Gideon and the Three Hundred with Jars

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There is a valley, and in the valley there is a field, and in the field, in the middle of the night, there are three hundred men standing very still in the dark.

Each of them is holding a trumpet in one hand. And in the other hand, each one is holding a clay jar, the plain kind, the kind you would keep water in, or oil, or the odd forgotten lentil. Inside each jar, and this is the clever part, there is a small flame.

Down in front of them, a long way down, there are more tents than anyone has ever counted, and in the tents there are more sleeping soldiers than there are stars over the valley, and the sleeping soldiers have no idea whatever what is about to happen to them.

And nor, to be honest, has the man at the front.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Gideon, from the book of Judges, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few of the small conversations, and the weather, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with a problem, because the book of Judges always starts with a problem.

The people of Israel have been living in the land that God gave them for a good many years now. They have fields and vines and sheep. They have also, if we are honest, got a little careless about the one who gave them all of it. The book of Judges tells this story over and over, in a pattern you can nearly set your watch by. The people drift away. Trouble comes. The people cry out. And God sends someone to set them right. Then they are good for a while, and then they drift again.

The someone is called a judge. Do not picture a wig and a gavel. A judge in this book is more like a rescuer. A leader that God raises up, for one hard season, when the people have nobody else.

Tonight's trouble is a nation called Midian.

Now, the Midianites were not a nation that came with a big army, to fight a big battle, and go home. They were worse than that. They came every year at harvest time, in huge numbers, with their tents and their camels, and the book says that the camels could not be counted, which I think tells you how many camels there were. And they camped on the land and ate the crops. All of them. The wheat, the barley, the olives, the grapes, everything that had grown. They left nothing to eat, not a sheep, not an ox, not a donkey. They were like locusts, says the book, and it means exactly that.

This went on for seven years.

By the end of it, the people of Israel were living in caves and in mountain hideouts, because it was the only place where nobody would look for them. They would plant a field in the spring, and every autumn the Midianites would come and clear it. So the people did the only sensible thing a person can do when they have run out of sensible things. They prayed.

And God heard them, and the first thing he did was to send a man to tell them a few honest words. Not an army, not yet. Just a messenger, to say, you were brought out of Egypt, and I gave you this land, and you have not listened. It was a hard thing to say. But the book is clear that the help was already on its way.

And the help, when it comes, is sitting under a tree.

The tree is an oak, in a village called Ophrah, and it belongs to a man named Joash. Under the oak, quite suddenly, there is a stranger sitting. The book calls him the angel of the Lord. He has come, it says, and he is sitting on the ground, in the shade, as though he has all the time in the world.

And a little way off, there is a young man named Gideon, and he is doing something very odd.

He is threshing wheat. Now, threshing is what you do with a harvest. You spread the grain out on a flat, open place, a threshing floor, where the wind can blow through it and carry off the chaff. And that is the whole point. It needs space and it needs air.

But Gideon is not doing it on a threshing floor. Gideon is doing it in a winepress.

A winepress, in those days, was a pit cut into the rock, low and narrow and hidden. You trod grapes in it. It was the last place in the world you would choose for threshing wheat, because there was no wind and no space and your elbows kept hitting the wall. But it was also the last place a Midianite would think to look. So Gideon is in the pit, with his little heap of wheat, working very quietly, and glancing up at the rim every few moments to see if anyone is coming.

This is the man. This is the future leader of Israel. He is hiding in a hole in the ground with his lunch.

I am not saying that to laugh at him. Honestly, I would have been in the hole beside him. Seven years is a long time to be afraid.

And then the stranger under the oak calls across, and he says: "The Lord is with you, mighty warrior."

Imagine hearing that, from inside a winepress.

Gideon looks up. The book does not tell us what his face does, but I think it is easy enough to guess. And he answers, very politely and very honestly, the way a person does who has had a hard seven years.

"Please, my lord," he says, "if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about? They said, did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt? But now the Lord has left us, and given us into the hand of Midian."

Which is, I think, one of the most honest sentences in the whole Bible. He does not pretend. He does not say, oh well, it's all for the best. He says what everyone in the country is thinking. And the Lord does not scold him for it.

What the Lord does is look at him, and say, "Go in this strength of yours, and save Israel from the hand of Midian. Have I not sent you?"

