ผู้วินิจฉัย 6:18 วิจารณ์

Nothing that occurred in the quiet and peaceable times of Israel is recorded; the forty years' rest after the conquest of Jabin is passed over in silence; and here begins the story of another distress and another deliverance, by Gideon, the fourth of the judges. Here is, I. The calamitous condition of Israel, by the inroads of the Midianites (Jdg 6:1-6). II. The message God sent them by a prophet, by convincing them of sin, to prepare them for deliverance (Jdg 6:7-10). III. The raising up of Gideon to be their deliverer. 1. A commission which God sent him by the hand of an angel, and confirmed by a sign (Jdg 6:11-24). 2. The first-fruits of his government in the reform of his father's house (Jdg 6:25-32). 3. The preparations he made for a war with the Midianites, and the encouragement given him by a sign (Jdg 6:33-40).

INTRODUCTION TO JUDGES 6 In this chapter we have an account of the distressed condition Israel was in through the Midianites, Jdg 6:1, of a prophet being sent unto them to reprieve them for their sins, Jdg 6:7 of an angel appearing to Gideon, with an order to him to go and save Israel out of the hands of the Midianites, Jdg 6:11 and of a sign given him by the angel, whereby he knew this order was of God, Jdg 6:17, and of the reformation from idolatry in his father's family he made upon this, throwing down the altar of Baal, and building one for the Lord, Jdg 6:25, and of the preparation he made to fight the Midianites and others, Jdg 6:33, but first desired a sign of the Lord, that Israel would be saved by his hand, which was granted and repeated, Jdg 6:36.

And Gideon went in,.... Into his own house, or his father's: and made ready a kid; boiled it, as appears by the broth he brought, at least part of it was so dressed; and perhaps it was only some part of one that he brought, since a whole one was too much to be set before one person, and if even he himself intended to eat with him: and unleavened cakes of an ephah of flour; that is, probably those were made out of an ephah of flour; not that the whole ephah was made into cakes; since an omer, the tenth part of an ephah, was sufficient for one man a whole day; and, according to the computation of Waserus (n) an ephah was enough for forty five men for a whole day; unless it can be thought that this was done to show his great hospitality to a stranger, and the great respect he had for him as a messenger of God: the rather unleavened cakes were brought, because of dispatch, being soon made. Jarchi says, from hence it may be learned that it was now the time of the passover, and of waving the sheaf; but this is no sufficient proof of it; besides, if this was new wheat Gideon had been threshing, it shows it to be about the wheat harvest, which was not till Pentecost; it was the barley harvest that began at the passover: the flesh he put in a basket; the flesh of the kid which was boiled, or if any part of it was dressed another way, it was put by itself in a basket for more easy and commodious carriage: and he put the broth in a pot; a brazen pot, as Kimchi interprets it, in which the kid was boiled; and this, as he says, was the water it was boiled in: and brought it out unto him under the oak; where he appeared, and was now waiting the return of Gideon there: and presented it; set it before him, perhaps upon a table, which might be brought by his servants, or on a seat, which was placed under the oak to sit upon under its shade for pleasure. (n) De Antiqu. mensuris Heb. l. 2. c. 5. sect. 9.

THE ISRAELITES, FOR THEIR SINS, OPPRESSED BY MIDIAN. (Jdg 6:1-6) and the Lord delivered them into the hand of Midian--Untaught by their former experiences, the Israelites again apostatized, and new sins were followed by fresh judgments. Midian had sustained a severe blow in the time of Moses (Num. 31:1-18); and the memory of that disaster, no doubt, inflamed their resentment against the Israelites. They were wandering herdsmen, called "children of the East," from their occupying the territory east of the Red Sea, contiguous to Moab. The destructive ravages they are described as at this time committing in the land of Israel are similar to those of the Bedouin Arabs, who harass the peaceful cultivators of the soil. Unless composition is made with them, they return annually at a certain season, when they carry off the grain, seize the cattle and other property; and even life itself is in jeopardy from the attacks of those prowling marauders. The vast horde of Midianites that overran Canaan made them the greatest scourge which had ever afflicted the Israelites.

GIDEON'S PRESENT CONSUMED BY FIRE. (Jdg. 6:17-32) Depart not hence, I pray thee, until I . . . bring forth my present--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.

