Commentaria in Judices
Morally, therefore, learn here that a leader ought to go before his soldiers, a father before his sons, a Superior before his inferiors in hard things, and be first to put his hand to a difficult matter, if he wishes it quickly and rightly done. So did Cato, who in Lucan, book IX, drives his soldiers by his own example to every danger, saying:
I will enter, and I shall be first to set my steps in the dust.
Let the heat of the sky strike me, let the serpent full of venom meet me, and make trial of your dangers by my fate: let him thirst who shall have seen me drinking, or let him burn with heat who shall have seen me seeking the shade of the groves; or let him fail who sees the horseman precede the squadrons of foot, if in any danger it be known that leader or soldier has gone, etc.
18. CRY TO THE LORD AND TO GEDEON,—namely let this battle and victory be [theirs]. Whence verse 20 it is said that they cried: “The sword of the Lord and of Gedeon,” namely this is he who pursues you, O Madianites, slays and lays you low. Whence the Chaldee: the sword proceeds from the face of the Lord, and the victory is by the hand of Gedeon, whom you, O Madianites, dread as an antagonist, and by the dream already know to be about to triumph over you, as if to say: It is God, God I say, who avenges himself on the Madianites, who wields his sword against them, and gives them to death; but Gedeon in this matter is His minister, receives from Him the avenging sword, and drives it with his own hands into the enemies. Hear St. Augustine, Question 40: “This signifies that the sword was to work what should please the Lord and Gedeon.”
Hence the Poles and Hungarians are to be praised, who, like Gedeon, attack in battle with the name of Jesus cried aloud, and the Spaniards with the name of St. James, and therefore often win victory over the enemy.
19. AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDNIGHT WATCH, AND THE WATCHMEN BEING AWAKENED, THEY BEGAN TO SOUND THE TRUMPETS.—The night itself and the clang of the trumpets struck the Madianites, so that they thought a vast army of Israelites was rushing upon them, whom they despaired of being able to resist. Whence, turned to flight, they trampled and destroyed one another. This stratagem is imitated by cunning leaders of war; for when they have few soldiers, they have many trumpets blown, that from them the enemy may suspect that very great forces are coming against them, and so think of flight. So Pompey did against Mithridates about to fight. Hear Dio, book XXXVI: “First,” he says, “all the trumpeters by agreement sounded the war-note together, then the soldiers and all the rest of the crowd shouted: and they indeed struck their spears or javelins on their shields; the others (camp servants and sutlers) struck stones on bronze vessels.” Like to this Fredegund, queen of France, did, fighting for her little son Clothar, for by order of the leader Landeric, his soldiers, each covered with cut branches of trees and striking bells, terrified the enemy in the dead of night and drove them to flight, as Aimoin narrates, book III, chap. 81.
AND TO CLAP THE PITCHERS ONE AGAINST ANOTHER,—that partly by the crash of this clapping, partly by the flashing of so many torches or firebrands shining forth from it, the Madianites might be thrown into consternation. By a like stratagem the Salonitans put to flight Octavius Caesar, afterwards Augustus, besieging Salona, as Dio narrates, book XLI: “The women,” he says, “with hair loosed, clothed in black, having taken torches, in short arrayed in the most terrible guise possible, at midnight approached the camp of the besiegers: and the sentinels, struck lifeless with fear (for they presented to them the appearance of demons), they cast fire into all parts of the camp at once; the men following them slew many roused by that tumult, and many also sleeping: so they straightway seized both the camp and the station of the ships which Octavius held.”
Tropologically, the author of the homily On the Virgin, in St. Bernard: “They went out,” he says, “with lamps, having their loins girt, and lamps burning in their hands, that both the girdle of chastity may be bound in the body, and for the advantage of the neighbour and the glory of the Father the light of example may shine in work. So Gedeon, hiding lamps in small pitchers, but at the hour of conflict breaking the little vessels and showing them, terrified the enemies with sudden light and put them to flight; for the princes of darkness are terrified at the sight of the light of good works, because darkness cannot stand before light.” And Isaias the Abbot, oration 47: “He who fears,” he says, “the infirmity of the body, will not attain to that which is according to nature; he who, suppliant to God, had broken the pitchers, would not have beheld the splendour of the lamps. Likewise a man, unless he despise the body, will not behold the light of divinity. For Jahel the wife of Haber the Cinite, unless she had taken the nail of the tent, would not have crushed the pride of Sisara. If the mind therefore confirm itself, and decree to follow charity, it will overcome all the vices of the flesh.”
