all who are with me; ye also blow the trumpets round about the entire camp,” which the 300 men divided into three companies were to surround, “and say, To the Lord and Gideon.” According to Jdg 7:20, this war-cry ran fully thus: “Sword to (for) the Lord and Gideon.” This addition in Jdg 7:20, however, does not warrant us in inserting “chereb” (sword) in the text here, as some of the early translators and MSS have done.[1]
Verse 19
Gideon then proceeded with the 100 who were with him, i.e., the company which was led by himself personally, to the end of the hostile camp, at the beginning of the middle watch, i.e., at midnight ראשׁ is an accusative defining the time: see Ges. 118, 2, and Ewald, §204, a. The only other watch that is mentioned in the Old Testament beside the middle night-watch, is the morning night-watch (Exo 14:24; 1Sa 11:11), from which it has been correctly inferred, that the Israelites divided the night into three night-watches. The division into four watches (Mat 14:25; Mar 6:48) was first adopted by the Jews from the Romans. “They (the Midianites) had only (just) posted the watchmen (of the middle watch),” - a circumstantial clause, introduced to give greater distinctness to the situation. When the first sentries were relieved, and the second posted, so that they thought they might make quite sure of their night's rest once more, Gideon and his host arrived at the end of the camp, and, as we must supply from the context, the other two hosts at two other ends of the camp, who all blew their trumpets, breaking the pitchers in their hands at the same time. The inf. abs. נפוץ, as a continuation of the finite verb יתקעוּ, indicates that the fact was contemporaneous with the previous one (see Ewald, §351, c.).
Verses 20-21
According to the command which they had received (Jdg 7:17), the other two tribes followed his example. “Then the three companies
- ↑ Similar stratagems to the one adopted by Gideon here are recorded by Polyaenus (Strateg. ii. c. 37) of Dicetas, at the taking of Heraea, and by Plutarch (Fabius Max. c. 6) of Hannibal, when he was surrounded and completely shut in by Fabius Maximus. An example from modern history is given by Niebuhr (Beschr. von Arabien, p. 304). About the middle of the eighteenth century two Arabian chiefs were fighting for the Imamate of Oman. One of them, Bel-Arab, besieged the other, Achmed ben Said, with four or five thousand men, in a small castle on the mountain. But the latter slipped out of the castle, collected together several hundred men, gave every soldier a sign upon his head, that they might be able to distinguish friends from foes, and sent small companies to all the passes. Every one had a trumpet to blow at a given signal, and thus create a noise at the same time on every side. The whole of the opposing army was thrown in this way into disorder, since they found all the passes occupied, and imagined the hostile army to be as great as the noise.
