But how did the difference arise?  This we shall best learn by comparing the beginnings of the two stories.  We remarked that the second, as it stands, wanted a beginning, but what is wanting may be to some extent supplied from what follows.  According to viii. 4 seq., Gideon’s aim is to get hold of the two kings of the Midianites:  these appear all through as the particular enemies whom he is pursuing:  as to the rest of the Midianites he is more or less indifferent.  And the reason, as we learn from viii. 18 seq., is that the two kings had slain his brothers at Tabor; it is to take vengeance for them that he sets out to pursue the slayers, and does not rest till they are in his hand.  It is the duty of blood-revenge which causes him to take the war-path with his household, unconcerned by the disproportion in numbers between his followers and theirs:  it is the powerful sentiment of family which sets him in motion and causes him to become, as it were incidentally, the liberator of Israel from the spoilers.  In the first account (vi. 11-viii. 3) these natural motives have completely disappeared, and others have taken their place which are almost of an opposite character.  Before anything has happened, before the Midianites have made their yearly incursion, Gideon, who expects nothing of the kind, is summoned by a theophany to battle against them.  When they arrive he is seized by the Spirit and sets out against them.  What is human in him has no part in the act he is called to do; flesh and blood set themselves against it.  He is impelled by the direct impulse of Jehovah, and here, of course, he goes forth in behalf of the public interests of Israel, against the Midianites, not against their princes personally.  And accordingly everything possible is done to cast the man into the shade behind the Deity.  Gideon, according to the second account a distinguished and royal man, is in the first of a poor house and family; in the second story he is remarkable for irrepressible energy, but here he is timid and shrinking up to the last moment, and new miracles have constantly to be wrought to encourage and strengthen him.  The 32,000 men with whom he takes the field he is ordered by Jehovah to send away all but l,000 and again all but 300, “lest Israel vaunt themselves against Me, and say, Mine own hand hath saved me.”  The weapons with which the nocturnal attack of the 300 is made are torches, pitchers, and trumpets; the men have not a hand left to hold swords (vii. 20); and the hostile army has accordingly to do itself the work of its own destruction (vii. 22).

Few of the deviations of the religious version from the natural one are not transparent; one of these few is the removal of the scene to this side of the Jordan.  Most of them are at once recognisable as due to the process of glorification, illumination, and religious inflation, by which the body of the tradition is etherealised and the story lifted up into the region of the air.  For example, the