20. THEY HELD THE LAMPS IN THEIR LEFT HANDS, AND WITH THEIR RIGHT HANDS THE TRUMPETS WHICH THEY BLEW,—that they might hold them more firmly, and therefore blow them with greater force and sound; for there is greater strength in the right hand. A mystical signification and cause St. Gregory gives, book XXX of the Morals, chap. 34: “We are said to have for the right whatever we weigh as great; for the left what we count as nothing. Well therefore is it written there that they held the trumpets in the right hand, but the pitchers in the left; because the martyrs of Christ account the grace of preaching great, but the advantage of the body least. For whoever makes more of the advantage of the body than of the grace of preaching holds the trumpet in the left and the pitcher in the right. If, however, the grace of preaching is attended to in the first place, and the advantage of the body in the second, it is certain that the trumpets are held in the right hands, and the pitchers in the left.”
21. STANDING EVERY MAN IN HIS PLACE ROUND ABOUT THE ENEMY’S CAMP,—“Standing,” that by standing they might feign that they were giving passage to their very great forces invading the Madianites, as though each trumpet, and each trumpeter, had led his own cohort of armed men; for each company of horse has its trumpeter: it was night when nothing is seen, and therefore many things that are not seem to be seen, especially by the fearful and consternated.
SO ALL THE CAMP WAS TROUBLED,—not so much by the diversity of tongues, as Josephus will have it, as because they thought the Israelites were in their camp, and did not recognize one another, and by a certain divine blindness and rage raged against all they met. So tropologically heretics, who are our Madianites, fight with swords against one another, and destroy themselves. Truly St. Jerome on Ezechiel: “The conflict of heretics,” he says, “is our victory.” And St. Hilary, book VII On the Trinity: “The war of heretics,” he says, “is the peace of the Church.”
22. AND THE LORD SENT THE SWORD INTO ALL THE CAMP, AND THEY SLEW ONE ANOTHER:—evidently God sent into the Madianites terror and blindness, and thinking that the Hebrews were making slaughter in the midst of the camp, from fear, from inability to sleep, from sorrow and anger, each, thinking his neighbour an enemy, struck him with the sword, and those who fled thought those following them and fleeing equally to be Israelites, enemies and pursuers of themselves; wherefore while they thought they were striking and slaying them, they slew one another, because the Israelites with the continual clang of trumpets and the glare of lamps or burning brands were pursuing them. This the faith and lofty hope of Gedeon deserved, by which, obeying God, with three hundred soldiers, armed with the sportive arms of pitchers and lamps, he boldly attacked the countless and best-armed Madianites, and therefore laid them low, and as Sidonius Apollinaris says in the Panegyric:
Victory came by song alone.
In like manner God struck and smote the enemies of Josaphat king of Israel, 2 Paral. 20. Among the Gentiles the Lacedaemonians boldly threw themselves at Thermopylae against Xerxes and his countless forces, and slew and put them to flight, and are therefore celebrated by all histories.
In all these Gedeon was a type of Christ, as I showed by sixteen analogies on Isaias chap. 9:4, on those words predicted of Christ: “The sceptre of his exactor thou hast overcome as in the day of Madian.”
Finally the army of Madian was at least 135 thousand, of whom 120 thousand were slain here, the remaining 15 thousand, fleeing, Gedeon pursued and slew beyond the Jordan, as we shall hear chap. 8, verse 10. And all this he accomplished with three hundred soldiers only; but by stratagems, God fighting for him and striking the enemies. Truly Judas Machabeus another Gedeon: “Not in the multitude of the army is the victory of battle, but strength is from heaven,”
1 Mach. 3:19. Gedeon was imitated by Leonidas, who with three hundred