Now Gideon, to give him his due, does not leap up and grab a sword. He says what any sensible person would say.

"Please, Lord, how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in the whole tribe, and I am the youngest in my father's house."

And the answer comes: "But I will be with you."

That is the whole of it. That is the reason. Not that Gideon is strong, or clever, or well connected, because he is none of those things. Just: I will be with you. And you will strike Midian as if it were one man.

Gideon takes a moment. He has, after all, just been told something enormous, in a hole, by a stranger, and he would very much like to be sure about it. So he asks for a sign.

"If I have found favour with you," he says, "then give me a sign that it is really you speaking with me. And please do not go away until I come back with my offering."

And the Lord says, "I will stay until you return."

So Gideon hurries off to his house. He kills a young goat and he bakes bread, and he puts the meat in a basket and the broth in a pot. It takes him, we must suppose, some time, because it is not a quick meal. And all that while the stranger is sitting under the oak, waiting, with no apparent sign of impatience.

Gideon brings the food out, and the angel tells him what to do. Put the meat and the bread on this rock, he says, and pour the broth over them.

Gideon does.

And the angel reaches out the tip of his staff and touches the meat and the bread. And fire comes up out of the rock, and burns it all up. And the angel is gone, out of his sight.

Now Gideon understands. Properly. And the first thing he feels is not joy. It is fear. Because in those days people knew that you could not look on the Lord and live, and Gideon has just spent an afternoon talking to a messenger of the Lord, with only a goat between them.

"Alas, Lord God!" he cries. "For I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face."

And the Lord says to him, very kindly, "Peace be to you. Do not be afraid. You shall not die."

So Gideon builds an altar on the spot. He calls it, The Lord Is Peace. And I think that is a good name for it, for a man who has had a very strange afternoon.

The next thing the Lord asks of Gideon is not a battle. It is something much closer to home.

In Gideon's father's own yard there is an altar to Baal, which is a false god, and next to it there is a wooden pole in honour of another one. The whole village has got into the habit of going there. And the Lord says to Gideon, that very night: tear down your father's altar. Cut down the pole. And build a proper altar to me on top of the hill, and offer a bull on it.

Gideon is, I think, a little afraid of this, and the book says so quite frankly. He does not do it by day. He takes ten of his servants, and he does it at night, because he is afraid of his family and of the men of the town.

So there is a small, quiet, slightly worried group out in the dark, and a tall altar going down, and a pole coming down, and a bull on a new altar on top of the hill. And in the morning, the town wakes up.

Now, picture the scene. It is the first light. And one of the neighbours steps out of his door, and says, "Hang on. Where is the altar?"

It does not take long for a crowd to gather. They ask around. "Who did this?" And someone says, "I think it was Gideon, Joash's boy." And the whole crowd goes round to Joash's house, in a bad mood, and they say, "Bring out your son, so that he may die."

I should say here that things were not very gentle, in those days.

But Joash, the father of Gideon, does something wonderful. He stands in his doorway, and he looks at the crowd, and he says, quite calmly: "Are you going to fight Baal's battles for him? Are you going to save him? If he is really a god, let him defend himself."

Which is, I think, a very good point, and very well put. It is hard to argue with. And the crowd, being a crowd, goes slightly quiet, and starts to look at its feet.

And that is how Gideon gets a second name. They call him Jerubbaal, which means, "Let Baal contend against him." Because Baal did not. He didn't do anything at all.

Meanwhile, the Midianites are on their way.

It is spring, and they have come across the river with the Amalekites and the people of the east, their tents like a second horizon, and they have camped in the Valley of Jezreel. It is a broad, flat valley, with good land, and they have come to do their usual work.

And this time, something is different.

The book says, quite simply, that the Spirit of the Lord clothed Gideon. That is the actual word, clothed. As if the Spirit were something you put on, a coat. And Gideon, the man from the winepress, raises a trumpet and blows it.

And they come. From his own clan first, and then from the tribes round about, and then from further. Men of Manasseh, and Asher, and Zebulun, and Naphtali. They hear the trumpet, and they put down whatever they are doing, and they come. Thirty-two thousand of them, by the end.

