Judges 9:1-6
One stone, seventy brothers
He borrows the argument of kinship and seventy pieces of silver from a pagan temple, hires worthless and reckless men, and makes himself king by a tree in Shechem.
People of the Bible
Abimelech
Took the crown his father refused, on one stone, from seventy brothers.
Abimelech is the son of Gideon by a concubine in Shechem. After his father dies he goes to his mother’s family and asks them a question designed to answer itself: is it better for seventy men to rule you, or one, and remember that I am your bone and your flesh. They give him silver from the temple of Baal-berith, he hires men with it, and he kills his brothers on one stone. Only the youngest escapes, and stands on a mountain and shouts a fable at the city about trees looking for a king.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Abimelech
- 01
- 02
Judges 9:7-21
The bramble that offered shade
Jotham survives and shouts down from Mount Gerizim. The olive, the fig and the vine all refuse the crown because they have useful work. The bramble accepts and threatens fire.
- 03
Judges 9:22-45
Three years, then the ambush
The city that made him turns on him. He takes it, kills the people in it, pulls it down and sows it with salt, which is a thing done to land you never intend to use again.
- 04
Judges 9:50-57
The millstone at Thebez
At the next tower a woman drops an upper millstone on his head. He calls his armour bearer to run him through so nobody can say a woman killed him, and the text records the request and then reports it anyway.
Why it matters
Judges puts Abimelech directly after the man who said the LORD would rule over you, and he is not called a judge at any point. He is the book’s argument about what kingship looks like when it is simply taken, and the fable of the bramble is the earliest political satire in the Bible. The end matches the beginning: he dies under a city wall from a millstone dropped by a woman, and asks his armour bearer to finish it so it will not be said a woman killed him.
1 song
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
