shots.
There’s no real reason to think Gideon existed as a historical figure. Nothing in the Bible pre-David has any corroboration outside the Bible, much of it is obviously non-historical (Genesis, Exodus). But for the parts that use the names of historical figures, we have no way of knowing what parts are history and what are simply myths. David was probably the name of an Israeli king, for example, but I doubt he really killed a giant or soothed the soul of Saul with his lyre.
Similarily, there was probably no Gideon, and even if there was, the episode described in the OP is likely a later myth ascribed to him. At the least, we have no way of saying anything about a historical Gideon. What we do have is the Gideon in Judges, and that Gideon does what he does because God tells him.
Its a fun intellectual parlor game to try and rationalize the Bible stories like this. The Parting of the Red Sea was due to an Earthquake, the Plague of Frogs a tornado, etc. But it isn’t really anything more then a game, the “mudane explanations” always require a lot of looking at the text while assuming what your trying to prove, and it ignores the obvious explanation, which is that the Bible authors made it up.
This is a good example of what I’m talking about. You say this is realistic, but that’s just because your seeing it through the prism of the interpretation your trying to tack on to it. What happens in the story is that David runs into a single other enemy solider, and that solider has a dream where a pastry knocks over the tent. You can come up with a little story about how this represents “psychological reconnaissance”, but its really the dream of one soldier in and army of thousands, and the reason it encourages Gideon is purely supernatural. In the Bible, dreams are always prophetic.
Similarly, in an alternative universe in which the lappers were sent home and 300 sippers were kept for the attack, I don’t doubt the same people would be arguing that sipping is obviously a sign of superior military skill. Its a vague, “just-so” story that is connected only tangentally to the text it supposedly explains.
TLDR version: The explanation given by Alessen is directly contradicted by the text. He says this is OK because there’s an underlying historical story where it does make sense, but there’s no reason to think Gideon is a historical figure, if he was a historical figure there’s no reason to think the sipping-lapping story every happened, and if the sipping-lapping story did happen, there’s no real reason to prefer Alessen’s explanation of it over half-a-dozen other “just-so” stories that could give vague rationalized reasons for it.
I don’t grant the authorial intentions the same weight. It is true that this is what the author intended, but a text can also disclose meanings the author did not intend.
We have nothing about Gideon other than the text it is true. So we look to the text and ask - is this a depiction of a realistic event that could be a mythologizing of an actual event? Or is it wholly supernatural and fantastic?
The examples you pic demonstrate my point: some Bible stories are very clearly wholly invented or ‘just so’ stories intended to illustrate a particular point. Others, are mythologized accounts of actual events. Given that we know the Bible shaded from history to myth, can we not look to the inherent plausibility of the stories themselves to say with some degree of plausibility that (say) accounts of tribal battles probably was more on the “mythologized history” side of the ledger that stories of purely supernatural events and miracles?
And as for “making it all up” - sure, it may all be made up, but even if the events never happened they can tell you something significant about the people that invented them. You can only “make up” stories based on your own knowledge. In this case, the person who invented the Gideon story clearly knew enough about tribal warfare to “invent” a very plausable raid on an armed encampment. See for example Keegan’s account of this in A History of Warfare (I believe).
In reality, too - given that the Bible takes place in a cultural context in which dreams and omens were imbued with meaning. Not only for Jews I might add. Read for example Herodotus for the significance, at a much later date, of dreams and omens.
Gideon is encouraged because his enemies are openly discussing bad omens. The fact that they are doing so is significant and would be even if Gideon did not himself believe in dreams or omens - or if the writer of the story did not. But by all accounts, such beliefs were very common across cultures in the ancient world.
The inclusion of details like this makes me even more convinced that this story was not simply invented out of whole cloth, because it has no obvious in-text meaning (hence the debate).
Drink the older water from the canteens and refill them to have fresher water.
And the idiot should have assigned half the soldiers to drink at a time, so one half was always on watch. It is difficult to concentrate on watching when trying to take care of personal needs, but if you know that it just is not your turn yet makes you able to hold out for a few minutes more until it is your turn.