"A sword for the Lord, and for Gideon!"
Judges 7:20
Faith, politics, and asymmetrical combat in the iron age.
DISCLAIMER: this will be a secular discussion of the story of Gideon's battle with the Midianites. While I do have my opinions and theological beliefs regarding this story, the point of this post is to talk about secular concepts, verifiable history, and reasonable theories around the narrative.
This will not be a 'Sunday school' lesson.
The book of judges, which is recorded both in the christian Old Testament, and jewish Tanakh, includes in its words the story of Gideon, son of Joash, from the Abiezrite clan in the tribe of Manasseh He would rise to become a military leader, and then a judge (leader) over the nation of ancient Israel.
However, one of Gideon's exploits is so amazing that today, it is still talked about, still read about, and is still taught as a historical bases for modern military historians, and modern officers. That story is the nighttime attack of Gideon on the army of the Midianites, an attack so outlandish in its conception that even today, we balk at the idea of it working, even though its core principles have perceived over history.
In summary, Gideon is selected by God to lead Israel when it is threatened by the army of the Midianites, one of the Bedouin tribe of the Mediterranean around the 8th century BCE. The jewish people of the day were also starting to turn away from their faith and worship the deity BaĘżal, threatening the cultural identity of the nation.
Gideon, based on visions he received, mustered a new army of Israel, the final tally numbered over 30,000 men. However, it was believed that a force that strong, while a formidable threat to the Midianites, might prove to be too much so. Such a victory might be seen as proof that the jews were masters of their own fate, and didn't need to worship God for protection.
Towards this end, Gideon invited anyone who wanted to leave to do so. At this invitation, 20,000 men departed.
Then, he lead the remaining men to water and ordered them to drink. He watched as the remaining 10,000 did this, and the men who knelt down and cupped the water with their hands, he kept. The men who 'lapped at the water like a dog', , getting down on the ground, he sent home.
Gideon divided his men into three equal groups, calling each a company. He gave each man a trumpet, and a clay jar and a torch that was placed inside.
The attack took place at night. Gideon led his force up to the edge of the Midianite camp, and then had the companies smash their jars on the ground, light and then raise their torches up in the air, blow their horns, and then shout "a sword for the Lord, and for Gideon!"
The loud, sudden action caused panic in the Median camp, and the massive force wound up turning on itself in the night. In the aftermath, the Midianites were broken, and fled.
The book of Judges is widely considered to be the oldest known recorded narrative of such a military tactic. Written copies have been reliably dated to the dawn of the current age, and it is popularly believed that oral tradition of this story was in common circulation for centuries before that.
Even if we argue that Gideon didn't exist, and the battle with the Midianites didn't happen, we can confidently say that people were telling the story, discussing the principles, and taking lessons from the narrative 300, 400 and even 500 BCE.
While the story leaves out some of the numbers and details that the modern sensibilities prefer, and certainly some of the actual text's important points are out of context from when they were first recorded, there are still enduring and time honored truths to this story that are widely regarded combat tested facts today.
- Mind games: At its core, the attack itself is what would, in modern parlance be called a 'demonstration', a 'decoy action', or perhaps just a distraction. The basic idea was to surprise the enemy so much that they did something stupid. When we put it that way, its easy to say 'that idea is the oldest trick in the book'.Well, that's right, and Gideon is the man who wrote chapter 1 of said book.
The point is that centuries before the battle of Thermopylae, in an age before steel, the study of psychology, before Sun Tzu's "The art of War", or anything resembling a military academy ever existed, Gideon (the person, or the character) was able to conceptualize that a handful of men with a thought out plan could trigger a panic destructive enough to actually do substantial damage to his enemy. Even by modern terms this is a bold plan, for Gideon's day and age, it was arguably beyond cutting edge.
The tactic was obviously new for its day, but has been repeated time and time again across the ages of man, and at times to a scale that would boggle the mind of Gideon in his day
Some modern examples include whole fake regiments being built out of inflatable tanks and plywood shacks in the north of England before D-Day. Placed so that German recon aircraft would see them, the information caused Germany to move, and hold back armored reserves before the landing, and then continue to keep them in reserve out of fear of a second landing to the north. Ultimately, the distraction lead to multiple regiments not arriving in time to shore of the beach defense, and causing the beginning of the German fallback through France.
