Jerubbaal signifies ‘Baal will contend,’ not ‘Baal will plead against him,’ and therefore really has a meaning exactly the reverse of that ascribed to it in the narrative. The name seems substantially identical with that of Rib-Hadad, the governor of Phœnicia in the age of the Tel el-Amarna tablets. Joash, the father of Jerubbaal, was a worshipper of Baal, and consequently there was nothing strange in his calling his son after his god. It is only as Jerubbaal that the future judge was known to the generation that followed him,[[331]] and his successor in the kingdom of Manasseh was called even in his own day ‘Abimelech the son of Jerubbaal.’[[332]] It has been suggested that Jerubbaal and Gideon were two different personages, whom tradition has amalgamated together,[[333]] but double names of the kind were not unknown in Oriental antiquity. Solomon himself also bore the name of Jedidiah (2 Sam. xii. 25), and Gideon, ‘the cutter-down,’ was not an inappropriate epithet for the conqueror of the Midianites. There was a good reason why the pious Israelite of a later generation should shrink from admitting that one of his national heroes had borne a name compounded with that of Baal.[[334]]
The tribes of the desert, Amalekites, Midianites, and those Benê-Qedem or ‘Children of the East,’ whom an Egyptian papyrus of the twelfth dynasty places in the neighbourhood of Edom,[[335]] had fallen upon the lands of the settled fellahin, as their Bedâwin descendants still do whenever the Turkish soldiery are insufficient to keep them away. Year by year bands of raiders swarmed over the cultivated fields, murdering the peasants and carrying off their crops. At first it was Gilead that suffered, but the Hebrews were weak and divided, and the robbers of the desert were soon emboldened to cross the Jordan, and extend their raids as far as the western frontiers of Israel. ‘They destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.’
At last the Lord sent a prophet to the people and an angel to Gideon the Abi-ezrite. Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress near the sacred terebinth of Ophrah. Here, under the shadow of the tree, was an altar of Baal, and by the side of it the cone of stone which symbolised the goddess Asherah. The angel summoned Gideon to rise and deliver Israel, and as a sign that he was indeed the angel of Yahveh he touched with his staff the offerings of flesh and unleavened cakes that Gideon had made to him, so that fire rose out of the rock and consumed them all. On the threshing-floor Gideon built an altar to Yahveh, like that more stately sanctuary which David raised in later days on the threshing-floor of rock which had belonged to Araunah the Jebusite.
Recent criticism has discovered in the history of Jerubbaal two different and mutually inconsistent narratives, which are again subdivided among a variety of writers. To these some critics would add a third version of the story, which is supposed to be referred to in Is. x. 26, though others maintain that the reference in the book of Isaiah is to the first of the two narratives. It cannot be denied that the history of the war against the Midianites in its present form is confused, and that it is difficult to construct from it a clear and intelligible picture of the course of events. That the compiler of the book of Judges should have made use of more than one narrative, if such existed, is indeed only natural, and what a conscientious historian would be bound to do. But to distinguish minutely the narratives one from the other, much more to analyse them into still smaller fragments, is the work of Sisyphus. It is even more impossible than to distinguish between Rice and Besant in The Golden Butterfly or Celia’s Arbour. The historian must leave all such literary trifling to the collectors of lists of words, and content himself with comparing and analysing the facts recorded in the story.[[336]]
The altar raised by Gideon was dedicated to Yahveh-shalom, ‘the Yahveh of Peace,’ and it was still standing at Ophrah when the narrative relating to it was written.[[337]] Its name shows that it could hardly have been built before Gideon had returned in peace from the Midianitish war. There was much that had first to be done.
Gideon’s first task was to destroy the symbol of Asherah and the altar of Baal. The revelation made to him had been made in the name of Yahveh, and it was in the name of Yahveh alone that he was about to lead his countrymen to victory. It is true that between Yahveh and Baal the Israelite villager of the day saw but little difference. Yahveh was addressed as Baal or ‘Lord,’[[338]] and the local altars that were dedicated to Him in most instances did but take the place of the older altars of a Canaanitish Baal. Mixture between Israelites and Canaanites, moreover, had brought with it a mixture in religion. Along with the title, Yahveh had assumed the attributes of a Baal, at all events among the mass of the people. Joash and the villagers, who demanded that Gideon should be put to death for destroying the altar of Baal, doubtless thought that they were zealous for the God of Israel. It was the symbol of Asherah only which was the token of a foreign cult.
