Judges 9: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Abimelech, son of Jerubbaal, wins over his mother's relatives in Shechem, hires men with silver from the temple of Baal-berith, and kills his seventy brothers on one stone; only Jotham escapes, and from Mount Gerizim he tells a fable of trees choosing a king and calls down a conditional curse on Shechem and Abimelech. After Abimelech rules Israel three years, God sends a spirit of hostility between him and the leaders of Shechem; Gaal's revolt fails, and Abimelech destroys the city and burns about a thousand people in the tower of Shechem. At Thebez a woman drops a millstone on his head, and he has his armor-bearer finish him. The chapter closes by saying God repaid Abimelech's evil and the evil of the men of Shechem, and Jotham's curse came upon them.

Claim by Claim

1. 9:1
   • Abimelech was the son of Jerubbaal.
   • Abimelech went to Shechem, to his mother's brothers.
   • Abimelech spoke to his mother's brothers and to all the clan of his mother's father's household.
2. 9:2
   • Abimelech told them to speak in the hearing of all the leading men of Shechem.
   • Abimelech asked which was better for them: that seventy men, all the sons of Jerubbaal, rule over them, or that one man rule over them.
   • Jerubbaal had seventy sons.
   • Abimelech told them to remember that he was their own bone and flesh.
3. 9:3
   • His mother's brothers spoke all these words about him in the hearing of all the leading men of Shechem.
   • The hearts of the men of Shechem inclined to follow Abimelech.
   • They said that Abimelech was their brother.
4. 9:4
   • They gave Abimelech seventy pieces of silver.
   • The silver came from the house of Baal-berith.
   • Abimelech hired empty and reckless men with the silver.
   • The hired men followed Abimelech.
5. 9:5
   • Abimelech went to his father's house at Ophrah.
   • Abimelech killed his brothers, the sons of Jerubbaal, seventy men.
   • He killed them on one stone.
   • Jotham, the youngest son of Jerubbaal, was left alive.
   • Jotham survived because he hid himself.
6. 9:6
   • All the leading men of Shechem gathered together.
   • All the house of Millo gathered together.
   • They went and made Abimelech king.
   • They did this by the oak of the pillar that was in Shechem.
7. 9:7
   • It was reported to Jotham.
   • Jotham went and stood on the top of Mount Gerizim.
   • Jotham lifted up his voice and called out.
   • Jotham told the men of Shechem to listen to him.
   • Jotham said that God might listen to them.
8. 9:8
   • The trees went out to anoint a king over themselves.
   • The trees said to the olive tree, Reign over us.
9. 9:9
   • The olive tree answered them.
   • The olive tree asked whether it should give up its richness.
   • The olive tree said that by its richness God and men are honored.
   • The olive tree asked whether it should go to sway over the trees.
10. 9:10
    • The trees said to the fig tree, Come and reign over us.
11. 9:11
    • The fig tree answered them.
    • The fig tree asked whether it should give up its sweetness and its good produce.
    • The fig tree asked whether it should go to sway over the trees.
12. 9:12
    • The trees said to the vine, Come and reign over us.
13. 9:13
    • The vine answered them.
    • The vine asked whether it should give up its new wine.
    • The vine said that its wine cheers God and men.
    • The vine asked whether it should go to sway over the trees.
14. 9:14
    • All the trees said to the thornbush, Come and reign over us.
15. 9:15
    • The thornbush answered the trees.
    • The thornbush said that if they were truly anointing it king over them, they should come and take refuge in its shade.
    • The thornbush said that if not, fire should come out of the thornbush.
    • The thornbush said that the fire should devour the cedars of Lebanon.
16. 9:16
    • Jotham asked whether they had acted in truth and integrity in making Abimelech king.
    • Jotham asked whether they had dealt well with Jerubbaal and his house.
    • Jotham asked whether they had done to Jerubbaal according to what his hands deserved.
17. 9:17
    • Jotham said his father fought for them.
    • Jotham said his father threw his own life away in front of him.
    • Jotham said his father delivered them from the hand of Midian.
18. 9:18
    • Jotham said they had risen up against his father's house that day.
    • Jotham said they had killed his father's sons, seventy men, on one stone.
    • Jotham said they had made Abimelech king over the leading men of Shechem.
    • Jotham said Abimelech was the son of Jerubbaal's maidservant.
    • Jotham said they did this because Abimelech was their brother.
19. 9:19
    • Jotham said that if they had acted in truth and integrity with Jerubbaal and his house that day, they should rejoice in Abimelech.
    • Jotham said that in that case Abimelech should also rejoice in them.
20. 9:20
    • Jotham said that if not, fire should come out from Abimelech.
    • Jotham said that fire should devour the leading men of Shechem and the house of Millo.
    • Jotham said that fire should come out from the men of Shechem and from the house of Millo.
    • Jotham said that fire should devour Abimelech.
21. 9:21
    • Jotham ran away and fled.
    • Jotham went to Beer.
    • Jotham lived there.
    • Jotham did this because of Abimelech his brother.
22. 9:22
    • Abimelech held rule over Israel for three years.
23. 9:23
    • God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the leading men of Shechem.
    • The men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech.
24. 9:24
    • This happened so that the violence done to the seventy sons of Jerubbaal would come back.
    • Their blood was to be laid on Abimelech their brother.
    • Abimelech had killed them.
    • Their blood was to be laid on the men of Shechem.
    • The men of Shechem had strengthened Abimelech's hands to kill his brothers.
25. 9:25
    • The men of Shechem set ambushers against Abimelech on the tops of the mountains.
