Judges 7:16-22

The night attack

The account of Gideon's bold and successful stratagem is perfectly intelligible as a whole, though there is some confusion in the details, chiefly due to the repetitions in Judges 7:17 (Gideon's order), Judges 7:20 (the blowing of the trumpets), Judges 7:22 (the direction of the flight). It is usually objected that one pair of hands (Judges 7:16) could not have carried a trumpet and a pitcher with a lighted (?) torch inside; the objection is rather prosaic; such a difficulty would not, perhaps, have occurred to an ancient writer. But the fact remains that the text in Judges 7:17; Judges 7:20; Judges 7:22is clearly not in its original form; are we to explain the overloading as the work of subsequent editors, or as an attempt to combine two different narratives of the same event? The latter explanation is adopted by most recent commentators; it is supposed that in one narrative the trumpets played a leading part, in the other, the pitchers and torches. At any rate the trumpets cannot have been introduced by a later hand, for they form a prominent feature of the story; so perhaps we can only suppose that here, as elsewhere in the history of Gideon (cf. Judges 6:11-32; Judges 6:35 and Judges 7:23), two versions have been harmonized with more or less success. But to separate them is difficult; none of the attempts at an analysis can be called satisfactory. The problem remains in much uncertainty.