Reflections on God and Money: An Idol in Israel (6)

And Gideon said to them, ‘Let me make a request of you: every one of you give me the earrings from his spoil’… And they answered, ‘We will willingly give them’. And they spread a cloak, and every man threw in it the earrings of his spoil. And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold, besides the crescent ornaments and the pendants and the purple garments worn by the kings of Midian, and besides the collars that were around the necks of their camels. And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.

Judges 8:23-27

In stirring out of his complacency, Gideon had asked God for guidance using a fleece of sheep’s wool (see Judges chapter 6). After this, Gideon seems to become more attuned to hearing God’s voice in choosing his army from among all the volunteers and deciding the attack plan, but he later capitalises on the experience with the fleece and makes his home town a place where people could hope to get divine guidance. He does this by asking for donations to make a gold ephod.

The ephod was one of the garments the high priest wore (see Exodus 28 & 39). It had a breastpiece containing two special stones called the Urim and Thummim, that were used to understand God’s will. Although we cannot now be sure just how this was done, they may have been used like dice or casting lots, in 1 Samuel 30 we read how David asked the high priest to bring the ephod so that he could ask God what he should do in a particularly difficult situation.

Gideon makes a gold ephod, so that his home town becomes a place where people come hoping to discover God’s will. In researching this, I could not help speculating further on the social background and wonder if the town had benefited materially by hosting the pagan shrine that Gideon had destroyed and wanted to put something a little more ‘Jewish’ in its place. If he did, then it worked: as we read in the passage at the start of today’s Reflection, all Israel ‘whored’ after the gold ephod in Ophrah! We cannot tell from the text whether this ‘whoring’ was spiritual adultery or sexual immorality but usually one went with the other!

The relevance of this to Christians today is that it does little good to set up alternative idols to mammon – idols such as ‘tithing’ or ‘sowing and reaping’. In and of themselves, tithing and sowing and reaping they are good practices (I wrote about them extensively in the series on Giving & Funding), but they can easily, inadvertently, become idols that give Christians a false sense of security when they act contrary to the standards of behaviour that Jesus described.

I will conclude this thought, and this short series on idolatry in ancient Israel, tomorrow.

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Saturday 26 October 2013

An Idol in Israel (6)