Another more dramatic example was conducted during the first Gulf War when a seven man US Navy Seal team swam to the occupied Kuwaiti coast and planted demolition charges on the beach barricades. Hours later, when the charges went off, the occupying Iraqi army thought that the actions were preparation for a US Marine landing into the army's rear. This prompted the Republican Guard to pull back multiple divisions, tens of thousands of men, from the southern defense of Kuwait in order to intercept the expected Marine division on the coast. The actual result, however, would see the divisions caught on the open roads under US air strikes, and would greatly reduce the defensive lines waiting for allied ground forces when they began their assault from the south days later.
From a social standpoint, Orson Wells Radio production of "the War of the Words" s still regarded as an example of a 'stunt' that might have gone too far. More to the point, if you dig into the actual mechanics of the production, the sound effects and other dramatic noises he used were produced entirely by highly skilled actors, and every day items whos sounds out of context, fooled thousands (The 'artillery' firing, for example, was the sound of a flushing toilet).
Politically, the Russian cyber campaigns to influence western democracies, including the United States, are every bit in the same vein as Gideon's mission thousands of years ago. Even if we argue that this modern example had no direct effect, the idea of the mission was to use deception, fear, and surprise to provoke a hasty, self destructive action on the part of an adversary.
The central point here is that while not new today, the idea of fighting a man's mind rather that his body was very likely was cutting edge of modern military science for Gideon and his men. - Specialized equipment: In the modern age, the idea of high-end, specialized equipment being employed by military or even law enforcement is not only common, but expected in places like Russia, the UK, the EU, and the US. But the idea of fighting a war with something other than a sword or a spear (or even a rock) does have its origins, and as I have said before, the story of Gideon is the oldest such story we have record of.
While a far cry from night vision goggles, or stealth helicopters, his choice of equipment is none the lees every bit as high tech as those items in the context of the day.
Horns have been, and were an accepted staple of communications going back to the earliest known tribes of men. Armies have singled maneuvers with them all the way up to the early days of the Vietnam war.
Also, Armies have used teams of radio specialists to create whole 'ghost units' in order to distract or decoy an enemy away from a real fight. The practice dates back to the second world war, and even today, communications units have 'decoy' as one of the missions they train for. One or two men working a field radio can imitate a whole company, a battalion, or even a regiment to the ears of an enemy radio listening station miles away. The tactic was considered one of the cornerstones to cold-war era planning if a ground war in europe broke out.
When we say 'horns' in this story, we need to understand that they were every bit as sophisticated and advanced in their day as the modern communication's team is to a mechanized maneuver group or heliborn regiment. The cultural and social power of the sound of a blown instrument was great enough that using it as a weapon itself was, for its day, the cutting edge of "thinking outside the box".
The torch, through perhaps a little more obvious at first glance, still bears some detailed considerations here as well. Over two millennium before the zippo lighter and road flairs, the act of simply moving a torch into position without being seen to soon was no small feat. Even if we account for flint and easily lit oils, moving the whole thing into position means you need to do as much prep ahead of time as possible. 300 men trying to pour oil on torches, and then all strike flints over them, at night, without something going wrong, is a disaster waiting to happen.
If you don't believe me; get a hundred men and try it, during a dim moon, or overcast night, see how many of them spill their oil, or loose their flits. How many do you think will ignite on the first try, and how many of them are still hitting their flints together thirty seconds later. How much noise do you think they will make trying to manage all of this, and in the dark no less.
Though its a bit of speculation, I don't think its a stretch to assume that the torches were soaked ahead of time and put into the jars to keep them soaked with oil and ready to light at the last minute. Smashing them was probably (if I had to guess) as much about getting fast access to the torches as anything else, but the added noise certainly wouldn't have hurt at all.
