Gideon and the Altar of Baal

When God called Gideon to deliver the Israelites from the Midianites His initial address was both ironic and indicative of future enabling: "the Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour." At the time, Gideon was cowering in fear, threshing the wheat at the base of a hill by a winepress instead of at the top of hill where the wind would be available to blow the chaff away. Gideon was not a mighty man at the time, nor was he valorous. However, God saw in him a man of obedience, however slow that obedience was in developing, and that was what He sought. Before Gideon is called God sent a prophet to give all of Israel His standard: "I am the Lord your God; fear not the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but ye have not obeyed my voice." God called all of the Israelites to obey Him; only when they refused as a nation did He have to call an individual to lead them to obey as a nation.

Gideon's faith, weak as it was because the nation was suffering for the nation's sins, required signs to assure him that the impossible could still happen

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ideon. Asherah is Ba'al's mother. Ba'al is also one of the sons of El. We can see here in the identity of El and Yahweh the movement to synchretic religion wherein Yahweh is absorbed into Satan's preexisting pantheon. Asherah, whose pole is beside the altar Gideon is commanded to tear down, is indirectly identified as Yahweh's wife! Yahweh's indignant anger at this is understandable, as is His command to remove anything associated with the altar, even the bullock(s) used to tear it down. The main point of this Ba'al story was the construction of a palace for Ba'al, from which he could perpetuate his war on his enemy Mot, the god of the underworld, death, and destruction. There is therefore an attempt to also imitate Christ's triumph over Satan and death. There is a second irony is this story, because once Ba'al does get his palace built he must order the architect and builder Kathir wa-Hasis ("the Fit and Understanding One") to keep the windows shut lest Mot be able to slip in through the windows and kill his wives. This fear Ba'al had does help explain some of the imagery of Jer. 9:21 "For death is come up into our windows and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without." The principal sin Jeremiah spo
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Seventy Testament, El Yahweh, Ba'al Lang, Lord God, Asherah Astarte, Israelites Midianites, Fit Understanding, God Gideon, Ba'al-Hadad Yahweh, Spirit Lang, altar baal, sons god, el worship, angel lord, seventy sons, atlanta ga scholars, scholars press, press 1986, intended sacrifice, god desert, ga scholars, ga scholars press, harvard semitic monograph, frank moore cross, ed frank moore,
Approximate Word count = 3054
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)