There came an angel of the Lord. — It is obviously absurd to suppose, as some have done, that a prophet is intended, like the one in Judges 6:8. There the word is Nabi, here it is Maleak-Jehovah, as in Judges 2:1. Josephus, when he says that “a phantasm stood by him in the shape of a youth,” is merely actuated by his usual desire to give the story as classical an aspect as possible for his Gentile readers.
Under an oak. — Rather, under the terebinth (haêlah): — some well-known tree beside the altar in Ophrath. (Comp. Genesis 35:4.)
Ophrah. — This Ophrah was in Western Manasseh. There was another in Benjamin (Joshua 18:23). The name means “fawn,” and the place is identified by Van de Velde with Erfai, near the north border of Ephraim.
Joash the Abi-ezrite. — Joash was the head of the family which descended from Abiezer, the son of Gilead, the son of Machir, the son of Manasseh (Numbers 26:30; Joshua 17:2).
Gideon. — The name means “hewer.”
Threshed wheat by the winepress. — Perhaps, rather, beating it out than threshing it, as in Ruth 2:17 (LXX., rhabdizôn). There would hardly be room for regular threshing in the confined space of a winepress, for wine-presses were vats sunk in the ground.
To hide it. — Literally, to make it fly (Exodus 9:20). The threshing-floors — open circular places in the fields where the corn was trodden out by oxen — would naturally be the first places where an invading enemy would come to forage, as in 1 Samuel 23:1.