Discovery BoxJudges 6:11 
Context6:11 The Lord’s angelic messenger 1 came and sat down under the oak tree in Ophrah owned by Joash the Abiezrite. He arrived while Joash’s son Gideon 2 was threshing 3 wheat in a winepress 4 so he could hide it from the Midianites. 5
Judges 7:13
Context7:13 When Gideon arrived, he heard a man telling another man about a dream he had. 6 The man 7 said, “Look! I had a dream. I saw 8 a stale cake of barley bread rolling into the Midianite camp. It hit a tent so hard it knocked it over and turned it upside down. The tent just collapsed.” 9
Judges 18:7
Context18:7 So the five men journeyed on 10 and arrived in Laish. They noticed that the people there 11 were living securely, like the Sidonians do, 12 undisturbed and unsuspecting. No conqueror was troubling them in any way. 13 They lived far from the Sidonians and had no dealings with anyone. 14
1 tn The adjective “angelic” is interpretive.
sn The
2 tn Heb “Now Gideon his son…” The Hebrew circumstantial clause (note the pattern vav [ו] + subject + predicate) breaks the narrative sequence and indicates that the angel’s arrival coincided with Gideon’s threshing.
3 tn Heb “beating out.”
4 sn Threshing wheat in a winepress. One would normally thresh wheat at the threshing floor outside the city. Animals and a threshing sledge would be employed. Because of the Midianite threat, Gideon was forced to thresh with a stick in a winepress inside the city. For further discussion see O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel, 63.
5 tn Heb “Midian.”
6 tn Heb “And Gideon came, and, look, a man was relating to his friend a dream.”
7 tn Heb “he”; the referent (the man mentioned in the previous clause) has been specified in the translation for clarity.
8 tn Heb “Look!” The repetition of this interjection, while emphatic in Hebrew, would be redundant in the English translation.
9 tn Heb “It came to the tent and struck it and it fell. It turned it upside down and the tent fell.”
10 tn Or “went.”
11 tn Heb “who were in its midst.”
12 tn Heb “according to the custom of the Sidonians.”
13 tn Heb “and there was no one humiliating anything in the land, one taking possession [by] force.”
14 tc Heb “and a thing there was not to them with men.” Codex Alexandrinus (A) of the LXX and Symmachus read “Syria” here rather than the MT’s “men.” This reading presupposes a Hebrew Vorlage אֲרָם (’aram, “Aram,” i.e., Arameans) rather than the MT reading אָדָם (’adam). This reading is possibly to be preferred over the MT.
