Who stands back
and who joins?
Who leads. who follows?
Who birthed you
and what do you birth?
We
come to the closing of the Gideon cycle, as the young
man who stepped into Debora's place achieves victory, providing, like her, for a transformative
"forty years of quiet."
As
he chases the Midianites to achieve this decisive victory, Gideon
traverses the bank of the river, revisiting
the stops made by his ancestor Jacob on his primordial journey
back to Canaan: Penuel, Succot, and finally Shechem.
Yet
Gideon's trajectory here is the opposite of Jacob's.
If
Jacob sends his children and wives ahead remaining
"alone" to be rebirthed as Israel through a struggle with
a mysterious assailant, Gideon's symbolic rebirth as
Yerubaal took place before he approached Penuel. If Jacob's tumultuous life narrowed to the strains of Jabbok,Gideon's canvas widens. If
before, we met Gideon alone, at night, in
private dialogue with God and angels, here
we see Gideon within the national context, as he interacts with the other tribes, and speaks to
the Midianite
kings.
If
Gideon's earlier struggles were with his own fears and doubts, here
he struggles to placate those who wish for greater involvement (Ephraim),
and to punish those who hold back (Succoth and Penuel). No longer does he
carefully assuage fears. Instead,
he ruthlessly and violently asserts national authority. Not
for nothing does Israel offer him kingship.
In
place of the lone young initiate, we now see Gideon
embedded within a family: suddenly he has "brothers, the sons of my mother," and a young
son he is trying to train. Gideon's history
begins to extend forward
and back in time. As he retraces his forefather Jacob's journey, and worries for his
brothers, he is offered
hereditary kingship, extending forward in time. "I will not reign over you, nor will my son reign over
you. God will reign over you,"
Gideon ceremoniously declaims, his
every choice now reverberating through time.
Yet
this sudden tension between Gideon's rule and
God's is dangerous, as the man who once was
"clothed" in God's spirit now lays down a "dress" to gather gold (in a scene reminiscent of the creation
of the Golden Calf). The money gathered serves to create an article of clothing (an
"ephod") that becomes a gateway to idolatry, indeed
competing with God.
Despite
the achievement of the forty years of peace, the
Gideon-cycle ends on a dark note. From one son we
end with 70, and "many women" (precisely what Moses warned the king to avoid). The
Israelites, we are told, do not
"deal kindly" with Yerubaal or
his family. The hero who comes to deal with a post-Golden-Calf Israel gets trapped in their cycle of idolatry and sin).