Charles Ellicott Commentary Judges 7:11

"and thou shalt hear what they say; and afterward shall thy hands be strengthened to go down into the camp. Then went he down with Purah his servant unto the outermost part of the armed men that were in the camp." — Judges 7:11 (ASV)

And you shall hear what they say. —This was the kind of omen known by the Jews as the Bath Kol, or “Daughter of a Voice.” For a similar instance see 1 Samuel 14:6 (Jonathan and his armour-bearer). The word is used in slightly different senses.

Sometimes it means a voice from heaven (Matthew 3:17 and following); such voices from heaven are described in the Talmud. Sometimes it means the first chance words which a person hears after being told to look out for them as a Divine intimation. Sometimes it means an actual echo (see Hamburger’s Talmud. Wörterb., s.5).

It was one of the four recognised modes of Divine direction (namely, prophets, dreams, Urim, and the Bath Kol, 1 Samuel 28:6–15), but it stood lowest of the four. It was also known to the Greeks, among whom the oracle sometimes instructed a man to take as his answer the first casual words he heard spoken on leaving the Temple.

The armed men. —Literally, ranks by five, the word (chamooshim) rendered “harnessed” in Exodus 13:18 and “armed” in Joshua 1:14. Probably here the word means “foreposts,” or “sentries”; and the Vulgate renders it “vigiliae.” The Septuagint curiously renders it “to the beginning,” (or in other MSS.) “to part of the fifty,” following a wrong punctuation.

That were in the host. —Probably “the host” was in some respects more like a temporary nomad migration, such as is so common among all wandering tribes. If so, it would not be by any means entirely composed of “armed men,” but would, like the Persians under Xerxes, trail with it a vast mass of camp followers, etc., who would probably be encamped in the centre with the baggage.