Judges 9:50

These eight verses close the story that fills Judges 9. Abimelech was a son of Gideon, who was also called Jerubbaal (Judges 6:32). He won over the men of Shechem, who gave him money from the house of Baal-berith to hire followers, and with them he killed his seventy brothers on one stone at Ophrah and was made king (Judges 9:1–6). Jotham, the youngest, escaped. From mount Gerizim he told Shechem his parable of the trees and laid a curse on the partnership between the city and its king (Judges 9:7–21). After three years God set the two against each other, and the quarrel ended with Shechem destroyed and sown with salt and its tower burned with a thousand people inside (Judges 9:22–49).

Shechem had a better history than this. It was a Canaanite city that had been taken into Israel’s land, and Joshua had renewed the covenant there (Joshua 24:1–28). By Abimelech’s day the mood of the land was the one Judges sums up twice: “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6, and again at Judges 21:25). The judges before him were raised up by God. Abimelech made himself king by bloodshed, long before God gave Israel a king, and his name sits strangely on him. ʼĂbîymelek is built from ʼâb, “father”, and melek, “king”, and means “father of the king”, yet he ruled as a destroyer of his own father’s house.

Verse 50 tells the taking of Thebez in three plain verbs. He “went” (yâlak, to walk or go), he “encamped against” the city (chânâh, to pitch a tent or camp, here a siege camp set round the walls to cut the city off), and he “took it” (lâkad, to catch or capture). Thebez had probably resisted his rule as Shechem had, and the verse spends so few words on its fall that Abimelech looks unstoppable. It is his last success.

Cities in Canaan were often built with a last stronghold inside the walls. Thebez had one, a migdâl (tower) of ʿôz (strength, might), a citadel with thick walls, usually on the highest ground, where the people could hold out once the city itself had fallen. Everyone ran to it. The verb is nûwç, to flee, and the verse is careful to say who fled: “all the men and women, and all they of the city.” They “shut it to them” (ṣâgar, to shut or close), sealing themselves in, and went up to the top, the gâg or roof, which was the best place both to watch from and to drop things on an enemy below.

Abimelech had met this before. At Shechem the people had crowded into a tower, and he had piled wood against it and burned them alive (Judges 9:49). A tower’s wooden door was its weak point, and fire was the usual way through. So he “fought against it, and went hard unto the door of the tower to burn it with fire.” The verb for burning, sâraph, is the ordinary word for setting something on fire. “Went hard unto” means that he came right up to the door, and he came in person. The method that had worked at Shechem brought him within reach of the roof.

One sentence ends the reign: “And a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech’s head, and all to brake his skull.” We are never told her name. The verb shâlak means to throw or hurl, so she threw the stone with purpose. The word for the stone, rekeb, names the upper millstone, the top stone of a hand mill that was turned to grind grain. Grinding was women’s daily work, and every house had such a stone. An ordinary tool from a kitchen became the weapon that stopped a king.

“All to brake” is old English for “completely broke”. It was a fatal wound, to the gulgôleth, the skull, a word that comes from a root meaning to roll. The head that had planned the murder of seventy men was the part of him that was struck. Those brothers had died “upon one stone” (Judges 9:5), and it was a stone that came down on their killer.

God often brings down the strong by what looks weak. David told Goliath that the battle is the LORD’s and that he saves without sword and spear (1 Samuel 17:47). Here a warrior with an army is felled by a woman he never saw, with a tool no soldier would carry.

He wanted to control how he would be remembered. In Israel and the nations around it a fighting man’s honour rested on his strength in battle, and to be killed by a woman was the deepest shame a warrior could suffer. So “he called hastily” (mᵉhêrâh, quickly) to “the young man his armourbearer”. The word naʻar means a boy or lad and often a servant, and an armourbearer was a trusted attendant who carried his master’s weapons and stayed at his side. “Draw thy sword, and slay me,” Abimelech said, using mûwth, to kill, “that men say not of me, A woman slew him.” The word for woman is the everyday ʼishshâh. The young man “thrust him through” (dâqar, to pierce), “and he died.”

