Gideon: He Who Cut Down Her Sacred Tree

Judges 6:32

The first Gideon Bibles were placed in rooms of the Superior Hotel in Superior, Montana in 1908. Gideons International, the Evangelical Christian association for men founded in 1899 now distributes over 70 million free Bibles, annually.

But why are they named for Gideon, the hero of today’s chapter?

Their homepage explains:

 “Gideon was a man who was willing to do exactly what God wanted him to do, regardless of his own judgment as to the plans or results. ..This is the standard that The Gideons International is trying to establish in all its members.”

Although he enjoyed fame in all of three chapters in the Book of Judges, starting with today’s, Gideon scorched his way into popular religious mythology - primarily Christian. He is regarded as a saint by Eastern Orthodox, Eastern Catholic and Latin Rite Catholic Church and commemorated on the fourth Sunday of Advent, coming up, just before Christmas. 

What’s ironic about the way this pious and creative judge-general, fighting Israel’s holy wars in the name of YHWH against the Canaanite pagans, is that he might be, originally, a worshipper of the very pagan god he is depicted as trying to destroy.

Is his another possible case of blended blurred and hidden identity?

In the complex set of stories set in the next three chapters, Gideon is sometimes called JeruBaal, and the two different names, along with the different interpretations of what the names mean -  may mean more than the text tells us, and more than meets the naked eye. 

Here’s the Gideon story highlights: A generation after Deborah’s triumph, the neighbors, Midian (yes, once upon a time Moses’ family) attacks and rules over Israel harshly, while other nomadic tribes attack and steal their remaining crops. Young Gideon, the youngest of his father’s house, from Menashe’s tribe in the northern hills, thrashes grain secretly one day, hiding from the occupiers, when a stranger sits down under the sacred tree, near him, and begins to talk.

The disguised angel will deliver Gideon the divine draft order - nominating him by YHWH as the people’s next savior. Gideon, like Moses before him, asks for conclusive proof before he takes the job, gets divine signs in the forms of fire eating up their food and some extra-ordinary situation with a wet fleece of wool. He is convinced and sets out for his first mission: Destroy his family’s altar of the Canaanite God Baal and cut down the sacred tree of the Ashera goddess growing above the altar. It’s possibly the same tree under which he received his revelation.  

Along with ten men he goes about this spectacle at night, for fear of being seen. With the broken stones and the branches of the cut down sacred tree he builds a new altar and offers a bull to YHWH.  

In the morning the people see his deed and want to kill him for the heresy but his father intervenes to save his son. ‘Let Baal take care of his own problems’, Joash, Gideon’s dad, says.  

And then:

וַיִּקְרָא־ל֥וֹ בַיּוֹם־הַה֖וּא יְרֻבַּ֣עַל לֵאמֹ֑ר יָ֤רֶב בּוֹ֙ הַבַּ֔עַל כִּ֥י נָתַ֖ץ אֶֽת־מִזְבְּחֽוֹ

 “That day they named Gideon Jerubaal, meaning “Let Baal contend with him, since he tore down his altar”

Judged 6:32

From then on Gideon will be sometimes called Jerubaal and sometimes not, as he upgrades his career from local spectacles of religious fanatical politics to fighting a major and decisive battle against Midian, with only 300 warriors and no weapons. 

But although Jerubaal is officially cited here as a name that defies the local godhead of Canaan, many scholars actually agree that it’s a much older name and means quite the opposite. According to biblical scholar Lester Grabbe "Judges 6.32 gives a nonsensical etymology of his name; it really means something like 'Let Baal be great.'

The name Gideon likely means - ‘He cuts down the tree’ while Jerubaal may mean - “the one who blesses Baal’. Could the two names have developed later on? Could these be two different people whose stories somehow blended over time to be one complex warrior whose parents still worshipped Baal but then changed his mind?

Some scholars go that route. Others suggest that the Gideon narratives display the layered loyalties and inconclusive identities that populate these chapters and this history. One of his names recalls the sacred Goddess tree under which he offers a sacrifice to the divine voice that called him to save Israel- but then he cut down the same cherished tree. The other name is either pro or con Baal? It’s all muddled to be a clear nationalist story of finalities and faith, despite how it is framed, presented and preserved. 

Prof. James Kugel writes in The God of Old: Inside the Lost World of the Bible:

“Some scholars suggest that the religion of Israel’s ancestors was originally altogether like that of other inhabitants of Canaan, devoted to the worship of El, Baal, and other Canaanite gods. It was only at some point in history that the new God- the God of the Bible, known specifically by the Hebrew letters, YHWH- entered the land of Canaan from the south and east, and became the God of the future people of Israel . 

 In a sense, the worship of this God was grafted onto existing ideas and terminology, and even modes of worship, so that Israel’s God was in many ways described and venerated in the same way as El or Baal,  and even identified with them. At the same time, YHWH’s adherence would have distanced themselves, utterly from others in Canaan.”

According to these histories, Gideon and/or Jerubaal demonstrate the ‘grafting’ of ideologies and theologies, somehow, impossibly, representing both. 

But fluidity of faith was not how Gideon was to be remembered. 

In 1540, at the height of the Protestant Reformation, Gideon became the hero of a popular polemic play against the Catholic clergy. Composed by  the Swiss protestant playwright Hans von Rüte's the play ‘Gideon’ compared the removal of saints' relics from churches to Gideon's destruction of Baal's altar. 

And that’s how this story got to your hotel room, gift of the modern Gideons. Or Jerubaals? 

There is no archeological evidence of Gideon’s existence, but in 2019, a broken pot with an unusual inscription was  found at an archaeological site in the Judean Foothills, as was recently made public in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. The pot, bearing a single word in early alphabetic Canaanite script is rare, as it’s unusual to find any writing from this period - about 1100 B.C,  which lines up with the estimated time period depicted in the Book of Judges, generally believed  to have occurred between about 1200 and 1050 B.C. 

The pot shard clearly reads ‘Jerubaal’. 

So who knows? 

Tomorrow - a hidden test, a fateful dream, a swift sword and a deadly delusion. 

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