    • The ambushers robbed everyone who passed by them on the road.
    • It was reported to Abimelech.
26. 9:26
    • Gaal son of Ebed came with his brothers.
    • They crossed over into Shechem.
    • The leading men of Shechem put their confidence in Gaal.
27. 9:27
    • They went out into the field.
    • They harvested their vineyards.
    • They trod the grapes.
    • They held a festival.
    • They went into the house of their god.
    • They ate and drank.
    • They cursed Abimelech.
28. 9:28
    • Gaal son of Ebed asked who Abimelech was and who Shechem was, that they should serve him.
    • Gaal asked whether Abimelech was not the son of Jerubbaal.
    • Gaal said Zebul was Abimelech's officer.
    • Gaal told them to serve the men of Hamor, the father of Shechem.
    • Gaal asked why they should serve Abimelech.
29. 9:29
    • Gaal wished that this people were under his hand.
    • Gaal said that then he would remove Abimelech.
    • Gaal said to Abimelech, Increase your army and come out.
30. 9:30
    • Zebul was the ruler of the city.
    • Zebul heard the words of Gaal son of Ebed.
    • Zebul's anger was kindled.
31. 9:31
    • Zebul sent messengers to Abimelech.
    • The messengers were sent either secretly or to a place called Tormah; the text is ambiguous.
    • The message said that Gaal son of Ebed and his brothers had come to Shechem.
    • The message said that they were closing in on the city against Abimelech.
32. 9:32
    • Zebul told Abimelech to get up by night, he and the people with him.
    • Zebul told Abimelech to lie in wait in the field.
33. 9:33
    • Zebul said that in the morning, as soon as the sun rose, Abimelech should rise early and rush upon the city.
    • Zebul said that Gaal and the people with him would come out against Abimelech.
    • Zebul told Abimelech to do to him whatever his hand found to do.
34. 9:34
    • Abimelech and all the people with him rose up by night.
    • They lay in wait against Shechem in four companies.
35. 9:35
    • Gaal son of Ebed went out.
    • Gaal stood at the entrance of the city gate.
    • Abimelech and the people with him rose up from the ambush.
36. 9:36
    • Gaal saw the people.
    • Gaal said to Zebul that people were coming down from the tops of the mountains.
    • Zebul told him he was seeing the shadow of the mountains as if it were men.
37. 9:37
    • Gaal spoke again.
    • Gaal said that people were coming down from the center of the land.
    • Gaal said that one company was coming by way of the Diviners' Oak.
38. 9:38
    • Zebul asked Gaal where his mouth was now.
    • Zebul said Gaal had asked who Abimelech was, that they should serve him.
    • Zebul asked whether this was not the people Gaal had despised.
    • Zebul told Gaal to go out now and fight with them.
39. 9:39
    • Gaal went out before the leading men of Shechem.
    • Gaal fought against Abimelech.
40. 9:40
    • Abimelech chased Gaal.
    • Gaal fled before Abimelech.
    • Many fell wounded, as far as the entrance of the gate.
41. 9:41
    • Abimelech stayed at Arumah.
    • Zebul drove out Gaal and his brothers from living in Shechem.
42. 9:42
    • On the next day the people went out into the field.
    • It was reported to Abimelech.
43. 9:43
    • Abimelech took the people.
    • He divided them into three companies.
    • He lay in wait in the field.
    • He saw the people coming out of the city.
    • He rose up against them and struck them.
44. 9:44
    • Abimelech and the company with him rushed forward.
    • They stood at the entrance of the city gate.
    • The two other companies rushed upon all who were in the field.
    • They struck them down.
45. 9:45
    • Abimelech fought against the city all that day.
    • Abimelech captured the city.
    • Abimelech killed the people who were in it.
    • Abimelech tore down the city.
    • Abimelech sowed the city with salt.
46. 9:46
    • All the leading men of the tower of Shechem heard of it.
    • They entered the stronghold of the house of El-berith.
47. 9:47
    • It was reported to Abimelech that all the leading men of the tower of Shechem had gathered together.
48. 9:48
    • Abimelech went up Mount Zalmon, he and all the people with him.
    • Abimelech took an axe in his hand.
    • Abimelech cut a branch from the trees.
    • Abimelech lifted it and laid it on his shoulder.
    • Abimelech told the people with him to hurry and do as they had seen him do.
49. 9:49
    • All the people also cut down each man his own branch.
    • They followed Abimelech.
    • They laid the branches against the stronghold.
    • They set the stronghold on fire over the people inside.
    • All the men of the tower of Shechem died.
    • About a thousand men and women died.
50. 9:50
    • Abimelech went to Thebez.
    • Abimelech encamped against Thebez.
    • Abimelech captured Thebez.
51. 9:51
    • There was a strong tower inside the city.
    • All the men and the women and all the leading men of the city fled there.
    • They shut themselves in.
    • They went up to the roof of the tower.
52. 9:52
    • Abimelech came to the tower.
    • Abimelech fought against it.
    • Abimelech drew near to the door of the tower to burn it with fire.
53. 9:53
    • A certain woman threw an upper millstone on Abimelech's head.
    • The stone crushed his skull.
54. 9:54
    • Abimelech quickly called to the young man who carried his armor.
    • Abimelech told him to draw his sword and kill him.
    • Abimelech said this was so that they would not say of him that a woman killed him.
    • His young man ran him through.
    • Abimelech died.
55. 9:55
    • The men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead.
    • They each went to his own place.
56. 9:56
    • God repaid the evil of Abimelech.
    • Abimelech had done that evil to his father.
    • The evil was the killing of his seventy brothers.
57. 9:57
    • God returned all the evil of the men of Shechem on their own heads.
    • The curse of Jotham son of Jerubbaal came upon them.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

