old tradition could not see anything in Gideon’s refusing the gold for himself and dedicating it to God but a fine proof of his unselfishness and piety, and that in viii. 22-27 we have a secondary product, in which the original features of the story are distorted so as to make them suit later tastes.  The second hand has unfortunately supplanted in this instance the work of the first.  The older narrative breaks off (viii. 21) with the words:  “Gideon took away the ornaments that were on the necks of the camels of the kings.”  What he did with them we do not learn, but naturally we must suppose that it was of them that he made the ephod.  According to the secondary passage, which begins immediately after viii. 21, he used for this purpose the nose-rings which the whole of Israel had taken from all the Midianites, amounting in weight to 1700 shekels, besides the ornaments of the kings and of their camels.  The proportion is similar to that between the 600 Danites in chap. xviii. and the 25,700 Benjamites in chap. xx., or between the 40,000 men of Israel in v. 8, and the 400,000 in xx. 2.

VII.I.4.  In the last place it is possible to trace even in the original narratives themselves certain differences of religious attitude which indicate to us unobtrusively and yet clearly that tendency in the development of the tradition which reached its end in the revision and ornamentation of which we have hitherto been speaking.  This is especially the case with regard to those narratives which are preserved to us in a double form.  These are not frequent in Judges, but they do occur.  A very simple case of the kind is seen on comparing chap. iv. with chap. v.

The Canaanites again lift their heads under their great king Sisera, and from their towns in the plains harass the hill villages of the new settlers.  Deborah unites the Hebrew tribes for the contest.  From the North and from the South the hosts of Jehovah descend before our eyes towards Jezreel, the prophetess Deborah at their head, the warrior Barak at her side.  The conflict takes place at the brook Kishon, and ends with the defeat of the kings of Canaan.  Sisera himself is killed in the flight by Jael, the wife of a nomad Kenite.  Such are the contents of the song in chap. v.  In the preceding narrative (chap. iv.) we should expect to find a historical commentary on the song, but we find a mere reproduction in which the special features of the story are blurred and falsified.  Instead of the kings of Canaan we have the king of Canaan, as if Canaan had been a kingdom.  Sisera, the head of the Canaanite kings, is transformed into a mere general; the oppression of the Hebrews is made general and indefinite.  Jael murders Sisera when he is Iying in a deep sleep by driving a tent-peg into the ground through his temples.  There is nothing of this in the song:  there he is drinking when she strikes the blow, and is conceived as standing at the time, else he could not bow down at her feet and fall, and lie struck dead where he fell (ver. 27).