The judges of Israel

Abimelech

The usurper who was no true judge · After Gideon's death · Delivered Israel from Israel itself, from within · Three troubled years, then ruin

Abimelech was a son of Gideon by a concubine of Shechem, and he was no deliverer at all. He murdered seventy of his own brothers on one stone to seize power, was made king by the men of Shechem, and ruled three years before God turned Shechem against him. He burned a tower full of people, and at last a woman dropped a millstone on his head. His story is placed among the judges as a dark warning, the anti-judge who saved no one and destroyed much.

Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech, which he did unto his father, in slaying his seventy brethren:Judges 9:56 (KJV)

His story from Scripture

After Gideon died, Abimelech, his son by a concubine in Shechem, went to his mother's people and persuaded them to make him ruler. They gave him silver from the temple of their idol, and with it he hired vain and reckless men. He went to his father's house and slew his brethren, the sons of Gideon, threescore and ten persons, upon one stone. Only Jotham, the youngest, escaped by hiding.

The men of Shechem made Abimelech king. Jotham stood on Mount Gerizim and cried out the parable of the trees, who sought a king and were refused by the olive, the fig, and the vine, until only the worthless bramble agreed to reign, and the bramble threatened to burn them all. So it proved. After three years God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem, and they turned on one another. Abimelech destroyed Shechem and burned about a thousand people in the tower of their god. Then at Thebez he came to burn another tower, and a woman cast a piece of millstone upon his head and broke his skull. Ashamed that a woman had killed him, he begged his armourbearer to run him through, and so he died. The text concludes, Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech, which he did unto his father, in slaying his seventy brethren.

His character, honestly

Abimelech is included here precisely because he is the opposite of a judge, and it would be dishonest to smooth that over. He was not raised up by God, not filled with the Spirit, and delivered no one. He was driven by naked ambition and murdered his own family to get a crown. His name means my father is king, and he tried to make it true by blood. The book of Judges refuses to flatter its own line of heroes; it sets a fratricide and tyrant in the middle of the account and calls his rule what it was.

How God worked even here

God did not raise up Abimelech, but the text is careful to say that God rendered his wickedness back on his own head, and repaid the men of Shechem too. Even in a story with no deliverer, the God of justice is at work, turning evil against itself and refusing to let innocent blood go unanswered. Jotham's parable warned that a people who choose a bramble for a king will be burned by it, and they were. The Judge above all judges was still on the throne, even when the man wearing the crown was a murderer.

The cycle at its darkest

Abimelech marks how far the nation has fallen. There is no crying out to the LORD here, no repentance, no rescue, only Israelites destroying Israelites while the true King is forgotten. The cycle has broken down into something worse than oppression from outside: self-destruction from within. It is a preview of the book's terrible last chapters, and a picture of what a people become when everyone does what is right in his own eyes and no true king reigns.

How he points to Christ, by contrast

Abimelech is the false king, the bramble who seized a throne by murdering his brothers and left ashes behind. He shows, in the sharpest way, the world's hunger for a true King, and how deadly the wrong one is. Jesus is his exact opposite: the true King who did not kill his brothers to take a crown, but laid down his own life to give his brothers the kingdom. Where Abimelech reigned three years by blood and ended in shame, Christ reigns forever by the blood he shed for others, and his crown will never fall.

A note on honesty: the book of Judges is one of the darkest and most candid books in the Bible, and it does not flatter its own heroes. The failures named above are the ones Scripture itself records. We do not whitewash them, because the point of the book is not how good the judges were, but how faithful God was to a people who could not save themselves, and how deeply they, and we, need the true Deliverer.

Related: Previous: Gideon · Next: Tola · The Kings of Israel and Judah · All the judges of Israel