9:1

Shechem was a walled city in the hill country of central Israel, set in the pass between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Its population was largely Canaanite. Abimelech's mother was a woman of Shechem (Judges 8:31), so her brothers were Shechemites; in this culture a man's mother's clan were the natural people to appeal to when his father's household lived elsewhere. Jerubbaal is Gideon. The name is given to him in chapter 6, after he pulls down his father's altar to Baal: it means something like "let Baal contend against him".

9:2

"Leaders" translates a Hebrew word meaning literally "the lords" or "masters" of Shechem, the property-holding citizens who ran the city's affairs and could decide such a question. "Flesh and blood" renders the old idiom "your bone and your flesh," the standard way of claiming blood kinship. The seventy sons reflect Gideon's many wives (Judges 8:30); seventy is also a round number for a full complement.

9:4

Silver was weighed, not coined: these were seventy shekels, roughly two pounds of silver in all, a modest sum, enough to hire a small band. Temples held deposits of precious metal and served in part as treasuries. Baal-berith means "lord of the covenant" or "Baal of the treaty"; Baal was the chief Canaanite storm-god, and the word also meant simply "lord" or "owner."

9:5

Wiping out rival claimants was a normal precaution for a man seizing power in the ancient Near East. "On one stone" pictures a single block used as the place of execution; some read it as a sacrificial slab. Ophrah was Gideon's home town, several miles from Shechem.

9:6

The house of Millo (Beth-millo) was probably Shechem's fortified citadel; "Millo" comes from a word meaning "filling," an earth-and-stone platform raised to carry a fortress. The great tree beside the standing stone was the city's traditional landmark for oaths and public assembly (compare Genesis 35:4; Joshua 24:26). Gideon had earlier refused an offer of hereditary rule (Judges 8:22–23); this is the first attempt at kingship in the book.

9:7

Mount Gerizim rises steeply just south of Shechem, so a man standing on its slope could be heard by people in the city below. It was also the traditional hill from which blessings were pronounced over Israel, with the curses called out from Mount Ebal opposite (Deuteronomy 27).

9:8

A fable in which plants or animals talk was a familiar way of making a sharp political point without stating it flatly. Anointing, pouring olive oil over the head, was the ceremony that installed a king or a priest.

9:9

Olive oil was the region's most valuable product: burned in the sanctuary lamps, mixed into grain offerings, and used to anoint kings and priests ("honor God"), and rubbed on the skin every day and at feasts ("and people"). "Wave over the trees" translates a Hebrew verb meaning to sway or toss about; the joke is that the king simply waves in the wind above the rest.

9:11

Figs are small sweet fruits. They were an everyday food.