You might think that Gideon would feel better, at that point. Thirty-two thousand men is a great many. But Gideon is a careful sort of person, and he has been given a very large task. And so, the night before the muster, he sits on his own for a long time. And he does what he does best, which is to ask for another sign.

"Lord," he says, "if you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said, then look. I am going to put a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew on the fleece alone, and all the ground is dry, then I shall know that you will save Israel by my hand."

It is a very careful request. It is not demanding. He is simply, and humbly, asking God to make something happen that cannot happen by chance.

And in the morning, he gets up early, and goes to the fleece. And it is soaking. He wrings it out, and he gets a whole bowl of water out of it. And the ground all round is bone dry.

Now. You would think that was enough.

But Gideon, who has been so afraid for so long, is not quite there yet. And the next night he says, quietly, to God: "Do not be angry with me. Let me speak just once more. Let me make a test with the fleece, only once more. This time let the fleece alone be dry, and let there be dew on all the ground."

I love this. Because he knows, you see, that he is pushing his luck. And he says so. And God, who knows exactly how much a frightened man can bear, does not lose patience. In the morning, the fleece is dry, and all the ground is wet with dew.

I want to say a word about this, because people sometimes take the fleece as a recipe. Put out a fleece, get an answer. But look at what is actually happening. God has already told Gideon, plainly, what he is to do. Gideon is not asking for guidance. He is asking for courage. And God, in his gentleness, gives it to him, twice. It is not a model for how to make a decision. It is just a picture of how patient God is with a nervous man.

So here is Gideon, at the spring called Harod, with thirty-two thousand men. And the Midianites are camped in the valley to the north, in their tens of thousands, and Gideon is, we may suppose, as ready as he will ever be.

And the Lord says: "You have too many men."

Let me say that again, because Gideon must have needed to hear it twice. The Lord says: you have too many men. If I give Midian into your hand with this lot, then Israel will say, "My own hand has saved me." And that is not the point at all. The point is that the Lord should be seen to save.

So the first thing Gideon does is announce to the whole army: "Whoever is afraid and trembling, let him turn back and go home."

And twenty-two thousand of them do. Twenty-two thousand. Just like that. I think you would not blame them. They have been afraid for seven years, and here is a small man in a big valley, saying that anyone who wants to may leave. Two thirds of the army puts down its spears and heads for the road home, and Gideon is left with ten thousand, which is a perfectly respectable army, and which is still, I should think, going to feel rather small when the sun comes up on the Midianites.

And the Lord says: "There are still too many."

Here is the second test, and it is a lovely small one.

The Lord says, take them down to the water. And there I will test them for you. Everyone who laps the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, you shall set to one side. And everyone who kneels down to drink, you shall set to the other.

So Gideon takes the ten thousand down to the spring on a hot day. And they are all thirsty, and they all drink. And most of them kneel down, and cup their hands, or put their faces right into the water, the way you do when you have been marching all morning.

But a few of them do something different. They scoop the water up in one hand, and lap it from their hand, quickly, with their eyes still up. They never put their faces down. They are watching the hillside while they drink.

And there are three hundred of them.

Three hundred, out of ten thousand. And the Lord says, "With the three hundred men who lapped I will save you, and give the Midianites into your hand. Let all the others go to their homes."

So they go. And Gideon is left on the hill at Harod with three hundred men. Three hundred, against an army so large that the book gives up trying to count it. And I suppose that you would expect him to be in despair. But I don't think he is. I think he is rather quiet, and rather steady, as though some of the fear had been taken out of him in the going.

For he has done everything he was asked. And now, for the first time in the story, he has nothing left to be afraid of with his own strength. There is only one thing left, which is that God is with him.

It is night, and Gideon cannot sleep.

The Lord has said to him: "Arise, go down against the camp, for I have given it into your hand. But if you are afraid to go down, go first to the camp with your servant Purah, and you shall hear what they say, and afterwards your hands shall be strengthened."

So that is what Gideon does. He gets up in the dark, and taps Purah on the shoulder, and the two of them go creeping down the hill towards the biggest army either of them has ever seen.

Now I would like you to picture this properly, because I think it is easy to skip. There are two men in the dark. One of them is a farmer who spent most of his life hiding in a pit. They are creeping down into the valley, between the sleeping men, and the camels, and the cooking fires burning low. The book says that the Midianites lay along the valley like locusts for number, and their camels were like the sand on the seashore. And the two of them go down into the middle of it. Just to listen.

