Gideon Gideon Gideon () or Gedeon, also named Jerubbaal, and Jerubbesheth, was a military leader, judge and prophet whose calling and victory over the Midianites are recounted in chapters 6 to 8 of the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible. Gideon was the son of Joash, from the Abiezrite clan in the tribe of Manasseh and lived in Ephra (Ophrah). As a leader of the Israelites, he won a decisive victory over a Midianite army despite a vast numerical disadvantage, leading a troop of 300 'valiant' men. The nineteenth-century Strong's Concordance derives the name "Jerubbaal" from "Baal will contend", in
The Book of the Short Sun with each book, and the story is highly nonlinear, with narrative threads from different times told in parallel and story events related out of order as the narrator remembers or confronts them. As with many of Wolfe's novels, the narrator and the circumstances under which the book is being written are essential to understanding the story. Most of the story takes place in a star system with two habitable planets, Blue and Green (named for their appearance as seen from space). The human inhabitants arrived in the system after several centuries on an O'Neill-style generation starship called the "Whorl", which