This type of planning ahead and organizing would be in line with the detailed preparation we see soldiers go through today, with ammunition, armor, radios, and weapons all strategically placed on the body for quick, and ready access, even when rendered totally blind and deaf. That type of organisation uniformity, organisation and forethought wasn't realized on a large scale until the rise of the Greek city states, several centuries later. - Selection process: Again, today it makes sense that a specialized force of men would have to go through a vetting process, but there is a hidden degree of sophistication hinted at in the Gideon narrative.
First, Gideon told men who didn't want to be there to go back to their homes.
Even in armies where conscription fills out the ranks (Which included the US up until the 1980s), it is recognized that volunteer soldiers are much more likely to perform better and fight harder than those compelled to service.
US Army Rangers have long been referred to at 'triple volunteers', first voluntarily joining the army, then voluntarily joining the Airborne (specifically the parachute divisions), and finally volunteering to join the Rangers, arguably one of the finest light infantry forces in the world.
Also, there are echoes of this command in the vetting processes for special forces selection. Forces like Seal Team Six/DevGroup, Delta Force, and the Special Air Service all have highly advanced psychological testing programs to help select the best candidates mentally, as well as physically.
Though rudimentary by modern standards, the idea of telling men that they can leave simply for not wanting to be there is a powerful tool here, since it helps assure the unit morale, the esprit de corps, perhaps the hardest thing to gauge, is the strongest it possibly can be.
Gideon took the remaining men, presumably about 10,000, to the water and ordered them to drink. The ones who 'lapped the water like dogs' were the ones he sent home.
Now, lets put some context to this for a moment. we are moving 10,000 people towards a body of water large enough for them to drink out of it. This in itself means we are taking about something relatively large, like a river or a lake. And, we are moving 'to' it, meaning its at least a moderate walk away, and not within the camp itself. So, when we get to the actual water, the men have probably been walking for at least an hour, and are probably standing in line for another hour so they can get to the water's edge to drink. So, they re probably a little sore, a little tired, and probably thirsty to begin with.
Now, I want to take apart the test itself for a moment.
[TRANSPARENCY NOTE: This section has been edited since it was first published, because I realized I had misread a two verses. And its not just that I had misread, them but the translations left a lot to be desired. So, I used my phone to suspend the post, raced back to my house, and made some vital corrections.]
So Gideon took the men down to the water. There the Lord told him, “Separate those who lap the water with their tongues as a dog laps from those who kneel down to drink.” Three hundred of them drank from cupped hands, lapping like dogs. All the rest got down on their knees to drink. The Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the others go home.”Judges 7:5-7 NIV translation.
So, this is saying that those who 'lap the water' 'as a dog' are the ones that Gideon sent home.
I know this sounds unusual, but consider it from practical standpoint. First of all, these men don't know what the terms of the test are, there is no 'right' or 'wrong' answer for them, and in fact, they may not even know that they are being tested.
Second, consider the physicality of this process. The two motions described are kneeling down and cupping the water up to their faces, and bringing their heads down to the water to drink.
The fact of the matter is that kneeling down, reaching down with two hands, and lifting water to you face a lot of people will just do on the spur of the moment. It requires a degree of dexterity, strength, joint health, and muscularity. Sure, there are a lot of you who could do it easily, but how many would consider it the easiest choice when contrasted with just laying down, getting off your legs entirely, and guzzling down as much as you can drink?
To put this in perspective, *I* would not be able to do that.. I mean, I could if I was told to, but it wouldn't be my first choice, or even my third to be honest.
The use of this seemingly unusual test probably (if we speculate a little) vetted out men who's determination and persistence let them compensate for the fact that they were not 'as young as they used to be'. Also it likely helped identify men who still had the energy to be that spry in the first place, even after a walk and a lot of standing round. - Special Organisation. A lot can be said about the men being divided into three groups, each called a company.
The fact of the matter is that the word 'company' has been a recognized and largely formalized military unit since the end of the English Civil War, and the size of an infantry company does average around a hundred men, though of course examples exist with numbers as low as 50 and as large as 200. Still, absent of all other historical context, the cultural average of a 'company' is assumed to be 'about a hundred men'.