They come to the edge of the camp, where the guards are, and they stop. And they hear a voice. Somebody is awake, and he is telling his friend about a dream.

"I had a dream," says the man. "And in my dream, a cake of barley bread came tumbling into the camp of Midian. And it came to the tent, and struck it, and it fell. It turned the tent upside down, and the tent lay flat."

And his friend, who is not a man of many words, and who is perhaps very tired, says: "This is nothing other than the sword of Gideon, son of Joash, a man of Israel. God has given Midian into his hand, and all the camp."

Now. I think that is one of the funniest and most wonderful moments in the book. A loaf of barley bread. The cheapest food there was, the food of the poor, the kind of bread a farmer from a hole in the ground might bake. And the enemy are lying in their tent, in the dark, and one of them is saying that it is the end of them. That the whole thing has already been decided.

And Gideon, crouching out in the darkness, hears every word.

What does he do? The book says it very simply. When Gideon heard the telling of the dream and its interpretation, he worshipped. There in the dark, at the edge of the camp, in the middle of the enemy, he got down on his knees. That is the first thing he does. He does not run back to his men. He worships.

And then he goes back, and he says to them: "Arise. For the Lord has given the army of Midian into your hand."

And now we come to the plan. And it is, I think, the strangest plan in the Bible, and that is saying a great deal.

Gideon divides his three hundred men into three companies of a hundred each. And he gives each man three things. A trumpet. An empty jar. And inside the jar, a torch.

That is all. No swords. No spears. Just a trumpet, and a pot, and a flame.

Now think about this properly. In the night, a flame in the open is easy to see. Anyone in the camp can see it, and anyone can shoot at it. But a flame inside a clay jar is something else. A man could walk right up to the edge of the camp, carrying a lit torch, and nobody would see it. Because the jar covers it. It is only a person, in the dark, with a jar.

And then, at the right moment, you break the jar. And the light comes out.

Gideon explains the plan to his men as they stand there. "Look at me," he says, "and do likewise. When I come to the outskirts of the camp, do as I do. When I blow the trumpet, I and all who are with me, then you also blow the trumpets, around the whole camp, and shout: For the Lord and for Gideon."

I should say, there is nothing very grand about this. It is not a fancy battle plan. It has about three parts. You walk quietly, you smash a jar, you make a very loud noise. But I do think there is something wise in it, because the plan depends on every single man doing the very small thing he has been asked to do. Not a hero among them. Just three hundred men, with a pot, standing in the dark, waiting for a signal.

It is the beginning of the middle watch. That is the middle of the night, when the guards have just changed, and the new ones have not quite woken up.

Gideon and his hundred come to the edge of the camp. Everything is quiet. A camel coughs somewhere, and shifts its weight. The cooking fires are low, and somebody is snoring in a tent, like a saw in a log.

And all round the valley, in the dark, on every side, the other two hundred are standing in their places, very still, and each of them is holding a jar.

Gideon takes a breath. And he blows his trumpet.

And all three hundred blow theirs.

Then there is the smashing. Three hundred jars, all at once, breaking on the stones. It is a tremendous noise, like a shop falling down. And in that very moment, the whole hillside lights up. Three hundred torches blazing in the dark, from every side, all round the camp, with three hundred trumpets blaring over them, and three hundred voices roaring, "A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!"

I want you to imagine waking up.

You are a Midianite soldier, asleep in your tent, after a long day. And you are woken by trumpets. By the crash of pots. By fire, all round you, on every side, and a great shouting in the dark. You cannot tell how many there are. You cannot tell which way to run. And you have, in your head, an idea that you have heard somewhere recently about the sword of Gideon.

The book says that every man stood in his place round the camp. The three hundred did not move. They did not need to move. They simply stood where they were, with their trumpets and their torches, and they made a noise.

And the whole camp ran.

They ran in every direction. They cried out. They fled, the book says, down the valley and away to the east, toward the river, in a great confusion, with the dark all round them and the light on every hillside. In the confusion they could not tell friend from foe. And in the end the whole great army was a crowd of frightened people, going home as fast as they could go.

