Abimelech’s Violent Kingship Destroys Itself

Abimelech goes not to his father’s house at Ophrah but to his mother’s kin at Shechem, “the house of his mother’s father”. The concubine of 8:31 had stayed with her own people, and her son now draws on that Shechemite clan as his power base.

“The men of Shechem” is baale Shechem, the landholding citizens, literally “the lords of Shechem”, a word that sounds like the god they worshipped. “Your bone and your flesh” is kinship language: Laban said it to Jacob (Genesis 29:14), and the tribes will say it to David at Hebron (2 Samuel 5:1).

Deuteronomy 17:15 required that Israel’s king be “one from among thy brethren”, not a stranger. The Shechemites reason the same way in reverse: “He is our brother”, by his Canaanite mother. The criterion of the king law is used to choose a Canaanite city’s own man.

Seventy pieces of silver for seventy brothers: one piece per life. The money comes from the treasury of Baal-berith, the covenant god of 8:33. “Vain and light persons” are empty and reckless men, like the “vain men” who will gather round Jephthah (11:3).

“Upon one stone” suggests slaughter on an altar like stone; Saul later had a great stone rolled up for slaughtering animals properly (1 Samuel 14:33–34). One son escapes by hiding, as the infant Joash was hidden from Athaliah’s massacre of the royal family (2 Kings 11:2).

“The plain of the pillar” is “the oak of the standing stone”, very likely the great stone Joshua set up under the oak at Shechem as a witness to the covenant (Joshua 24:26). Abimelech is crowned beside the stone that witnessed Israel’s promise to serve the LORD. Beth-millo, “the house of the fill”, was probably the city’s fortified citadel.

Mount Gerizim was the mountain of blessing in the covenant ceremony (Deuteronomy 11:29; 27:12). Jotham pronounces a curse from it. “That God may hearken unto you” makes his hearing conditional: listen to me, if you want to be heard.

This is the first fable in the Bible; the only other is Jehoash’s parable of the thistle and the cedar (2 Kings 14:9). “Anoint a king” is also the first mention of anointing a king in Scripture, placed in the mouths of trees.

“Fatness” is the olive’s rich oil, used for lamps, for offerings and for anointing priests and kings. The tree whose oil makes kings would have to give up the oil to become one. “Promoted over” is literally “to sway over”, to wave above the others.

The trees speak to the fig in the feminine, “come thou”, since the Hebrew nouns are feminine. Each man sitting “under his vine and under his fig tree” became the Bible’s picture of settled peace (1 Kings 4:25; Micah 4:4).

Figs were a staple, dried and pressed into cakes; Abigail brought David “two hundred cakes of figs” (1 Samuel 25:18). “Sweetness” is motek. The fig, like the olive, will not trade its usefulness for a throne.

The vine was the image Israel’s poets used for Israel itself: “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt” (Psalm 80:8), and Isaiah’s song of the vineyard (Isaiah 5:1–7). The third and last of the fruitful trees is asked.

Wine was poured out as a drink offering “of a sweet savour unto the LORD” (Numbers 15:7), and Psalm 104:15 praises “wine that maketh glad the heart of man”. “Cheereth God and man” sums up both uses in one line.

The bramble is atad, a thornbush, the plant that gave its name to “the threshingfloor of Atad” where Jacob was mourned (Genesis 50:10). It bears no fruit and gives no timber, and “all the trees” together choose it.

“Put your trust in my shadow” is the language used of God: “in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge” (Psalm 57:1). A thornbush casts almost no shade. Dry brambles are where brush fires start, and fire in thorns can spread to the greatest trees, the cedars of Lebanon.

“Truly and sincerely” is emet and tamim, the very pair Joshua used at Shechem: “serve him in sincerity and in truth” (Joshua 24:14). Jotham measures Shechem by the covenant words spoken in the same city.

“Adventured his life far” is literally “threw his life away in front”, cast it out before him. The King James brackets verses 17–18 as an aside in which Jotham interrupts his own condition to remind them what his father did.