The idea of a group of fighting men being called 'a company' though, dates back to before the middle ages, with written records existing all the way back to just after the fall of the roman empire. In some cases, it can be considered an economic invocation, such as a mercenary company, though in others, the idea is clear one of 'a group'.
Unlike Battalion and Platoon (both of which have their linguistic origins in french), the word 'company' comes from the social context of 'keeping good company', or 'Having company over". While I am not a biblical scholar, if we assume some fidelity int he translation, the decision to name each hundred man group a 'company' (or the linguistic equivalent there to) would serve to help formalize the bond between the men. Imagine a military team of men today called a 'brotherhood' or a 'family', but as a formal organizational tier. While it sounds strange to modern sensibility, the idea of a family like bond in combat units is accepted as a staple of successful armies. The award winning HDO series "Band of Brothers" is perhaps the most literal use of that concept as a tile that refers to the men of E company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in world war 2.
But, beyond the nomenclature, another important fact here is the idea that Gideon did organize his men into separate units, and gave each unit a separate destination. Now, this was probably not new, even to Gideon, but it it very likely that such organisation of armies before this were along family, or political lines. The thoroughly mixed in group of men chosen only by the merit of their relevant skills was certainly a rare concept in that day, if not completely foreign to the men of Gideon's now tiny army.
These were men likely raised with the idea that they would fight next to people they lived with, or worked next to. Here, they were 300 pulled seemingly at random from a group of 30,000, and then grouped together into matching groups of a hundred. In that moment, they were strangers, probably honestly wondering 'and who the hell are you?' about the men on their left and right.The idea of calling them a 'company' was the groundwork of quickly establishing a collective group identity. - The "Sword" of Gideon: There is a little more context to this concept that just the idea of 'a weapon'.
First of all, swords didn't win wars, spears did.
Armies all the way back to Babylon, and Egypt built on a core of men skilled with the spear. Its reach, penetration, and power with two hands behind it made it the undisputed king of the melee field, and in terms of cost, it was markedly cheaper to field than a sword. When fielded en mass, it was able to deflect horse attacks, and drive off infantry presses.
What's important about this is that the scriptures do talk about the spear in several chapters, both literally and metaphorically. The idea of the weapon existing as different, and distinct from the sword was not in any way shape for form lost on the jew of the day, or those that came after them.
Yet, it is not the 'spear' or 'lance' of the lord that the men are told to proclaim. It is the 'sword'.
Why?
While hardly rare, swords were expensive. On average far more more so than spears, or bows, and probably on a par with the cost of the more common body armor of the day. Also, a sword is substantially more complicated to use than a spear, with more movements, defenses and attacks, and all of which done at much closer range. From an economic standpoint, and then a practical one, the people who had swords were the ones who could both afford them, afford the armor to go with them, and afford the training to be competent with it all.
If you wound up in an actual sword fight on an old testament battlefield, chances were you were squaring off against someone at least nominally important, or their bodyguard.
Ergo, the sword was an elite weapon, indicative of leadership and/or military prowess. That concept was markedly older than Gideon, but also persisted well into the 20th century, with British and French officers using their sabers to lead charges all the way up to the early days of the first world war, and Japanese officers doing the same with Katanas all the way up until the end of World War 2.
In fact, the sword's emotional importance to Japan's fighting spirit was so central to its identiy that part of the military occupational law laid down after the surrender in 1945 was that all sword in Japan had to be destroyed, and all kendo schools closed down.
So, the invocation of 'a sword for the Lord, and for Gideon", was not some broad declaration of war or victory, it was a statement of military prowess in the strike itself. In as much as it was saying 'attack', it was also saying 'attack with the best that you have'.
Its one thing to say 'I'm going to shoot you with my gun'.
But its another matter entirely to say "I'm going to take you're head off with a 7.62mm hollow-point from my SOCCOM M-14 precision marksman's rifle".
You're effectively saying the same thing either way, but there is an added degree of prowess, and threat when you clearly state that 'not only am I going to shoot you, I'm going to do it with the best weapon I have.
