Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Judges 7:20
And the three companies blew the trumpets, and broke the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands to blow [withal]: and they cried, The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon.
20. Gideon’s company having given the signal ( Jdg 7:19), the two others reply, and all three together ( Jdg 7:20) carry out the preconcerted plan.
The sentence ‘and the trumpets in their right hands to blow withal’ seems to be, either in whole or in part, an addition, possibly from the ‘trumpet-story’; but the original form of the verse is past recovery.
The sword etc.] A sword for Jehovah and Gideon! The battle-cry as agreed was simply ‘For Jehovah and Gideon,’ Jdg 7:18; a sword has been added.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Verse 20. Blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers] How astonishing must the effect be, in a dark night, of the sudden glare of three hundred torches, darting their splendour, in the same instant, on the half-awakened eyes of the terrified Midianites, accompanied with the clangour of three hundred trumpets, alternately mingled with the thundering shout of chereb layhovah ulegidon, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!”
Origen, in his ninth homily on this book, makes these three hundred men types of the preachers of the Gospel; their trumpets of the preaching of Christ crucified; and their lights or torches, of the holy conduct of righteous men. In some verses of an ancient author, attributed to Tertullian, and written against the heretic Marcion, Gideon’s three hundred men are represented as horsemen; and in this number he finds the mystery of the cross; because the Greek letter T, tau which is the numeral for 300, is itself the sign of the cross. The verses, which may be found in vol. v. of the Pisaurian Collection of the Latin heathen and Christian poets, Advers, Marcion., lib. 3, ver. 18, as being very curious, and not often to be met with, I shall here subjoin: –
Ex quibus ut Gideon dux agminis, acer in hostem,
Non virtute sua tutelam acquirere genti,
Firmatusque fide signum petit excita menti,
Quo vel non posset, vel posset vincere bellum,
Vellus ut in noctem positum de rore maderet,
Et tellus omnis circum siccata jaceret,
Hoc inimicorum palmam coalescere mundo;
Atque iterum solo remanenti vellere sicco,
Hoc eadem tellus roraret nocte liquore,
Hoc etenim signo praedonum stravit acervos.
Congressus populo Christi, sine milite multo:
Tercenteno equite (numerus Tau littera Graeca)
Armatis facibusque et cornibus ore canentum.
Vellus erat populus ovium de semine sancto.
Nam tellus variae gentes fusaeque per orbem,
Verbum quod nutrit, sed nox est mortis imago.
Tau signum crucis et cornu praeconia vitae,
Lucentesque faces in lychno spiritus ardens.
“Gideon, keen in arms, was captain of the host,
And acquired redemption for his people, but not by his own
power.
Being strengthened in faith, his heart was influenced to ask a
sign
By which he might know whether or not he should be successful
in battle.
A fleece was so placed by night, that it might be wet with dew;
And all the surrounding earth remain dry.
By this he was to learn that he should gain the victory over
his enemies.
The sign was reversed; the fleece remaining dry while all the
ground was moist;
And by this sign he was to know that he should slaughter those
troops of robbers.
The people of Christ conquer without any military force;
Three hundred horsemen, (for the Greek letter T, tau, is the
emblem of the number,)
Armed with torches, and blowing with trumpets.
The fleece of the sheep are the people sprung from the Messiah,
And the earth are the various nations dispersed over the world.
It is the word which nourishes; but might is the image of
death.
Tau is the sign of the cross; and the trumpets, the emblems of
the heralds of life;
And the burning torches in the pitchers, the emblems of the Holy
Spirit.”
We see here what abstruse meanings a strong imagination, assisted by a little piety, may extract from what was never intended to be understood as a mystery.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
Held the lamps and the trumpets, that they might be thought to be a mighty host, having as many troops or companies as there were trumpets and lights.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
And the three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers,…. The other two, observing what Gideon and his company did, followed their example, and at the same time blew their trumpets, and broke their pitchers; for that there were four companies, three besides Gideon’s, as Kimchi and Ben Melech suggest, there is no reason to believe:
and held the lamps in their left hands; which they took out of the pitchers when they broke them, and holding them up in their left hands, gave a great blaze of light, which must be very surprising to the host of Midian, just awaked out of their sleep:
and the trumpets in their right hands to blow withal; and which they continued blowing, the sound of which must be very dreadful, since it might be concluded, from such a number of trumpets, that there must be a vast army:
and they cried, the sword of the Lord and of Gideon; signifying that was drawn against the Midianites, and they must expect to be cut in pieces by it, since the sword was Jehovah’s, sent and commissioned by him, and was put into the hand of Gideon as an instrument, with which execution would be done, the Lord helping him. The Targum is,
“the sword of the Lord, and victory by the hand of Gideon”
which victory was to be ascribed to the sword and power of God. This was an emblem of the efficacy of the word of God, accompanied with his power, to the destruction of the kingdom of Satan; the blowing of the trumpets may denote the ministration of the Gospel, the great trumpet to be blown by the apostles and ministers of the word; the holding forth the lamps may signify the same, the light of the divine word in the ministers of it, and the holding forth of it to others; and which is carried in earthen vessels, frail mortal men; and done that the excellency of the power may appear to be of God, and not of men; and the sword of the Lord is the word of God in the mouths of ministers, accompanied by the power of God; for it can only be through God that such weapons of warfare can become mighty to do the execution that is done by them; see 2Co 4:7 blowing of trumpets, and then a cry or shout of the soldiers to terrify the enemy, were used in later times k.
