Attack of the Trumpeters

Gideon now assembles his troops and outlines his strategy for their attack on the Midianite camp. He divides his three hundred men into three companies, giving each man a trumpet and a torch, as well as an empty pitcher with which to cover the torch. Then he simply commands them to “ ‘Look at me and do likewise.’ ”

It is just after midnight (“the beginning of the middle watch”) when Gideon and his men creep to the outskirts of the Midianite camp. Again he acts by night, but this time it is at God’s command—the darkness hides the approach of the Israelites and, as we will see, probably magnifies the terror of the Midianites. When his men at last are in place, Gideon launches his attack, an assault not so much on the Midianites as on their senses. When he blows his trumpet, his men do not rush forward with drawn swords. Rather, standing in their assigned places, they sound their own trumpets; they shout, “ ‘The sword of the LORD and of Gideon’ ” (Gideon’s expedition to the enemy camp had shown him that the Midianites were aware of—and fearful of—both God’s name and his own, 7:14); and they break the pitchers concealing their torches. The Midianites are thus terrified out of sleep by a sudden assault of noise, light, and threatening cries, all of which prove all the more frightening in that they come in the dead of night. “That which Gideon aimed at was to frighten this huge host, to give them not only a fatal rout, but a very shameful one,” Matthew Henry writes. “It was intended that those who had so long been a terror to Israel, and had so often frightened them, should themselves be routed and ruined purely by terror.”

Now, at last, Gideon receives the desire of his heart to see the sort of miracle his Israelite fathers spoke of (Judg. 6:13). The assault of light and sound sends pandemonium throughout the Midianite camp. Because of it, the author of Judges tells us, “the whole army ran and cried out and fled” and “the LORD set every man’s sword against his companion.” Enveloping the Midianites in terror and confusion about just what is happening, God causes them to attack one another with a fearful slaughter—one hundred and twenty thousand men (8:10). The remnant, about fifteen thousand weak, flees toward the Jordan River and the border of their own country.