‘ And when Gideon was come, behold there was a man who told a dream to his fellow, and said, “Behold, I dreamed a dream, and lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian, and came to the Tent, and smote it that it fell, and turned it upside down so that the Tent lay along.” '
As they came nearer they heard two sentinels talking, and one telling the other of a vivid dream he had had, the dream of a cake of barley bread tumbling into the camp of Midian and crashing into the Tent (probably the tent of the Midianite commander-in-chief, but possibly as symbolising the whole camp) and dismantling it spectacularly so that it lay horizontally on the ground. His double use of ‘behold' and ‘lo' demonstrated how impressed he had been by it.
Dreams were considered of great importance in ancient times, especially if the dreamer was an important man, for it was thought that the gods revealed the future by these means. Every dream was seen as having some significance, the only problem being to discern what that was.
In this case barley bread was the food of the poor. It was half the value of fine flour (2 Kings 7:1) and was clearly seen as symbolising downtrodden Israel. It would have been their staple diet at this time of oppression. The fact of only one barley cake may indeed suggest the bareness of their provisions. Thus the dream could only mean the destruction of the Midianite confederacy by Israel. That is certainly how the sentinels saw it. The writer probably saw some significance in the fact that they were camped ‘by the hill of Moreh' (verse 1). Moreh means ‘diviner, oracle giver'.