Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Bramble That Would Be King
Judges 9:22-41
22 Abimelech was prince over Israel three years. · WEB
God sets Abimelech and Shechem against each other, and the alliance built on murder comes apart over a drunken boast at harvest.
Abimelech was prince over Israel three years Judges 9:22.
The reign is given one verse and a short term. Note the word — prince, not king, though Shechem had made him king Judges 9:6; and no achievement of any kind is recorded for the three years.
Then God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech Judges 9:23.
The judgment is announced before it is narrated, and it is attributed to God. What is sent is not an army but a spirit of ill will between two parties — the alliance is made to rot from inside. Scripture speaks this way elsewhere of God's use of a lying or troubling spirit as an instrument of judgment 1 Samuel 16:14 1 Kings 22:22, and it does not soften it here.
That the violence done to the seventy sons of Jerubbaal might come, and that their blood might be laid on Abimelech their brother who killed them, and on the men of Shechem who strengthened his hands Judges 9:24.
The purpose clause is explicit, and it assigns guilt to both parties: the man who did the killing and the city that financed it Judges 9:4. Jotham's conditional curse is here restated as a settled verdict. The chapter's remaining thirty verses are bookkeeping.
They went out into the field, harvested their vineyards, trod the grapes, celebrated, and went into the house of their god and ate and drank, and cursed Abimelech Judges 9:27.
The rebellion begins at a harvest festival in a temple, with wine. Gaal, a newcomer the city has taken up, makes the speech: who is Abimelech... that we should serve him? Judges 9:28, and follows it with a boast — I wish that this people were under my hand! Then I would remove Abimelech Judges 9:29. It is the fable running again: another willing bramble, and a city that trusts whoever presents himself.
He sent messengers to Abimelech craftily Judges 9:31.
Zebul, the city governor who is Abimelech's man, informs on Gaal and supplies the tactics: come by night, lie in the fields, attack at sunrise Judges 9:32–33. So the city is betrayed by its own official — treachery answering treachery, exactly as verse 23 said.
"Behold, people are coming down from the tops of the mountains." Zebul said to him, "You see the shadows of the mountains as if they were men" Judges 9:36.
A cool piece of deception at the gate. Zebul talks Gaal out of believing his own eyes until the ambush is too close to escape, then turns on him: now where is your mouth, that you said, "Who is Abimelech, that we should serve him?"... Please go out now and fight with them Judges 9:38.
Gaal fights, loses, and is expelled Judges 9:39–41. He had promised to remove Abimelech and is himself removed within a paragraph, and the city he stirred up is left without the champion it had trusted — and with a ruler outside its walls who now knows exactly who was disloyal.
held with reason What this mark means