Was there some connection between barley bread and Gideon in the mind of the Midianites?

Question

Before attacking the Midianite camp, Gideon does a little spying:

When Gideon came, behold, a man was telling a dream to his comrade. And he said, “Behold, I dreamed a dream, and behold, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian and came to the tent and struck it so that it fell and turned it upside down, so that the tent lay flat.” And his comrade answered, “This is no other than the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel; God has given into his hand Midian and all the camp.”—Judges 7:13-14 (ESV)

I imagined there might be a pun in Hebrew between Gideon (גִּדְעוֹן <H1439>) and barley (שְׂעֹרָה <H8184>), but I don't see it. Lacking a linguistic connection, I don't see how a cake of barley bread would conjure up a connection to Gideon. The best guess I have is that since Gideon was involved in wheat processing (see Judges 6:11) he was somehow associated with baking. Is that the most-likely solution or am I missing something?

Answer 1

There isn’t any historical consensus regarding the origins of leavened bread. However, the earliest archaeological evidence that we have happens to be from ancient Egypt:

The development of leavened bread can also probably be traced to prehistoric times. Yeast spores occur everywhere, including the surface of cereal grains, so any dough left to rest will become naturally leavened. Although leavening is likely of prehistoric origin, the earliest archaeological evidence is from ancient Egypt. Scanning electron microscopy has detected yeast cells in some ancient Egyptian loaves (Wikipedia).

Whether or not Egyptians invented the technology of “thick bread,” the Pentateuch suggests that yeast and leavening were strongly associated with Egyptian culture:

17 “Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. 18 In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. 19 For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And anyone, whether foreigner or native-born, who eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel. 20 Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread” (NIV Exodus 12:17-20).

One way of understanding the law to have no yeast in one’s house from the 14th to the 21st of the first month, is that Egypt and Egyptian culture was associated with the unique type of bread that they ate which was more thick and airy than the other types of bread eaten in the Middle East at that time. Therefore, the act of eating only non-leavened bread for the holiday of Passover (“the Festival of Unleavened Bread”) was a gesture of completely rejecting Egyptian culture as a whole.

The Midianite dialog in Judges 7 corroborates this theory: the Israelites took from Egypt the technology and cultural convention of baking large and round loaves of bread and this was distinct from all the surrounding cultures. Therefore, a cake of barley bread which is able to roll would unambiguously evoke the culturally unique Israelite nation and their Egyptian origins.

Answer 2

The barley cake does not have the gluten content of wheat, so it does not stick together like wheat bread. In this case it is not even a proper leavened loaf, an "ugah", just a lowly "tslil', unleavened, roasted dough eaten only by the poorest of the poor. As it rolls towards the camp of Midian it breaks into crumbs, just as Gideon's forces are progressively broken down from 32 thousand to just 300, not even a battalion. Yet the crumbs overturn the tent of Midian, laying it flat like the unleavened cake that the "tslil" was when it started.

[From the Ladino of Jacob Culi's Me-Am Loez, with some embellishments of my own.]

There is also an element "mida c'neged mida" (tit for tat), as the Midianites are earlier mentioned as stealing the harvest and leaving the Israelites destitute, now the crumbs of this harvest return to take their revenge.

The barley continues the symbolism of lowliness, following the seemingly irrational selection of the 300 men who lapped the water like dogs.