What does Judges 6:28 mean?
Gideon has thoroughly—if quietly—obeyed the command of the Lord (Judges 6:25–27), under the cover of darkness and with the help of ten servants. He dismantled the altar to Baal and the Asherah pole: artifacts used for worshiping false gods. He has built a new altar to Yahweh and sacrificed a bull on it. It likely took the entire night to complete all of this. This is not an act of petty vandalism. This is a complete destruction of those pagan elements and an attack on the legitimacy of those false gods.Now morning has dawned on the remains of Gideon's actions. The men of the town emerge from their homes to find the Baal altar in pieces, the Asherah pole chopped down and burnt, and the charred remains of a bull on top of a new altar to another deity.
It's hard to overstate how scandalous this would have been for everyone in town. They worshiped Baal and the other gods of the region. These were also the gods of their frequent attackers, the Midianites. They believed that worshiping those gods helped to protect and provide for them. Now those gods had been insulted, disrespected, and humiliated, as were all those who worshipped them. From their point of view, this act deserved the harshest possible punishment.