A Journey Through The Old Testament - Elmer Towns

As Gideon prepared to kill the two captured kings of Midi he revealed his new motives
for defeating the Midianites. He had been raised up by God to deliver Israel, but he was not
apparently interested now in solely accomplishing the purpose of God. He reminded the two
kings of a raid they had made on Tabor, and after telling them he had relatives who had died in
that raid, he confessed, “As the Lord lives, if you had let them live, I would not kill you” (v. 19).
Clearly Gideon was now interested in revenge.
When Gideon returned to his home in Israel, the men were ready to make him king. But
after having killed the two king of Midian, he may have realized being king was not always all it
was made out to be. He did, however, have a request. He asked for all the gold earrings that had
been collected as spoils of war. The men agreed, and when the earrings were weighed, Gideon
had 17,000 shekels of gold, or about six pounds of gold. “Then Gideon made it into an ephod
and set it up in his city, Ophrah. And all Israel played the harlot with it there. It became a snare
to Gideon and to his house” (v. 27).
One of the common themes in pagan worship is that of immoral sexual practices. During
the forty years of quietness which followed Gideon’s victory, Gideon acquired an undisclosed
number of wives, and had a concubine he kept in Shechem. But Gideon’s sin was not without its
consequences. “And so it was, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the Children of Israel again
played the harlot with the Baals, and made Baal-Berith their god. Thus the Children of Israel did
not remember the Lord their God, who had delivered them from the hands of all their enemies on
every side; nor did they show kindness to the house of Jerubbaal (that is, Gideon) in accordance
with the good he had done for Israel” (vv. 33-35).
PERSPECTIVE
It is interesting to note that the Scriptures begin identifying Gideon by the name
Jerubbaal as soon as he made the golden ephod. The name Gideon is based on a root which
means to cut down and symbolizes the great victories of his life. It was Gideon who cut down the
altar of Baal and then cut down the army of Midian. But it was the name Jerubbaal which
identified him with the pagan religious practices of his day. Ten times following his death, the
Scriptures refer to Gideon by his pagan name Jerubbaal. Though he had accomplished such a
great victory for Israel they were prepared to make him their king forty years earlier, by the time
of his death, he had destroyed his reputation for God by his involvement in pagan religious
practices.
The sin of Gideon was also directly responsible for the destruction of his family in the
next generation. The son he had fathered by a concubine conspired to kill legitimate sons of
Gideon. Only the youngest of the seventy sons of Gideon was able to escape with his life. The
son of the concubine, Abimelech, convinced the men of Shechem to make him Israel’s first king.
The name Abimelech means “my father is king” and was actually a dynastic title of the
Philistines. A part of Israel was having a king like the nations around them. But Jotham, the son
of Gideon, warned of trouble ahead.
Standing near the summit of Mount Gerizim, Jotham told the parable of the trees who
wanted a king. In their folly they chose the bramble bush to be their ruler, just as the men of
Shechem chose Abimelech. Because of the mistreatment of the family of Gideon, Jotham
declared those involved would be judged. Three years later, problems developed between the
new king and his subjects. As the problems erupted into a physical conflict, Abimelech destroyed
the city of Shechem and burned the stronghold of the city with the men of the city inside. Then
there was another uprising in the city of Thebez. But as Abimelech tried to take the same course