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points out that God grants them without a word. 27 It is noteworthy that
in this scene God is not speaking at all, but acting through performing
the signs.
In scene four, God acts decisively once more. God commands Gideon
to diminish the army. God does this in order to prevent the people from
elevating themselves and missing the point of the whole deliverance motif.
They have to recognize that it is God who is saving them, and in the
process they have to remember who this God is. Three times God
decreases the army, and in the climax of this scene, the fourth time, God
pronounces that with these 300 men, "I will deliver you and I will give
the Midianites into your hand." Again the focus is supposed to be exclu-
sively on God.
Just as one thinks that God can do no more, in the last scene of this
movement, God volunteers another sign. It is as if God is saying, for the
last time, do you see who I am, do you hear what the right answer should
be? It is ironic that it is the enemy soldier who gives a true account of
who God really is, when he interprets in his friend's dream that God will
give Midian into the hand of Gideon (7:15).28
In this narrative movement, one should notice the key role Gideon
plays in God's plan to help Israel remember again. Like the other judges,
Gideon has a mediating role. As a result, God's actions and signs are to
a large extent directed at Gideon. In this regard, one sees that most of
the actions/signs are done by God in private, in the presence of Gideon
alone. Even the diminishing of troops and the battle, which are more
public actions, are executed by means of Gideon. Crucial here is that the
private revelation serves the function to help the mediator interpret the
public action of God. The classic example in this regard is the Exodus
narrative. We see how God appears privately to Moses in the burning
bush (Exod 3). Moses then acts as interpreter, identifying the action played
out before Israel in the plagues (Exod 7-9) and the deliverance at the Sea
(Exod 14-15) as divine. Similarly, Gideon is expected to fulfill this func-
tion of interpreter. He is supposed to direct the people in recognizing

27 Klein, Judges, 55.
z80ne does note that this last sign is much less explicit than God's previous involvement.
One wonders whether there is not already in this last sign some hint that God is starting to
withdraw from the scene.