Humility is usually treated as a feeling, or a stated position. The story of Gideon places it somewhere else, in custody, meaning the decisions a man makes about where things are kept. A man can have the feeling and state the position and still lose everything on the decision.
The victory engineered to be unattributable
Before the battle with Midian, God cuts Gideon's army from thirty-two thousand to three hundred, and states the reason:
And the LORD said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me. (Judges 7:2)
The victory is designed in advance so that it can't be attributed to a man. Three hundred men with trumpets and pitchers faced a host like grasshoppers for multitude (7:12). Nobody could say Gideon did it.
And the moment it was over, they said Gideon did it:
Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son's son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian. (Judges 8:22)
For thou hast delivered us. Against explicit, elaborate evidence arranged to prevent exactly that conclusion, the people attributed the victory to the man and offered him a dynasty.
The first lesson is about the people rather than the leader. The tendency to glorify a man doesn't wait for him to make claims. It survives the deliberate removal of the grounds for it. Gideon didn't seek this. The structure of the victory was built to prevent it. They offered him a throne anyway.
That's why Jesus asked how can ye believe, which receive honour one of another? (John 5:44). The honour will be brought. The only question is what the man does with it.
The right answer, and the next verse
Gideon's answer is correct:
And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you. (Judges 8:23)
He states the right theology in public and refuses the office, for himself and for his descendants. If the story stopped there, Gideon would be an exemplar. But it runs straight on into the very next verse.
And Gideon said unto them, I would desire a request of you, that ye would give me every man the earrings of his prey. (Judges 8:24)
He declines the office, and in the following breath he asks for the gold. They give it gladly. It comes to a very great weight, and with it go the ornaments and the purple raiment of the kings of Midian and the chains from their camels' necks (8:26). He refused the crown and accepted the treasury and the royal ornaments.
Where he put it
And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in Ophrah: and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house. (Judges 8:27)
An ephod was a priestly garment. It belonged with the priesthood, at the sanctuary, where the tabernacle was. Gideon made one out of the spoil and put it in his own town. He didn't send it to Shiloh. He kept it in Ophrah, his city.
Since the text doesn't give his motive, we shouldn't supply one. He may have meant it as a memorial. The narrator doesn't accuse him of intending idolatry. He reports what happened, that all Israel went thither. The object became a destination. People travelled to the town of the man who had refused to be king, because the thing that mediated God's presence was now kept there.
The verdict is the narrator's own. The ephod became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house.
Gideon got the theology right and the architecture wrong. He said the correct sentence about who rules. Then he built a structure that collected, in his own town, under his own name, the traffic a king would have received. He refused the title and kept the glory-bearing object close.
He lived like one anyway
The narrative supplies the confirming details without comment. He kept a royal household, with seventy sons born of many wives (8:30). His concubine in Shechem (8:31) gave him a secondary establishment in a second city, the kind of thing a ruler maintains. And he named a son Abimelech, which means my father is king.
In fairness to Gideon, names of that form can refer to God, as in my Father is king, a pious confession matching what Gideon said in public. The ambiguity is the point, because a man can live inside it for twenty years and never resolve it. He can mean the pious version and hear the flattering one and never once have to decide which. Nobody will ask him, and he will never ask himself.
His son resolved it for him.
What the son did with it
Abimelech goes to Shechem and asks the men there whether it is better for them that seventy men rule over them, or one. He hires vain and light persons with silver from a pagan temple, goes to his father's house at Ophrah, and kills his seventy brothers on one stone (Judges 9:1-5). Only Jotham, the youngest, escapes. And Abimelech is made king. His father had publicly refused that office on behalf of his descendants, and within one generation a descendant took it.
It ends as such things do. He destroys Shechem. He burns a tower full of people. And at Thebez a woman drops a piece of a millstone on his head, and he asks his armourbearer to run him through so it won't be said a woman killed him (9:53-54). The last thing recorded about him shows a man managing his reputation with his skull broken.
Run the chain the text supplies. A refusal of kingship is followed by a request for the gold. The gold becomes a cultic object relocated to the leader's own town, and a nation travels there. A snare to him and to his house. Then come seventy sons and a royal establishment, a son named my father is king, and at last a son who killed sixty-nine brothers to become one.
Jotham's parable
Jotham stands on Mount Gerizim and tells the men of Shechem a fable (Judges 9:7-15). The trees went out to anoint a king. They asked the olive, and the olive refused: Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? They asked the fig: Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit? They asked the vine: Should I leave my wine, which cheereth God and man? Then they asked the bramble, and the bramble said yes: Come and put your trust in my shadow. And if not, let fire come out of the bramble.
A bramble has no shade and no fruit. All it can do is catch fire and spread it. The productive trees decline the office because they have real work the office would cost them. The one thing with nothing to leave accepts immediately.
Jotham was making the oldest observation about who ends up in charge. Modern research has since confirmed that the traits that get a person chosen as a leader (confidence, self-promotion, the appetite for the position) aren't the traits that make a leader effective, and are often opposed to them. An office offered indiscriminately will be taken by whoever has least to give up by taking it.
This is why Paul weights his qualifications for eldership toward things a man has already been doing, such as a household ruled well, hospitality practiced and a good report among outsiders. It is also why he adds not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil (1 Timothy 3:6). The lists are a test for fruit. A bramble fails them whether it's wicked or not, because there's nothing there to examine.
What intentional humility actually is
Gideon's humility was real but verbal. It didn't survive contact with a decision about where to keep an object.
He had the right view. He said it out loud, in public, at the moment of maximum temptation, and refused a dynasty. If humility as a feeling or a stated position were the safeguard, he'd have been safe. The safeguard is custody, and custody turns humility from an attitude into a set of decisions that can be made in advance, checked by others, and got wrong by somebody who feels humble.
The operative question is where is the ephod kept? The other question, am I proud?, is one nobody can answer about themselves.
Whose name is on the thing (the ministry, the account, the building, the platform)? Where does the traffic terminate, and when people are helped or converted, whose town do they travel to? Who holds the donor relationships, the lists, the contacts, and the other objects that would leave with a person if he left?
The diagnostic that combines them is to ask how much of what has been built would go with this man if he left tomorrow. He wouldn't need to take any of it. It would go because it was kept in his town.
None of Gideon's accumulation required an act of ambition. The people offered the gold. The people came to Ophrah. All he did was fail to send it somewhere else.
The glory will be brought to you. We tend to think humility means declining to want it, when in Gideon's story it means deciding, in advance and structurally, where the glory gets kept, and then not keeping it in your town.