k “At tuba terribilem sonitum”, &c. Virgil Aeneid. 9.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
According to the command which they had received (Jdg 7:17), the other two tribes followed his example. “ Then the three companies blew the trumpets, broke the pitchers, and held the torches in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right to blow, and cried, Sword to the Lord and Gideon! And they stood every one his place round about the camp, ” sc., without moving, so that the Midianites necessarily thought that there must be a numerous army advancing behind the torch-bearers. , “ and the whole army ran, ” i.e., there began a running hither and thither in the camp of the enemy, who had been frightened out of their night’s rest by the unexpected blast of the trumpets, the noise, and the war-cry of the Israelitish warriors; “ and they (the enemy ) lifted up a cry (of anguish and alarm), and caused to fly ” (carried off), sc., their tents (i.e., their families) and their herds, or all their possessions (cf. Jdg 6:11; Exo 9:20). The Chethibh is the original reading, and the Keri a bad emendation.
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
(20) The trumpets in their right hands . . .Thus they were comparatively defenceless, though, if they had any armour at all, doubtless they could still hold the shield on the left arm, while the sword was girded on the thigh. The effect of the sudden crash and glare and shout upon the vast unwieldy host of the Bedouins may be imagined. Startled from sleep in a camp which, like Oriental camps, must have been most imperfectly protected and disciplined, they would see on every side blazing torches, and hear on every side the rams horns and the terrible shout of the Israelites. (Comp. Tac. Ann. i. 68.) The instant result was a wild panic, such as that which seized the camp of the Persians at Plate. The first thought which would rise in their minds would be that there was some treachery at work among the motley elements of the camp itself. Even a well-disciplined camp is liable to these outbursts of panic. One such occurred among the Greeks in the camp of the Ten Thousand during their retreat. To shame these groundless alarms, Klearchus next morning caused a reward to be proclaimed for any one who would give information who had let the ass loose; and this seems to have been a standing joke to shame Greek soldiers from such panics (Xen. Anab. ii. 2, 20). Several stratagems similar to that of Gideon are recorded in history. Polynus, in his book on the Art of War, tells us that Ditas, when attacking Hera, ordered the trumpeters to stand apart, and sound a charge opposite to many quarters of the city; and that the Herans, hearing the blasts of many trumpets from many directions, thinking that the whole region was crowded with enemies, abandoned the city. Frontinus also tells us that the Tarquinians and Faliscans tried to frighten the Romans with torches, and Minucius Rufus terrified the Scordisci by trumpets blown among the rocks (Strateg. ii. 3). Hannibal on one occasion escaped from Fabius Maximus by tying torches to the heads of cattle, and having them driven about the hills. The Druids waved torches to repel the attack of Suetonius Paulinus on the island of Mona (Tac. Ann. xiv. 30). An Arab chief (Bel-Arab) in the eighteenth century used trumpets in exactly the same manner as Gideon did on this occasion, and with the same success (Niebuhr, Beschr. von Arabien, p. 304). Ewald alludes to similar stratagems in Neapolitan and Hungarian wars, the latter so recently as 1849 (Gesch. ii. 503).
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
20. Sword of the Lord In Jdg 7:18 the word sword is supplied from this passage. The battle cry as there given is, literally, For Jehovah and for Gideon. This cry, ringing out from the three companies on different sides of the camp, together with the sound of the trumpets and the crashing of the pitchers, and the sudden glare of three hundred torches in the midnight darkness, might well bewilder and confound an army just waking out of sleep.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘And they stood every man in his place around the camp, and all the host ran about, and they shouted and put them to flight.’
The courage needed by these men was immense. Had they been discovered they would probably have died instantly, or even worse. But they stood in their place, blew their ram’s horns, waved their torches and yelled their warcry. And they succeeded. The enemy ran about, totally disorganised, broke up and fled for safety from the ‘pursuing hordes’, which were, in fact, all in their minds. Many of their camels would be left behind. The tendency would be not to bother about them. Life was at stake and they would not be thinking clearly.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
Nothing can be more evident than that the battle was the Lord’s; for the army of Israel did nothing but alarm, make a great noise, and look on. Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. Exo 14:13-14 .
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Jdg 7:20 And the three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands to blow [withal]: and they cried, The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon.
Ver. 20. Blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers. ] By the sound of trumpets and shining of lamps out of earthen broken vessels, Gideon overcame his enemies: so Christ, by the trumpet of his word, and light of the gospel, carried through the world by weak instruments, hath confounded his enemies. 1Jn 2:14
The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon.
a Arch. Ussher., De Britan. Eccles. Primord.
blew: How astonishing and overwhelming must the effect be, in a dark night, of the sudden glare of 300 torches, darting their splendour in the same instant on the half-awakened eyes of the terrified Midianites; accompanied with the clangor of 300 trumpets, alternately mingled with the thundering shout of cherav yehovah oolegidon, “The sword of Jehovah and of Gideon!” Num 10:1-10, Jos 6:4, Jos 6:16, Jos 6:20, Isa 27:13, 1Co 15:52, 1Th 4:16
brake: 2Co 4:7, Heb 11:4, 2Pe 1:15
Reciprocal: Deu 33:29 – the sword Jos 6:5 – the people Jdg 7:18 – blow ye 1Ki 20:20 – the Syrians Jer 13:14 – I will dash
7:20 And the three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands to blow [withal]: and they cried, The {k} sword of the LORD, and of Gideon.
(k) Shall destroy the enemies.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes