Canter Bridge

Gideon, a.k.a. Jerubaal, talks the anti-monarchic line that customarily went down well with the ancient Israelite traditions of the desert. The anti-monarchist tradition that shows its face regularly in the biblical texts finds it convenient when a heroic figure like Gideon rises up, achieves the military liberation for which the people clamor, then disappears into the rustic egalitarianism that admires a man who prefers the company of his brothers.

However Gideon is not a simple figure. Indeed, the prerogatives he coaxes out of a grateful people suggest his is a monarchist in all but name. Yet the way he toes the party line is, superficially, inspiring:

Then the Israelites said to Gideon, ‘Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also; for you have delivered us out of the hand of Midian.’ Gideon said to them, ‘I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the LORD will rule over you.’

Still, Gideon accepts the lavish perks of conquest, takes on priestly overtones, and names a murderous son Abimelech: ‘my father is king’. It is not surprising, alas, that Abimelech presages all the worst kingly behavior that would afflict and even submerge Israel for centuries to come. He accomplishes arguably noble ends by means of bloodbath, he taunts and flaunts his glories at the drop of a hat. Abimelech is a bad thing indeed, sketched out early on Israel’s freshly hung canvas.

Yet his father, Gideon, had started so well.

Sadly, bad things come of good beginnings is to be a kind of irreducible pattern in biblical Israel’s story, a piece of bad gene-work with infinite opportunities to show itself in real flesh and blood, a destructive impulse so strong that neither tribal egalitarians nor Davidic monarchs would prove its equal.

Eventually, Israel’s hope in Gideon’s axiom—I will not rule over you because the Lord shall—would form itself into a concrete hope for the rule of God over his people in a way that would render human agency superfluous or, at least, non-essential. Some, captured by this longing, would ache for the day when a better David might appear. Others would see the people itself become, in the mind’s eye, the bearer of light and justice to nations beyond all know borders.

Gideon’s words raise expectations that his behavior will shatter. Would that words might be spoken that would stand forever, established, vindicated, and realized by the Lord himself in a day when Gideon should become a distant memory of Israel’s earliest ambitions.