Springfield Armories M-14 SOCCOM precision marksman's rifle
In a more specific example, the raid to kill Osama bin Laden sent the same message to the surviving member of Al-Qaeda. The US could have sent in an air strike, or a drone mission, but instead sent in the best troops they had to directly, and verifiable engage and kill the target. That level of elite, direct action is a powerful message to send.
That is the invocation of 'a sword for the lord, and for Gideon'.- Politics: Sure, no one likes to talk about it, but the fact is that war is an extension of policy, and violence is the result of when talk fails, or fails to even happen.
The attack on the Midianites was less a military victory than it was a political victory for Gideon and the Jews who still worshiped the Hebrew God.
It was a deliberate miracle meant to reaffirm the supremacy of the national faith over Ba'al, and all other deities.
In the broadest of terms, it was a needed moral boost and rallying cry for a nation falling apart at a cultural level.
If that sounds like a stretch, or a foreign concept, don't fool yourself.
Going back to early US history, another example where the battle against an enemy was as important internally as it was from without was the Crossing of the Delaware during the American Revolution.
After the battles of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill, and the siege of Boston (which were more or less the collectively "first act" of the war), the men of the colonial 'army' had been emboldened to believe that the militia, and its undisciplined, unruly waysm were the ultimate fighting force in the modern world. Officers and leaders rejected George Washington's directives to reorganize and drill the troops as conventional infantry.
The victories of that first set of engagements had given the colonial fighting men the entirely wrong message, and their arrogance persisted all the way until the battle of New York, where the British were able to force a conventional engagement on their terms. Colonial forces were crushed under the redcoat advance on the town.
The battle for New York was an unmitigated disaster for the Colonists, and during the retreat, hundreds abandoned the army. The British were confident that a surrender could come over the winter, or the remaining troops would be soundly defeated with the first actions of the spring.
From his headquarters, Washington was not in a position to argue.
What Washington needed was a victory, both to set the British back on their heels, but also to unite the colonists, to invigorate the troops, and to give his men back their fighting spirit.
The Christmas attack across the Delaware River was precisely that type of miracle.
The action, launched on the night of Dec 25th, 1776, targeted a Hessians camp, and in hours was able to overwhelm the German mercenaries, capturing 900, as well as tons of critical weapons, ordinance, food, and other provisions. Colonial losses were less than a dozen, while the Hessians has suffered just over a hundred dead or wounded.
Tactically, though a major victory, the actual blow to the British was small. The men would be easily ransomed back, and overall, the British still had massive weapons stores available to them, as well as tens of thousandths more infantry able to continue the march after Washington.
The political aftermath, however, was devastating for the British. The English leadership was humiliated, the king enraged, and the parliament was divided on how to react. The whole British war effort had been dealt a haymaker blow, and had taken it right right on the jaw.
Inversely, Washington saw his remaining men invigorated once again, and more importantly, ready to start drilling as a regular military force. His ranks swelled with new recruits as news of the victory spread. Official support started for come in from the remaining colonies, and even the French now that the idea of beating the British was no longer seen as a fantasy.
The fight may have been a small military victory, but it was one of the largest political win's of the war.
The ramifications of almost any battle include a political dimension, but with the Midianites attacking from without, and Israel fracturing from within as more and more worshiped Ba'al, this battle was a political issue with military ramifications as much as the inverse. - The Numbers: As concrete as we want to think numbers are, the fact of the mater is that they are also highly contextualized as well.
Before you ignore that, consider these few questions:
Does a centipede actually have a hundred legs?
Does a millipede actually have a thousand legs?
Did a roman century actually have a hundred men?
How long was '40 days and 40 nights"?
How long is 'a month"?
Does a Gigabyte thumb drive actually have 1 billion bytes in its digital volume?
Numbers, especially numbers ending in two or three zeroes need to be scrutinized. More to the point, we really need to scrutinize numbers we aren't told.
The text implies that Gideon raised an army of about 30000 men by saying he sent 20,000 away the first time, and 10,000 away the second, with 300 left.