“The son of his maidservant” is Jotham’s own description; 8:31 had called Abimelech’s mother a concubine, not a slave. The insult sharpens the charge: Shechem traded seventy lawful sons for the son of a servant because “he is your brother”.

The conditional blessing and curse recall the ceremony held between Gerizim and Ebal, where blessings and curses were pronounced over the people (Deuteronomy 27–28). Jotham stands on the same slope and sets two outcomes before Shechem.

Fire is to go both ways: from Abimelech to Shechem, and from Shechem to Abimelech. Beth-millo is named twice, as if the citadel were a party to the crime. The second half of this curse is the one the rest of the chapter will take longest to fulfil.

Jotham’s name means “the LORD is perfect” or “whole”, built on tam, the root of tamim, the “sincerely” of his own speech. Beer means simply “a well”; its location is unknown. The youngest son, like David later, survives the house’s disaster.

“Reigned” here is vayyasar, “ruled as a prince”, not the usual word for reigning as king. “Over Israel” is a large claim for a ruler crowned in one city; Israelites evidently followed him (verse 55). The first man called king in Israel lasts three years.

The same phrase is used of Saul: “an evil spirit from the LORD troubled him” (1 Samuel 16:14). “Dealt treacherously” is bagad, to betray, the word for breaking faith. The men who helped Abimelech betray his brothers now betray him.

Numbers 35:33 had laid down the principle: “the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.” The blood of the seventy is to fall on the killer and on those who paid him.

Shechem lay in the pass between Ebal and Gerizim, on the main north south road. Men lying in ambush on the heights to rob travellers would ruin trade and the tolls a ruler collected, an inference about why the robbery was reported to Abimelech.

Gaal son of Ebed can be read as “loathing, son of a slave”, perhaps a name the writer gave or preserved with scorn; some manuscripts read Eber for Ebed. He arrives with his brothers, a clan leader offering Shechem a new champion.

“Made merry” is hillulim, a festival of praise, the word used in Leviticus 19:24 for the fruit of the fourth year, “holy to praise the LORD withal”. Here the harvest thanksgiving is held in the house of their god, with curses for Abimelech over the wine.

“Who is Abimelech?” is the scornful question of Pharaoh, “Who is the LORD?” (Exodus 5:2), and of Nabal, “Who is David?” (1 Samuel 25:10). Gaal appeals to “the men of Hamor the father of Shechem”, the old Canaanite ruling family of Genesis 34:2, against the half Israelite son of Jerubbaal.

“Would to God” is the Hebrew idiom “who will give”. “Increase thine army, and come out” is shouted at a man who is not there; the Greek reads it as “and I would say to Abimelech”. It is a boast made safely at a feast.

Zebul is “the ruler of the city”, sar ha-ir, Abimelech’s governor in Shechem. His name means something like “exalted” or “prince”, the word found in Baal-zebul. He hears the boast and his anger burns, but he says nothing to Gaal yet.

“Privily” translates betormah, a word found only here. It may mean “with deceit”, or it may be a place name, “in Tormah”, possibly the Arumah of verse 41 where Abimelech was staying.

Zebul supplies the whole plan: move by night, lie in wait in the field, strike at sunrise. The ruler’s own governor designs the ambush against the city he governs.

“As thou shalt find occasion” is literally “as thy hand shall find”, the phrase Samuel uses when he anoints Saul, “do as occasion serve thee” (1 Samuel 10:7), and Ecclesiastes 9:10, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

“Four companies” is literally “four heads”, the Hebrew for divisions of troops. Abimelech rose by night, as Gideon his father did against Midian, and with the same kind of divided force.

The gate was where a city’s elders sat and where a ruler showed himself. Gaal stands there at the entrance just as Abimelech’s men rise from hiding. The two meet at the place where the city decided who held power.

“Shadow” is tsel, the word the bramble used when it offered its “shadow” to the trees (verse 15). Zebul mocks Gaal’s eyesight: those are only shadows on the mountains. The bramble’s shadow is real after all, and it is coming down the hill.

“The middle of the land” is literally “the navel of the land”, tabbur ha-arets, a hill near Shechem; Ezekiel 38:12 uses the phrase of Israel, and later tradition applied it to Jerusalem. “The plain of Meonenim” is “the diviners’ oak”, a tree where soothsayers gave oracles.

