Gideon made the gold into an ephod, which he placed in Ophrah, his town. All Israel prostituted themselves by worshiping it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and his family. Thus Midian was subdued before the Israelites and did not raise its head again. During Gideon’s lifetime, the land had peace forty years. (Judges 8:27, 28 NIV)

So immediately after using the Lord’s power to defeat tens of thousands of men with an army of 300, Gideon builds an idol and everyone starts worshipping it. It’s not for forty years that the Lord gets around to punishing them for this. But punish He does!

Abimelach, the bastard son of Gideon, hires mercenaries to kill his seventy brothers (Gideon had lots of wives), and make him king. They didn’t find the youngest, Jotham, who laid a curse on Abimelach and Shechem (the city that Abimelach’s mother came from). Three years later, the Lord makes the Shechem town leaders grow dissatisfied with Abimelach, which causes a war, and Abimelach burns down Shechem. But that wasn’t enough for him, so he assaulted Thebez, but when attacking a tower, “a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech’s head, and all to brake his skull.” (Judges 9:53 KJV).

Thus God repaid the wickedness that Abimelek had done to his father by murdering his seventy brothers. God also made the people of Shechem pay for all their wickedness. The curse of Jotham son of Jerub-Baal came on them. (Judges 9:56, 57 NIV)

It’s a fun story, and feels like the beginning on the Iliad, where various Greeks in the siege are at each others’ throats. I’m not certain what the moral of the story is.

Next: Judges 10-12

My apologies for skipping the summer. This is harder to do than I thought. I hope the book gets better.