So the people took food in their hand, and their trumpets; and he sent all the men of Israel every man to his tent, but retained the three hundred men: and the camp of Midian was beneath him in the valley.
The normal way to drink from a stream was to get down on one’s hands and knees and put his mouth to the water. This is what most of the soldiers did. A smaller number simply remained standing or kneeled, reached down, dipped one hand into the water, and brought the water to their lips. God told Gideon that he should send the majority home and that He would deliver Israel with the 300 men who remained. That made the ratio of Midianite to Israelite soldiers 450 to one (assuming eleph means "thousand" here). It is not clear whether God’s test and choice were arbitrary, having no other significance than that most people drank in one way and fewer in the other. Possibly God designed the test to distinguish the more alert soldiers from the less alert. [Note: Lewis, p. 49.] Getting down on all fours leaves one more vulnerable than if one remains upright while drinking. Another possibility is that God intended to identify the least likely to succeed, those who had so little self-confidence that they kept an eye out for the enemy while they drank. [Note: Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 5:6:3, preferred this option.] 