2. The Times of Gideon and His Family, and of the Judges Tola and Jair - Judges 6-10:5 In this second stage of the period of the judges, which did not extend over an entire century (only ninety-five years), Israel was only punished for its apostasy from the Lord, it is true, with a seven years' oppression by the Midianites; but the misery which these enemies, who allied themselves with Amalekites and other Arabian hordes, brought upon both land and people, so far surpassed the pressure of the previous chastisements, that the Israelites were obliged to take refuge from the foe in ravines, caves, and strongholds of the mountains. But the more heavily the Lord punished His rebellious nation, the more gloriously did He set forth His nearness to help, and also the way which would lead to a lasting peace, and to true deliverance out of every trouble, in the manner in which He called and fitted Gideon to be its deliverer, and gave him the victory over the innumerable army of the hostile hordes, with only 300 chosen warriors. But the tendency to idolatry and to the worship of Baal had already become so strong in Israel, that even Gideon, that distinguished hero of God, who had been so marvellously called, and who refused the title of king when offered to him from genuine fidelity to the Lord, yielded to the temptation to establish for himself an unlawful worship, in a high-priestly ephod which had been prepared for his use, and thus gave the people an occasion for idolatry. For this reason his house was visited with severe judgments, which burst upon it after his death, under the three years' reign of his son Abimelech; although, notwithstanding the deep religious and moral depravity which was manifested in the doings of Abimelech, the Lord gave His people rest for forty-five years longer after the death of Abimelech under two judges, before He punished their apostasy with fresh hostile oppressions. The history of Gideon and his family is related very fully, because the working of the grace and righteousness of the faithful covenant God was so obviously displayed therein, that it contained a rich treasure of instruction and warning for the church of the Lord in all aGes. The account contains such an abundance of special notices of separate events and persons, as can only be explained on the supposition that the author made use of copious records which had been made by contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the events. At the same time, the separate details do not contain any such characteristic marks as will enable us to discover clearly, or determine with any certainty, the nature of the source or sources which the author employed. The only things peculiar to this narrative are the use of the prefix שׁ for אשׁר, not only in reports of the sayings of the persons engaged (Jdg 6:17), but also in the direct narrative of facts (Jdg 7:12; Jdg 8:26), and the formula לבשׁה יהוה רוּח (Jdg 6:34), which only occurs again in Ch1 12:18; Ch2 24:20. On the other hand, neither the interchange of ha-Elohim (Jdg 6:36, Jdg 6:39; Jdg 7:14) and Elohim (Jdg 6:40; Jdg 8:3; Jdg 9:7, Jdg 9:9,Jdg 9:13, Jdg 9:23, Jdg 9:56-57) with Jehovah, nor the use of the name Jerubbaal for Gideon (Jdg 6:32; Jdg 7:1; Jdg 8:29; Jdg 9:1-2, Jdg 9:5,Jdg 9:16, Jdg 9:19, Jdg 9:24, Jdg 9:28), nor lastly the absence of the "theocratical pragmatism" in Judg 9, contains any proof of the nature of the source employed, or even of the employment of two different sources, as these peculiarities are founded upon the contents and materials of the narrative itself. (Note: Even Bertheau, who infers from these data that two different sources were employed, admits that ha-Elohim in the mouth of the Midianites (Jdg 7:14) and Elohim in Jotham's fable, where it is put into the mouth of the trees, prove nothing at all, because here, from the different meanings of the divine names, the author could not have used anything but Elohim. But the same difference is quite as unmistakeable in Jdg 8:3; Jdg 9:7, Jdg 9:23, Jdg 9:56-57, since in these passages, either the antithesis of man and God, or the idea of supernatural causality, made it most natural for the author to use the general name of God even it did not render it absolutely necessary. There remain, therefore, only Jdg 6:20, Jdg 6:36, Jdg 6:39-40, where the use of ha-Elohim and Elohim instead of Jehovah may possibly have originated with the source made use of by the author. On the other hand, the name Jerubbaal, which Gideon received in consequence of the destruction of the altar of Baal (Jdg 6:32), is employed with conscious reference to its origin and meaning, not only in Jdg 7:1; Jdg 8:29, Jdg 8:35, but also throughout Judg 9, as we may see more especially in Jdg 9:16, Jdg 9:19, Jdg 9:28. And lastly, even the peculiarities of Judg 9 - namely, that the names Jehovah and Gideon do not occur there at all, and that many historical circumstances are related apparently without any link of connection, and torn away from some wider context, which might have rendered them intelligible, and without which very much remains obscure, - do not prove that the author drew these incidents from a different source from the rest of the history of Gideon, - such, for example, as a more complete history of the town of Shechem and its rulers in the time of the judges, as Bertheau imagines. For these peculiarities may be explained satisfactorily enough from the intention so clearly expressed in Jdg 8:34-35, and Jdg 9:57, of showing how the ingratitude of the Israelites towards Gideon, especially the wickedness of the Shechemites, who helped to murder Gideon's sons to gratify Abimelech, was punished by God. And no other peculiarities can be discovered that could possibly establish a diversity of sources.)