Heber was away,but his wife Jael was at home.
She had heard of the battle.She knew that the man before her must be Sisera,for he looked like a foreigner and his helmet was of gold and he ordered the woman about like a man who is accustomed to give orders.And so Jael gave her unwelcome guest to eat and to drink,and then,as the man was plainly exhausted,she told him that he might rest on some rugs on the floor.Meanwhile,so she promised,she would keep watch and if any Jewish soldiers came near her house,she would warn the Egyptian that he might escape.
Sisera believed everything Jael said,and soon he was fast asleep.
Then Jael took a large spike(such as was used in those days for a tent-peg)and she drove it through the eye of Sisera and she killed her enemy on the floor of her own home,and she ran to the soldiers of Barak and proudly told them of what she had done.
That was the end of the story.For Jabin,without his trusted general,was forced to make peace and once more the Jews were free and they were very proud of what Jael and Deborah had done for them and they bestowed great honours upon them.
Unfortunately such periods of comparative rest seem to have been very bad for the general morale of the people.The worship of Jehovah,as it had been ordered by Moses,asked for eternal vigilance.But it is not easy to be interested in spiritual affairs when our lives are comfortable and when we do not have a single care in the whole wide world except the problem of how to spend our money as pleasantly as we possibly can.
And those stories which have come down to us from the days following immediately upon the defeat of Sisera show clearly how the great God of the wind-swept desert had been completely forgotten and how His laws were held in contempt by the younger generation,which ate and drank and generally amused itself without a thought for the problems of to-morrow.
Take,as an example,the unpleasant tale of Micah,the only son of a rich widow,who lived in the village of Ephraim.Micah stole money that belonged to his mother,but when she found it out,she not only forgave him,but ordered the gold and the silver to be melted and made into an idol as a present for her darling boy.
Micah liked the shining plaything,and he had a little tabernacle built inside his house and then he hired one of the members of the tribe of Levi (who were the hereditary keepers of the real tabernacle)to become his own private priest and officiate for him,so that he would not have to leave his house when he wanted to go to church.
All this offended horribly against the ancient laws,as they had been revealed to Moses.
It even shocked the other Jews,who by this time were none too pious.
Micah,however,was rich,and did as he pleased.
But one day his house was broken into by some people from the tribe of Dan,who were travelling westward,looking for fresh pastures for their cattle.They stole Micah's golden idol and carried it to their own village.
As for the Levite who was supposed to be Micah's priest,he ran away as soon as the image was gone,and offered his services to the man who had just robbed his master.
Jehovah certainly had cause to be displeased,and he soon showed his resentment.
He sent the Midianites against the land of Israel.They came every summer with dreadful regularity and stole the barley and the grain that stood in the fields.They spread such terror among the Jewish villages that the inhabitants used to flee to their mountain caves as soon as the first of the Midianite bands appeared and often remained there all winter.At last,in utter despair,they did not even bother to raise further crops.Soon there was famine in the land and people began to die from starvation.
Only here and there a man of stout heart still cultivated his fields,and among those was a certain Joash,who was the father of Gideon.Joash himself was none too faithful to the laws of his country.He,too,worshipped the strange gods who had been dear to the hearts of the original inhabitants of the land.His son,however,who like Deborah and Joseph,could make prophecies,had remained faithful to the old creed.
When his father erected an altar to Baal,young Gideon (encouraged by a dream in which an angel made a rock devour some food which he had placed before it)got up in the middle of the night,knocked down the ugly old idol and on the same spot erected an offering-place to the service of Jehovah.
In the morning when the people of the village in which Joash lived discovered the broken pieces of stone and realised what had happened,they ran to the house of Joash and they shouted that he must punish his boy for his terrible sacrilege.
Fortunately,Joash was a man of some common sense.He said that if Baal were really as powerful as people claimed,he would undoubtedly kill Gideon for what he had just done.But Gideon continued to live quite happily and at the end of a few weeks,when nothing at all had happened,the neighbours changed their mind.In this way,Gideon,who became known far and wide as Jerub-baal (or the Baal-altar-smasher),became a popular hero,whose fame spread to the other cities.
When at last the Midianites became so bold in their attacks that the Jews were forced to take the offensive or perish altogether,it was quite natural that Gideon should be asked to be their leader.He gathered some sort of army together in the ancient plain of Jezreel and tried to drill it into shape for the coming campaign.The spirit of his troops,however,was very bad.They were not really interested in the war.They had grown soft.They wanted to return to their snug caves and preferred hunger to physical hardship.
When Gideon asked them openly whether they would like to go home,the majority shouted,“Yes!the sooner,the better!”
