Notes on Gideon (Judges 6-8)

Midian

Moses's father-in-law was called a priest of Midian in the Pentateuch, but in Judges he is called a Kenite. The Midianites in Judges 6 are raiders allied with Amalekites and other "eastern peoples". They live in tents, invade the land, and camp there, raiding crops (Judges 6:3-5). These raiders wear gold earrings and are called Ishmaelites (8:23). The Midianite leaders are named Oreb and Zeeb (7:25). Their two kings are named Zebah and Zalmunnah (8:5,12). They are also known as nomads (8:11). Their warriors fought with swords (8:10). There were originally 135,000 in their "armies of the eastern peoples", but 120,000 were killed (8:10) and the remaining 15,000 were routed by Gideon's forces (10:12). They spoke a language which Gideon could understand (7:13-14).

The angel of Yahweh

Yahweh had promised to send his angel ahead of Israel "to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared" (Exodus 23:20). The Israelites were to "[p]ay attention to him and listen" in order that the angel would drive out the Canaanites. The angel came to the Israelites at Bokim in the first part of Judges, and berated them for not obeying and for letting the Canaanites remain and for worshiping other gods. The Israelites mourned and wept, but didn't really do anything. Later on, the angel appeared to Gideon, and told him to be courageous because God was with him, and to fight and defeat the Midianites. Yahweh, I guess through the angel, later told him to tear down Baal and Asherah's altar in his hometown and to erect a proper altar to Yahweh. And he did so.

Anxiety

God reassured Gideon's anxiety and gave him courage in several ways, including words from the angel, the test of tearing down Baal's altar and not being punished for it by the townspeople after his dad defended him, the two episodes with the fleece, and the Midianite's prophetic dream. God lessened Gideon's confidence, however, by making him send most his army away -- this was so that his confidence would not be in the size of his army, but in the Lord. And by the end, much of northern Israel was joining his army anyway, although Ephraim was pissed at him for not inviting them sooner, and the men of Succoth and Peniel didn't want to give him provisions because he hadn't completely defeated the Midianites yet. In sum, God provided words, signs, and small tests to increase his confidence in God, and yet through those tests, he temporarily diminished his confidence in people.

Mountains, valleys, and rivers

In Gideon's story, like in many other episodes in Judges, Israel's enemies camped en masse in a valley or on a plain, while the Israelites assembled on a mountain and then came down to fight. The Israelites chased their enemies (or the enemies chased them) to a river, and then more Israelites guarded the fords of the river and killed their enemies as they tried to cross. This may relate to how the Israelites took possession of much of the hill country but the local non-Israelites retained control of the plains. 

The enemy's animals

The non-Israelites often had military equipment and swift animals, such as camels (in the case of Midian) and horses and chariots (in the case of other nations), but these didn't determine the outcome of the battle when God was on the side of Israel.

Confusion in the enemy's camp

In the story of Gideon, and later on in 1 Samuel with the story of Jonathan, the enemies of Israel are taken by surprise and are so confused that they start fighting each other and running away, even before a very small number of Israelites. This is also meant to show that God put them in a panic and the battle was not determined by the number of Israelite fighters.

Where Bill Gothard followed and didn't follow Stephen Olford

Bill Gothard said in one of his Christian living seminars that when he was young, a mentor invited him over and had him listen to a tape recording of the sermon "Social Relationships" by Stephen Olford, an African-born English evangelist, recorded at Moody Bible Institute in 1955 or 1956 (and re-presented by Olford many times since). The message profoundly influenced Gothard, and he incorporated much of Olford's message into his Basic and Advanced Seminars. Chief among these ideas were:

• distinguishing different levels of friendship
• yielding one's sex life to the Holy Spirit for sublimation into creative and spiritual power
• avoiding "defrauding" others, that is, stirring up desires in them that can't be righteously satisfied

An area where Gothard did not follow Olford, however, was in the area of music appreciation. In a 1958 book entitled Christianity and You, Olford set out several tests for whether a particular amusement was permissible for a Christian: Do these pleasures positively encourage, endanger, or enrich my Christian life? (p.46) He also quotes with approval (pp.44-45) a section from Arthur Porritt's 1920 book The Strategy for Life: A Book for Boys and Young Men, which I have set out in full below, with my emphasis in bold:

Music is an amusement, but it is much more than an amusement. It is an educational and spiritualizing art which, in one form or another, a young man should cultivate in his own highest interests. A wit has said that music is the most expensive form of noise, and another humorist has observed that classical music is that form of music which is so much better than it sounds. However economical of his leisure a young man may be, time should be found to master the elements of music, to learn to sing, or play a musical instrument, and to hear good music rendered. Ears and tastes differ, and in music one man's joy is another's anathema. A devotee of Sullivan may squirm under Bach, and a votary of Beethoven's sonatas may yawn even over the honeyed sweetness of Handel's Messiah. Avoid affectation and follow your bent is the best advice as to music that I can offer a young man. Do not praise Debussy if you really prefer Balfe, nor pretend to be ecstatic over Tschaikovsky's "1812" if "There's a long long trail a-winding" is more to your fancy. Be honest in your tastes, but cultivate them. Your joy in jazz-tunes may end in appreciation of the "Moonlight Sonata." (Porritt 1920, pp.137-138)

 Olford and Porritt's moderate stance towards jazz contrasts with Gothard's hard line against rock & roll in the 1960s, which was more along the lines of Anne Shaw Faulkner's 1921 article "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" 

Popular music as a carrier of sexual license or rebellion or communism was a common theme among mid-20th century evangelists such as David Noebel and Bob Larson, so Gothard was not alone here. And the more you read their literature and listen to their talks, the closer it gets to racism or at least ethnocentrism, since jazz and rock had their roots in African-American music traditions. 

This really shows that different styles of music can symbolize different things to different cultural groups, over and above the individual tastes that Porritt noted. 

We get a taste of this culture clash in the two following stories, the first one by Wisconsin Baptist musician Alan Ives in a talk called "The difference between good and bad music", whose teaching is promoted by Illinois Baptist pastor Sheron Mark Davis. (Davis's teaching was in turn promoted by Gothard.)

In Africa, the heathen are able to play "poly rhythms." Poly, of course, means many. They have all these drums and other percussion instruments, rhythm instruments, that all make different sounds, and they can hear them. They can make one rhythm with their feet, another with their torso, some more with their arms, and some more with their fingers and wrists, some more in their heads; and they can dance six or seven different rhythms at one time. It is an amazing thing; however, it is all sensual; it's all for the body; and it's all created by their ability to hear and put into their bodies those dance rhythms that were created specifically to make their bodies move in ways that are not polite. They make the body move to draw attention to parts of the body in a way that is improper.

That is all that is happening in the rock scene today. They are catching up to some of these African rhythms. And, of course, the Satan worshipers have just turned the amplifiers up to the fullest degree, and many of them do not know, musically, what they are doing anymore. They are just making a lot of noise. Some of them are not even really playing chords; there is not even any harmony or melody there, just a lot of noise. There is nothing for the spirit, nothing for the soul; it is all for the body. Now we have Rap music. What happened to the melody? It is gone. What you don't know is that they have been doing this type of thing in Africa for thousands of years, and there are recordings of that. They will go on sometimes for hours. You talk about dance marathons! They dance until they drop over and are possessed by devils, and then they get back up and they dance again.

...Now let's say we add just a little bit of sensual rhythm to a song. We make it just one degree away from truly spiritual, holy music. It will appeal to a lot of Christians. Then we have some other music that really is boogie, but we call it Southern gospel; and that will appeal to a lot of Christians. They excuse it by saying it is just "down home" music. No, it isn't. It's boogie woogie, but some Christians still think it is O.K. Then there is the Contemporary Christian Music, which sounds like it is being sung in a nightclub. Of course it is big business today, and it is farther still away from painting a proper picture of our Lord.

...A pastor once told me, "You know, those black folks really have it; why don't you stick some of those rhythms into your music. With your voice and your talent..." I thought, "Get thee behind me." I didn't say that, but I just shook my head. The evangelist that was there said, "Brother Ives, don't change your music."

Contrast Ives's story above about misgivings toward "sensual rhythm" infecting white people's music with the following account by African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me".

[W]hen I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. 

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. 

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Whereas Ives worried about giving in to the body with danceable rhythms, Hurston worried that her white friend didn't feel what she felt. This is a culture clash rather than a spiritual problem.

After this long discursus, I just want to say that the music wars didn't have to be this way. Even in the thick of it there were reasonable people like Olford and Porritt and even Hurston, whom Gothard could have drawn from -- and he did draw from Olford in the matter of social relationships. I just wish he'd done the same with music.

Note: This post is a result of an ongoing interest in the sources that influenced Bill Gothard (and who influenced them), in order to map out the history of the spread of ideas through Evangelicalism in the 20th century, and ultimately to my family and the social and religious groups I grew up in. Which led me to transcribe Olford's talk on "Social Relationships" -- downloadable here.