Perhaps the answer made by Joash to the charge against his son has been coloured by the theology of the later historian. It breathes rather the spirit of an age when the antagonism between Yahveh and Baal had become acute than that of one who was himself a worshipper of Baal and Asherah, and whose son in the hour of victory made an idol out of the enemy’s spoil. The Baal worshipped by the villagers of Abi-ezer was regarded as Yahveh himself, and hence it was that the offence committed by Gideon against him was an offence committed against the national God, and therefore punishable with death. To set him up as another god in opposition to the God of Israel carries us down to the age of Elijah, when the subjects of Ahab were called upon to choose between the Yahveh who had led them out of Egypt and the Phœnician Baal. It belongs to the same period as the etymological play on the name of Jerubbaal.
There was a special reason why Jerubbaal should thus have come forward to deliver his countrymen from the Midianites. The Bedâwin raiders had slain his brothers in a previous struggle at Mount Tabor (viii. 18-21). Jerubbaal thus had a blood-feud to avenge. He was the last and presumably the youngest of his family, and upon him therefore devolved the duty of revenging his brothers’ death. Moreover, it would appear from the words of the Midianite chiefs that Joash and his sons were not only the heads of their clan, but that they also exercised a sort of kingly authority in Ophrah and its neighbourhood. The history of Abimelech seems to imply that the family of Abi-ezer had succeeded to the power and even the name of the Canaanitish ‘kings’ of Shechem, and that the subsequent ingratitude of the inhabitants of Shechem to the house of Jerubbaal was due to jealousy of the preference displayed by it for Ophrah. Shechem contained a large Canaanitish element which was wanting at Ophrah, where the population was more purely Israelitish. If Joash were thus king of a mixed population, recognised by Canaanites and Israelites alike, we can understand why by the side of the altar of Baal there stood also the symbol of the Canaanitish goddess. The very fact that the sanctuary of Ophrah belonged to him (vi. 25) indicates that he possessed royal prerogatives. Even at Jerusalem the temple of Solomon was as it were the chapel of the kings.[[339]]
It has been suggested that the Baal whose altar stood on the land of Joash at Ophrah was the Baal-berith or ‘Baal of the Covenant,’ worshipped at Shechem,[[340]] and that the ‘covenant’ over which the god presided was that made between the Canaanites of Shechem and their Hebrew master. Doubtless the two elements in the population would have interpreted the name in a different way. For the Hebrews the ‘Baal of the Covenant’ would have been Yahveh; for the Canaanites he would have been the local sun-god. But there is nothing to prove that the attributes of the Baals of Ophrah and Shechem were the same, or that they were adored under the same form. Indeed, the fact that the altar erected by Jerubbaal at Ophrah was dedicated to the ‘Yahveh of Peace’ tells rather in a contrary direction. Shechem had its Baal-berith, while Ophrah may have had its Baal-shalom. While the one commemorated the covenant that had been entered into between the two parts of the population, the other would have commemorated its ‘peaceful’ settlement. For the Canaanite it was a covenant, for the Hebrew it was peace.
The struggle at Mount Tabor, in which the brothers of Jerubbaal had fallen, laid the fruitful valley of Jezreel at the feet of the Bedâwin plunderers. The plain of Megiddo was now in the hands of the Israelites. The battle on the banks of the Kishon had broken for ever the power of the Canaanites and their ‘chariots of iron,’ and they were now tributary to Manasseh.[[341]] The Canaanite townsman and the Israelitish peasant were now living in peaceful intermixture, and the torrent of raiders from the desert fell upon both alike. We hear no more of any attempts made by the older population to shake off the Hebrew yoke; it suffers from the Midianite invasion equally with its Hebrew masters, and the family of Joash govern it as much as they govern the Israelites themselves. Jerubbaal is the deliverer of the Canaanite as well as of the Israelite.