And there is one thing I want you to notice. The three hundred never moved.

The rest of the day, and the days that followed, belong to a different kind of telling. The men of Israel who had gone home came back and joined the chase, and the Midianites were driven off the land, and the book spends two more chapters on how it was done. Some of it is hard to hear, and not for bedtime. We will leave it there.

But it matters what happens afterwards. Because the people of Israel come to Gideon, and they say, "Rule over us. You, and your son, and your son's son. For you have saved us out of the hand of Midian."

And Gideon answers them with the finest words of his life.

"I will not rule over you," he says, "and my son will not rule over you. The Lord will rule over you."

So the night is over, and the valley is quiet again.

The sun is coming up over the hills of Jezreel, and it is shining on a field covered in broken pots. On a tent or two left flat in the grass. On the camel tracks, going away to the east, and a few forgotten blankets, and the cold ashes of a great many fires. There is not an enemy in sight. And the three hundred, who have been standing all night with a trumpet and a torch, are very tired, and very cold, and in some cases rather scorched about the fingers.

I think they sat down. I think they sat down in the grass, with the shards all round them, and watched the sun come over the hill. And I think no one said very much.

Because they knew, and they would know it all their lives, that they had not done this. They had been there. They had carried the jars. But the thing itself had been done by someone else.

That is what the Lord told Gideon at Harod. Too many men, he said, or Israel will say, my own hand has saved me. And so he took twenty-nine thousand seven hundred of them home, and left three hundred, and a pile of clay pots.

Gideon lived a good many years after that, and the land had peace for forty years, the book says. It was the longest peace they had had in all the days of the Judges. The farmers planted their wheat, and the Midianites did not come to eat it. The barley grew tall. And a man could thresh his wheat on a proper threshing floor, in the open air, with the wind blowing through it, and nobody looking over his shoulder.

The book says, too, that Gideon was not perfect. It is honest about that. Later in his life he made a mistake, and it cost his family dearly. But that is another night, and we shall leave it there.

The Letter to the Hebrews, which was written to remind Christians how many people had lived by faith before them, names Gideon in its great list. Beside Abraham, and Moses, and David. He is there because of this night. Because he did what he was asked, with a trumpet and a pot, when it did not make any sense, and because he came out of the winepress.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything that happens in tonight's story follows the book of Judges, chapters six and seven, with a glance at the start of chapter eight. The seven years of Midian and the hiding in caves, the stranger under the oak at Ophrah, the winepress and the greeting, the sign of the fire on the rock, the night at the altar of Baal and the second name Jerubbaal, the muster at the spring of Harod, the two fleeces, the sorting of the army from thirty-two thousand to ten thousand to three hundred, the lapping of the water, the visit with Purah, the dream of the barley loaf, the plan with the jars, the trumpets and the torches, the shout, and the fleeing of the camp, are all in the text. The people's offer of the kingship, and Gideon's answer, are in chapter eight. The Letter to the Hebrews, chapter eleven, names Gideon among those who lived by faith.

What we invented is small. Gideon's feelings in the winepress, the talk with Purah on the way down, the neighbour at the doorway, the goat and the broth, the pause at the spring and the quiet of the dawn after, are our own. We have also left out the battle's later hard chapters, which are in the text and are not for bedtime, and the story of the golden ephod in chapter eight, which belongs to another night.

Two things are worth being careful about. First, the dates. Scholars place the age of the Judges at many different times, and we do not try to pick one. Second, the fleece. Some people use it as a pattern for decisions, and as we said, the text does not offer it as a pattern. God has already spoken to Gideon, and the fleece is a mercy to a frightened man.

Gideon is remembered in the Orthodox Church among the righteous of the Old Testament, with a commemoration on the first of October, and he is read in the Catholic Church in the readings at Mass in ordinary time, though without a fixed feast of his own.

That's the story of Gideon for tonight. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you be given, when you most need it, a small, plain job to do, and the sense to do it. May you hear, in whatever winepress you are hiding in, the voice that calls you mighty, and may you let it. May you never have too many men, and may you always, at least once, be surprised by what a pot and a candle can do. May the Lord who was with Gideon be with you, and may you worship, in the dark, at the edge of whatever you are afraid of, before you do anything else.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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