Judges 6:11
Ver. 11. And there came an angel of the Lord,.... This was not the prophet before mentioned, as Ben Gersom thinks, but an angel of God, as expressed, and not a created one, but the Angel of Jehovah's presence, the Word and Son of God, and who is expressly called Jehovah himself, Jud 6:14
and sat under an oak; or stayed there a while, as Kimchi interprets it, seeing, according to his observation, angels are not said to sit, but stand:
which was in Ophrah, that pertaineth to Joash the Abiezrite; which shows that this Ophrah is different from a city of this name in the tribe of Benjamin, Jos 18:23 for the oak that was in it, under which the angel sat, belonged to Joash an Abiezrite, a descendant of Abiezer, son of the sister of Gilead, who was the son of Machir the son of Manasseh, Jos 17:2, it is called by Josephus {h} Ephra, and by Jerom {i} Ephrata:
and his son Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the Midianites; lest they should take it away, and bereave his father's family of their sustenance, as they were wont to do, wherever they could find it; and all circumstances attending this affair were on this account; he threshed it himself, this he chose to do, and not trust his servants, lest it should be discovered; and he beat the wheat out with a staff, that it might be more silently done, and not with oxen, which was the usual way of treading out corn, who, bellowing {k}, would discover it; and this was done not on a threshing floor, but where a winepress stood, where there could be no suspicion of such work being doing.
{h} Antiqu. l. 5. c. 6. sect. 5, 7. {i} De loc. Heb. fol. 90. K. {k} Vid. Homer. Iliad. 20. ver. 495, 496, 497.