His last thought was for his name. With his skull broken and moments left, he said nothing of his brothers, of Shechem or of God. The plan failed in any case, because Scripture itself records who struck him, and every reader since has known that a woman’s hand brought Abimelech down.

Judges has shown us a death like this before, and it was told as a triumph. Jael killed Sisera, the enemy commander, with a tent peg (Judges 4:21), and Judges 4 celebrates what God did through her. Abimelech knew what such an end meant for a soldier’s name. He had lived by the sword and he died on one, as Jesus later said of all who take it up: “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52).

The men of Israel had been held together by Abimelech himself, and when he died there was nothing left to hold them. “Men of Israel” is ‘îysh Yisrâʼêl, and “every man” is the same word ‘îysh used for “each one”. They “departed”, which is yâlak again, the verb that brought Abimelech to Thebez in verse 50, and each went to “his place” (mâqôwm, a place or spot), which simply means home.

Israel in those days had no standing army and no central government. Men were gathered for a campaign and went back to their tribes when it ended. Abimelech left no heir, no successor and no cause that anyone cared to carry on, so the siege of Thebez stopped the moment he fell. A kingdom built on murder lasted three years and vanished in an afternoon.

The last two verses step back from the events and say who was behind them. “Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech.” The name for God is ʼĕlôhîym, plural in form and joined here to a singular verb, the name of the one true God. The verb shûwb means to turn back or return. God made Abimelech’s wickedness come back to him. The same verb stands in verse 57, where God did “render” the evil of the men of Shechem “upon their heads”, and the same word raʻ lies behind both “wickedness” and “evil”. Raʻ covers the wrong a person does and also the harm that follows from it, so the evil they did and the evil that befell them are named with one word.

This was God’s doing from the start of the quarrel. Earlier in the chapter we read, “Then God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem” (Judges 9:23). The falling-out of two partners in crime looked like ordinary politics, and Judges tells us it was judgment.

Abimelech shows what a self-made king is, and by contrast he turns our eyes to the King whom God has given. Abimelech took a throne by killing his brothers. Jesus, “being in the form of God”, made himself of no reputation, took the form of a servant and was obedient to death on a cross (Philippians 2:6–8). Abimelech came to cities to burn them, and the Son of man came “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). Abimelech used his last breath to escape shame. Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame (Hebrews 12:2), and by that cross he triumphed over every power set against us (Colossians 2:14–15).

Their kingdoms differ in the same way. Abimelech’s men scattered to their homes when he died. Christ’s death and resurrection gathered a people “out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” (Revelation 5:9). He is the Prince of Peace whose government has no end (Isaiah 9:6–7), he reigns on David’s throne for ever (Luke 1:32–33), and his is the everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:27) that “shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44). He is “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Revelation 19:16). God has delivered us from the power of darkness into that kingdom (Colossians 1:13–14), and Christ himself is the strong tower his people shelter in (Psalm 61:3), for our life “is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

The deepest link is in the word “render”. God turned Abimelech’s evil back on Abimelech’s own head, and that is what justice owes every sinner, since “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) and all who break God’s law stand under its curse (Galatians 3:10). At the cross God laid our evil on another head. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Christ became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), given because God so loved the world (John 3:16), and in him God is both just and the one who justifies the sinner who believes (Romans 3:23–26). The same Jesus will sit as judge on the last day (Revelation 20:11–15), and whoever has fled to him has already found shelter from that judgment.

For three years it looked as if murder had worked. Seventy men were dead, their killer was king, and the only voice raised against him belonged to a young man who had to run for his life. These verses are God’s answer to that stretch of time. He had seen all of it, and he repaid it at the hour and by the hand he chose. Justice that waits is still justice, and the wait in Abimelech’s case was three years.

The passage also shows us who God uses. The deliverer of Thebez was a woman whose name nobody wrote down, holding a tool she used for making bread. God’s work has always been carried by people the world would overlook, and he is able to bring down the proud without any army at all.

Abimelech’s dying wish holds up a mirror as well. He cared more for what men would say of him than for where he stood with God, and the very thing he tried to hide is what Scripture has told about him ever since. The honour that lasts comes from God, who gives it to the humble, and the one safe place when judgment falls is the refuge God himself has provided in his Son.