The tribes of the desert, Amalekites, Midianites, and those Benê-Qedem or ‘Children of the East,’ whom an Egyptian papyrus of the twelfth dynasty places in the neighbourhood of Edom,[335] had fallen upon the lands of the settled fellahin, as their Bedâwin descendants still do whenever the Turkish soldiery are insufficient to keep them away. Year by year bands of raiders swarmed over the cultivated fields, murdering the peasants and carrying off their crops. At first it was Gilead that suffered, but the Hebrews were weak and divided, and the robbers of the desert were soon emboldened to cross the Jordan, and extend their raids as far as the western frontiers of Israel. ‘They destroyed the increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.’ At last the Lord sent a prophet to the people and an angel to Gideon the Abi-ezrite. Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress near the sacred terebinth of Ophrah. Here, under the shadow of the tree, was an altar of Baal, and by the side of it the cone of stone which symbolised the goddess Asherah. The angel summoned Gideon to rise and deliver Israel, and as a sign that he was indeed the angel of Yahveh he touched with his staff the offerings of flesh and unleavened cakes that Gideon had made to him, so that fire rose out of the rock and consumed them all. On the threshing-floor Gideon built an altar to Yahveh, like that more stately sanctuary which David raised in later days on the threshing-floor of rock which had belonged to Araunah the Jebusite. Recent criticism has discovered in the history of Jerubbaal two different and mutually inconsistent narratives, which are again subdivided among a variety of writers. To these some critics would add a third version of the story, which is supposed to be referred to in Is. x. 26, though others maintain that the reference in the book of Isaiah is to the first of the two narratives. It cannot be denied that the history of the war against the Midianites in its present form is confused, and that it is difficult to construct from it a clear and intelligible picture of the course of events. That the compiler of the book of Judges should have made use of more than one narrative, if such existed, is indeed only natural, and what a conscientious historian would be bound to do. But to distinguish minutely the narratives one from the other, much more to analyse them into still smaller fragments, is the work of Sisyphus. It is even more impossible than to distinguish between Rice and Besant in _The Golden Butterfly_ or _Celia’s Arbour_. The historian must leave all such literary trifling to the collectors of lists of words, and content himself with comparing and analysing the facts recorded in the story.[336]