“Where is now thy mouth?” turns Gaal’s own words at the feast against him, as Gideon quoted Succoth’s taunt back to its princes (8:15). Zebul drops his pretence: this is the man you despised.

“Went out before” is the phrase for leading an army into battle; the elders later ask Samuel for a king who will “go out before us, and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20). Gaal gets the command he boasted he wanted.

The rout ends where Gaal had stood boasting: “even unto the entering of the gate”. The wounded lie along the road between the field and the city he had promised to defend.

Arumah, perhaps modern el-Orme southeast of Shechem, was Abimelech’s residence: he ruled Shechem from outside. Zebul, still inside, expels Gaal and his brothers. The city now has neither its new champion nor any peace with its ruler.

The people go out to the fields the next morning, apparently thinking the trouble over once Gaal was gone. Someone again reports it to Abimelech, as someone had reported the robberies in verse 25.

Three companies was his father’s tactic at the Midianite camp (7:16). Abimelech turns it on farmers going out to work their own fields, the townspeople of the city that crowned him.

Abimelech’s own company seizes the gate so that no one can get back into the city, while the other two companies kill those caught outside. The gate where Gaal boasted and where Zebul watched is now held against the city.

Sowing a destroyed city with salt was a symbolic curse on its future, not an attempt to poison the soil; Moses had pictured a cursed land of “brimstone, and salt, and burning” (Deuteronomy 29:23). Excavations at Tell Balata show a destruction of Shechem in roughly this period.

The god here is El-berith, “God of the covenant”, the same deity as Baal-berith of 8:33 and 9:4. “Hold” is tseriach, an inner chamber or stronghold, a word found elsewhere only in 1 Samuel 13:6. The temple whose silver hired Abimelech’s killers becomes the refuge he burns.

Excavators at Tell Balata uncovered a massive “fortress temple” with walls some five metres thick, which many connect with the tower of Shechem and the house of El-berith. Whether the tower was part of the city or a separate stronghold is debated.

Mount Zalmon, “the dark mountain”, perhaps for its woods, appears again in Psalm 68:14, “it was white as snow in Salmon”. The axe is qardom, the woodsman’s axe. Abimelech carries the branch on his own shoulder, like a king leading by example in the worst sense.

Here the first half of Jotham’s curse comes true: fire comes out from Abimelech and devours the men of Shechem (verse 20). About a thousand men and women die in the stronghold of their god. The bramble has set the cedars alight.

Thebez is usually placed at modern Tubas, about ten miles northeast of Shechem; it may have joined the revolt. Joab later names the town in a message to David about the danger of fighting too near a wall (2 Samuel 11:21).

“A strong tower” is migdal oz, the phrase of Proverbs 18:10: “The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.” The people of Thebez run to their tower and climb to its roof.

He tries the same method that worked at Shechem, fire at the door. Joab’s later warning to his officers names the error: “wherefore approached ye so nigh unto the city when ye did fight? knew ye not that they would shoot from the wall?” (2 Samuel 11:20).

The piece of millstone is literally “a rider stone”, the upper stone of a hand mill that women pushed back and forth every day to grind grain. “All to brake” is 1611 English for “broke completely”. The weapon is from a kitchen, and the hand is a woman’s.

Saul will die the same way, asking his armourbearer to kill him “lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and abuse me” (1 Samuel 31:4). Saul’s armourbearer refused; Abimelech’s young man obeys.

“The men of Israel” were following Abimelech; he had Israelite troops as well as Shechemites. With him dead, they simply go home: the kingdom he built did not survive the afternoon of his death.

“Rendered” is heshiv, returned, the word for bringing something back on the one who did it. Psalm 7:16 puts it as a rule: “His mischief shall return upon his own head.” The crime is named as one against his father, not only his brothers.

The chapter ends with the name of the one survivor, “Jotham the son of Jerubbaal”, and the word “curse”. Proverbs 26:2 says “the curse causeless shall not come”; this curse had a cause, and it came.