If we assume these are accurate, that means he had about 30,000 men in muster. And, there was concern that that would be enough to defeat the Midianites , so its safe to assume the Midianite army was probably larger than 30,000, and possibly closer to 40,000, if the Jews at least believed they were that much better at fighting then the Midianites.
So, lets come up with the most skeptical scenario, and see how this works out.
First of all, lets assume the poets and scholars shaved down the number of Israelites in the final fight, and maybe they had 900 troops. Now, that's a hell of a lot more complicated than 300 to coordinate, but, its not impossible, so lets go with it.
Second, lets go completely off the deep end and assume that the victors added a zero to the troop count of the Midianite army. That comes down to 3000.
So, with this highly skeptical scenario, 900 men, carrying clay jugs, torches, and horns (and maybe swords on their belts), managed to sneak up on a camp of 3000 troops and scare them into an open panic.
In order for that to be true, we're still talking about a 3 (and change) to 1 radio against, the complete inverse of what an conventionally armed infantry force is supposed to have.
Even looking at it this way, we are still in a scenario where modern leaders would be looking to the ranks of the elite, the best of the best, to pull this off.
Before automatic rifles or machine guns, there were the types of odds that you didn't want to square off against unless you were the defender and you had a wall or a cliff between you and your enemy.
And yet, still, even under this absolutely watered down scenario, the Israelites had the odds stacked against them.
The point here is to say that even if we accept that numbers of old don't have the specificity they do today, the idea of 'a few against many' here still has fidelity, still hearkens to ides of heroism, and still lays the groundwork for a miracle. - The real weapon: Panic: In the end, the actual weapon that did so much damage to the enemy wasn't sword, or spear, iron or wood. It was human panic.
If you can imagine the type of scale a 10, 20, or 30 thousand person camp would look like, even if only set up for one day, it would be miles across. A runner sounding the alarm could take twenty minutes or more to run from one end of the camp to the other, and probably still not get to the majority of the people.
Add to this the fact this was a night action. The Midianites would have woken to darkness, with likely only their camp fires and maybe some moonlight to outline human forms moving this way and that. With battle horns sounding and men screaming in Hebrew in the distance, and people jumping out of their camps, rushing this way and that to get their armor, confusion was assured. It would be almost inevitable that someone, somewhere bumped into a dark figure and struck out before realizing that they weren't, in fact, facing a jewish solider.
Suddenly, the madness of a waking, nighttime camp is eclipsed by the deafening roar of melee combat on a scale of hundreds, and then thousands, all probably not even able to see who they are swinging at, and many probably having never seen a jew before in their life to even compare to.
The narrative doesn't talk about how many men died that night, but the thing we need to keep in mind is that it doesn't need to be that many. Like I said before, armies of the day were in large part organized along political, economic, or family lines.
When the sun rose the next day, there didn't have to been tens of thousands of men dead on the ground in order to shatter the army. In fact, a few hundred could likely have been just as devastating if they were across enough of the lines that held the army together. A dead noble here, a dead son there, a crippled brother, a blinded father, a wounded patron, an injured friend, and who knows how many leaders, 'officers' or staff didn't make it.
By sunrise, men would have been exhausted, and as the realization of what had happened set in, its not a stretch to say that the trust, the unity of purpose, and bonds bonds that held the army together were likely stretched beyond repair, if not broken outright. Now, they would be angry and bitter at each other, possibly more so than at the Israelites.
What was once an army of possibly 40,000 men, were now broken bands of five and ten thousand, all alone, not willing or able to trust each other, and likewise unwilling to support each other.
Such formations would be easy picking for an now united Israelite army, a realization most Midianites probably came to within hours of that sunrise.
Conclusion: In the end, regardless of if the battle with the Midianites ever even took place, even a cursory study of the concepts talked about here show that the basic framework of modern special forces can see echoes of themselves in this narrative, and can see that the same fundamentals of asymmetrical warfare talked about five hundred years before the current era.
#Swordsunday is intended as a fun and educational series of posts for the enjoyment of readers.
His Lordship Ivo Blackhawk
Kingdom of Ansteorra
"Long Live the King!"