9:13

Wine was poured out at the altar as a drink offering ("cheers God") as well as drunk at feasts ("and people").

9:14

The thornbush or bramble is a low, spiny scrub of the dry hills: no fruit, no timber, no real shade, and notorious as tinder that carries fire fast through dry country.

9:15

"Take shelter in my shade" is the point of the joke, a knee-high thornbush casts almost no shade, and anyone who crawled into it would be torn. Cedars of Lebanon were the tallest and most prized timber known in the region, the furthest possible thing from a bramble.

9:17

Midian: a confederation of camel-riding desert peoples whose yearly plundering of Israel's harvests Gideon broke (Judges 6–8).

9:18

The son of a slave woman or secondary wife ranked well below the sons of a full wife and would not normally have inherited or led the family. "He is your relative" is Abimelech's whole claim: his mother was a Shechemite.

9:20

"Let fire come out and burn up" is a standard form of curse. Jotham is now applying his fable point by point, with Abimelech in the place of the bramble.

9:21

Beer means "well"; the place cannot now be identified, but the point is that Jotham put distance between himself and his brother.

9:22

The Hebrew says Abimelech "acted as ruler," a different word from the "judging" used of the other leaders in this book. In practice his authority covered Shechem and the country near it, not the whole of Israel.

9:23

"A spirit of hostility" is what the King James calls "an evil spirit"; the Hebrew adjective means harmful or ill-disposed. The phrase describes the collapse of good faith between the two sides.

9:24

Blood "charged to" someone is the language of blood-guilt: a killing left unavenged was treated as an outstanding debt attached to the killer until it was settled.

9:25

Robbing the traffic on the hill passes struck at Abimelech directly. A ruler's income and standing depended on his ability to keep the roads safe and take the dues of trade passing through his territory.

9:26

Gaal appears with no introduction; nothing else is known of him or of his father Ebed, whose name means "servant." "His brothers" probably means his armed kinsmen and followers.

9:27

This is the grape harvest festival at the end of summer. Grapes were crushed by treading them barefoot in a rock-cut vat. The feasting took place in the city's temple, and a curse spoken there, in the god's house, carried the weight of a formal renunciation rather than mere drunken abuse.

9:28

Hamor was the Canaanite chieftain of Shechem generations earlier (Genesis 34). Gaal's argument is about ancestry: the old native ruling house of the city has a better claim than Abimelech, who is half an outsider through his father Gideon. "Who is Shechem" probably refers to that ruling clan, named after Hamor's son.

9:29

Abimelech is not present; Gaal is shouting a challenge at an absent enemy in front of a crowd. The Hebrew can also be read "and I would say to Abimelech...", which is how many translations take it.

9:30

Zebul governed Shechem on Abimelech's behalf while Abimelech himself lived elsewhere (verse 41).

9:31

"Secretly" translates a Hebrew word that some read instead as a place name, Tormah, possibly the same town as Arumah in verse 41. The verb behind "setting the city against you" is also uncertain: it may mean stirring up the city, closing it, or besieging it.

9:37

"The middle of the land" is literally "the navel of the land," a term for a central height. Meonenim means "soothsayers" or "diviners": a landmark tree where omens were read, of the kind found at many old sanctuaries.

9:41

Arumah was a town a few miles from Shechem. Abimelech had been ruling at a distance, with Zebul running the city for him.

9:45

Scattering salt over a destroyed city was a symbolic act marking the site as cursed and not to be rebuilt or resettled. It was not a quantity that could have poisoned the surrounding farmland.

9:46

The "tower of Shechem" may be the city's fortified citadel or a separate settlement of that name nearby. The "stronghold" was the inner chamber or vault of the temple, a thick-walled room serving both as a holy place and as a refuge. "Berith" means "covenant," so El-berith, "god of the covenant," is evidently the same deity called Baal-berith in verse 4.

9:48

Mount Zalmon was a wooded hill near Shechem; the name suggests "dark" or "shady."

9:51

Fortified towns commonly had a keep with its own barred door as a last refuge once the walls were lost. Its flat roof gave the defenders a place to stand and throw things down on attackers at the base.

9:53

The upper stone of a household hand-mill: a shaped disc of hard stone, a few inches thick and light enough for one person to lift, turned against a lower stone to grind grain. Grinding was women's work, so this was an ordinary domestic object rather than a weapon.

9:54

An armor-bearer was a young attendant who carried a warrior's shield and weapons and stayed at his side in battle. For a fighting man to be killed by a woman was held to be the deepest possible disgrace (compare Sisera in Judges 4), and the story was in fact remembered exactly as Abimelech feared (2 Samuel 11:21).

9:57

The curse is the one Jotham called down in verse 20.