‘ And he caught a young man of the men of Succoth, and enquired of him. And he wrote down for him the names of the princes of Succoth, and its elders, even seventy seven men.'
Gideon would not kill haphazardly. The covenant had been broken and due punishment was required, but he would only exact it of those directly responsible. So he arranged for the detaining of a young man of Succoth in order to discover the names of the leading authorities, the princes and the elders. There were seventy seven of them which suggests a fairly large town. ‘Seventy and seven' was in Genesis 4:24 the number of perfect revenge.
“He wrote down for him.” An interesting confirmation that writing was an art widely practised in Israel. Examples are known from mines in Sinai of an alphabetic script used by slaves from Canaan working in the mines there well before this time, and potsherds have been discovered in a number of Canaanite cities utilising the same script.