22-27 we have a
secondary product, in which the original features of the story
are distorted so as to make them suit later tastes. The second
hand has unfortunately supplanted in this instance the work of
the first. The older narrative breaks off (viii. 21) with the
words: "Gideon took away the ornaments that were on the necks of
the camels of the kings." What he did with them we do not learn,
but naturally we must suppose that it was of them that he made
the ephod. According to the secondary passage, which begins
immediately after viii. 21, he used for this purpose the
nose-rings which the whole of Israel had taken from all the
Midianites, amounting in weight to 1700 shekels, besides the
ornaments of the kings and of their camels. The proportion is
similar to that between the 600 Danites in chap. xviii. and the
25,700 Benjamites in chap. xx., or between the 40,000 men of
Israel in v. 8, and the 400,000 in xx. 2.
VII.I.4. In the last place it is possible to trace even in the
original narratives themselves certain differences of religious
attitude which indicate to us unobtrusively and yet clearly that
tendency in the development of the tradition which reached its
end in the revision and ornamentation of which we have hitherto
been speaking.
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