Jdg 6:1 Renewed Apostasy of the Nation, and Its Punishment. - Jdg 6:1. As the Israelites forsook Jehovah their God again, the Lord delivered them up for seven years into the hands of the Midianites. The Midianites, who were descendants of Abraham and Keturah (Gen 25:2), and had penetrated into the grassy steppes on the eastern side of the country of the Moabites and Ammonites (see at Num 22:4), had shown hostility to Israel even in the time of Moses, and had been defeated in a war of retaliation on the part of the Israelites (Num 31). But they had afterwards recovered their strength, so that now, after an interval of 200 years, the Lord used them as a rod of chastisement for His rebellious people. In Jdg 6:1, Jdg 6:2, Jdg 6:6, they alone are mentioned as oppressors of Israel; but in Jdg 6:3, Jdg 6:33, and Jdg 7:12, the Amalekites and children of the east are mentioned in connection with them, from which we may see that the Midianites were the principal enemies, but had allied themselves with other predatory Bedouin tribes, to make war upon the Israelites and devastate their land. On the Amalekites, those leading enemies of the people of God who had sprung from Esau, see the notes on Gen 36:12 and Exo 17:8. “Children of the east” (see Job 1:3) is the general name for the tribes that lived in the desert on the east of Palestine, “like the name of Arabs in the time of Josephus (in Ant. v. 6, 1, he calls the children of the east mentioned here by the name of Arabs), or in later times the names of the Nabataeans and Kedarenes” (Bertheau). Hence we find in Jdg 8:10, that all the enemies who oppressed the Israelites are called “children of the east.”