to mean, “Let Baal contend.”  Etymologically this derivation is extremely far-fetched, and from every point of view impossible:  the name of a god is only assumed by those who are his worshippers.  In Hebrew antiquity Baal and El are interchangeable and used indifferently; Jehovah Himself is spoken of up to the times of the prophet Hosea as the Baal, i.e., the lord.  This is distinctly proved by a series of proper names in the families of Saul and David, Ishbaal, Meribaal, Baaljada, to which we may now add the name Jerubbaal given to the conqueror of Midian.  If then even in the time of the kings Baal was by no means simply the antipode of Jehovah, whence the hostile relation of the two deities, which Jerubbaal displays by the acts he does, although he praises the great Baal by wearing his name?  The view, also, that the Ashera was incompatible with the worship of Jehovah, does not agree with the belief of the earlier age; according to Deuteronomy xvi. 21, these artificial trees must have stood often enough beside the altars of Jehovah.  The inserted passage itself betrays in a remarkable manner that its writer felt this sort of zeal for the legitimate worship to be above the level of the age in question.  We receive the impression that the inhabitants of Ophra do not know their worship of Baal to be illegitimate, that Gideon also had taken part in it in good faith, and that there had never been an altar of Jehovah in the place before.

Of a somewhat different form is a correction which is to be found at the close of the history of Gideon (viii. 22 seq.).  After the victory over the Midianites the Israelites are said to have asked Gideon to be king over them.  This he declined out of regard to Jehovah the sole ruler of Israel, but he asked for the gold nose-rings which had been taken from the enemy, and made of them an image of Jehovah, an ephod, which he set up in Ophra to be worshipped.  “And all Israel went thither a-whoring after it, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his house.”  Now the way in which such a man acts in such a moment is good authority for the state of the worship of Israel at the time, and not only so, but we cannot impute it to the original narrator that he chose to represent his hero as showing his thankfulness to the Deity by the most gratuitous declension from His worship, as in fact crowning His victory with an act of idolatry.  This is seen to be the more impossible when we consider that according to the testimony of Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, such images were even in the Assyrian period a regular part of the belongings of the “houses of God” not only in Samaria but in Judah as well.  We have also to remember that the contradiction between a human kingship and the kingship of Jehovah, such as is spoken of in these verses, rests upon theories which arose later, and of which we shall have more to say. 1 Studer will thus be correct in his assertion that the

****************************************** 1.  “The words of Gideon are only intelligible on the presupposition that the rule of Jehovah had a visible representative prophet or priest.  But this was not the case in the period of the judges, as Gideon’s own history shows us.”  Vatke, p. 263.  We see besides from ix. 1 seq. that Gideon really was the ruler of Ephraim and Manasseh. *****************************************