2. The self-made king (8:33-9:57)

The Abimelech story and the list of minor judges (8:33-10:5) loosely follow the pattern of the deliverer narratives: Israel sins (8:33-35); a tyrant arises, though from within Israel (9:1-57); and a deliverer, Tola, arises to save Israel (10:1-5). The deeper relationships among these sections differ from the usual pattern. The tyranny of Abimelech embodies Israel’s sin as much as it results from it. Likewise, Tola saves Israel, not by charismatic action, but by uneventful administration (Boling, 187). The story identifies an oppression more grievous than any foreign foe. Israel’s faithlessness can raise up oppression from native soil.

Jdg 8:33-35 binds Abimelech’s rise to Israel’s sin, which now appears unequivocally as idolatry under the image of harlotry (cf. 2:17; 8:27). Additionally, a dynastic element materializes. The NIV’s “failed to show kindness” (8:35) is better translated “did not keep faith with” the family of Jerub-Baal. The verse thus remarkably coordinates spiritual harlotry with the political betrayal of Gideon’s descendants. This latter crime occupies center stage in the moral drama of ch. 9.

In describing Abimelech’s grasp of power, 9:1-6 foreshadows his demise. His approach is indirect, through the mediation of his mother’s family. His overt appeal to order—one ruler rather than seventy—thinly cloaks a covert appeal to ethnic prejudice. The appeal succeeds, and Abimelech, bankrolled by the lords of Shechem from the temple treasury of the Canaanite deity Baal Berith, murders his seventy half-brothers on one stone in a savage ritual dynastic execution. Having slain the legitimate heirs of Gideon, Abimelech alone remains to be elected king. This usurpation by dynastic fratricide triggers a sequence of consequences unfolding in 9:7-57.

Jotham, sole survivor of Abimelech’s purge and legitimate heir of Jerubbaal, directly challenges Abimelech’s pretension to superiority (9:7-21). Taking his stand on the mountain from which the curses of the law were proclaimed (Jos 8:30-35), Jotham utters a fable usually taken as an attack on kingship. The fable, however, curses not kingship, but followers of unfit kings. Whoever makes a bramble king should not be surprised when the bramble cannot provide shade. Jotham transforms the fable’s foolhardiness into moral guilt. In backing an unfit ruler, the Shechemites perpetrate treachery and violence.

Jdg 9:22-24 apprises the reader of God’s ratification of Jotham’s curse, beginning with an evil “charisma.” “Evil spirit” (v.23) here denotes a divisive disposition, not a malevolent spiritual entity. Divine retribution does not hurry, but waits three years, working secretly in the bad spirit brooding between Abimelech and his coconspirators. Vv.25-55 unfold the human drama in which God’s retribution carries out its hidden design. Two threats to Abimelech’s rule appear in 9:25-30. The lords of Shechem begin sponsoring raiding forays around Shechem, and Gaal ben-Ebed steals the confidence of the Shechemites. The first threat issues explicitly from the divinely prompted disaffection noted in 9:22-24, but the second brings an ironic twist. More than a malcontent, drunken drifter boasting against authority, Gaal poses a threat because the Shechemites trust him and his ugly (Abimelech-like) ethnic slurs. These threats issue explicitly from the divinely prompted disaffection noted in 9:22-24. Abimelech, faced with treacherous Shechemites and a popular detractor, responds in force. After squashing Gaal and routing the Shechemite ambush parties Abimelech burns the Shechemite leadership alive in the very temple whose treasury financed Abimelech’s murderous rise to power. Jotham’s dynastic curse finds literal realization. The vengeful Abimelech moves on to Thebez, besieges its tower, and prepares to burn it as well. This violent excess undoes him. His gratuitous violence is now brought to mind forcibly and finally by the Thebezite woman’s millstone.

Jdg 9:56-57 summarizes the whole narrative. All the events of 9:1-55 feature human actors, but the narrator penetrates beneath human causes to the vengeance of God working secretly to redress the evil done to Gideon’s family. The account starkly criticizes one kind of relationship between leader and people. Charismatic leadership easily degenerates into craven populism. Condemning Abimelech in a self-effecting curse by the sole surviving legitimate heir of Gideon, the story unmistakably asserts the inherent superiority of inherited rule. Shechem, the scene of this story, served as the early capital of the northern kingdom. In contrast to Judah, which enjoyed an unbroken succession of legitimate Davidic kings, at least seven dynasties ruled the North. The one threat to the Davidic line in Judah came when Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel, slew all the royal heirs but one, Joash, whom the priests hid (2Ki 11-12). The stories of Abimelech/Jotham and Athaliah/Joash parallel each other closely, presenting the conviction that charismatic rule, such as the North seemed to favor in some form, easily becomes corrupted into rule by violent usurpation.