Many Israelites, including Gideon’s own father, Joash, built an altar to the Canaanite sun god, Baal, near which they erected a wooden pole to the fertility goddess, Asherah. Gideon’s assignment was to destroy the altar his father built replacing it with an altar to the Lord upon which he would sacrifice the bull from his family’s stock of cattle that was as old as the seven-year Midianite oppression which the Baal couldn’t stop using the Asherah pole as dry firewood.
The next morning the men of the city were horrified to see what Gideon had done. They demanded that Joash bring Gideon to them so they could kill him for desecrating Baal’s hiding place. Abandoning his own idolatry to the point of rebelling against it, Joash told them to let that incompetent Baal avenge itself.
And that’s how Gideon became known as Jerubbaal, the man on whom Baal would have to take revenge all by its lonesome (which it could never have done).
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Denise offers the prompt work “stock” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
To read what really happened to Gideon (Jerubbaal), see Judges 6. In trying to make sense of the significance of what Gideon had done I was particularly influenced by the commentaries BibleHub offered and the Got Questions article on Baal.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 