Commentary - Judges 9:50-57

Bird's-eye view

Here at the end of Judges 9, we witness the final unravelling of a petty tyrant. Abimelech, the bramble king, who began his reign by murdering his seventy brothers on a single stone, ends his reign with his own head being crushed by a single stone. This is not an accident. This is the calculated poetry of God's justice. The entire chapter is a sordid tale of what happens when men reject God as their king and opt for a man who is all too willing to play the part. Abimelech's rise was built on bloodshed and treachery with the men of Shechem, and his fall is marked by that same bloodshed and treachery turning back upon him.

This passage serves as the capstone to the whole affair. It demonstrates with stark and brutal clarity that God is not mocked. What a man sows, that he will also reap. Abimelech sowed violence and pride, and he reaps a violent and humiliating death. The men of Shechem sowed rebellion and idolatry, and they reap the fulfillment of the curse pronounced upon them. This is not just a historical account of a minor skirmish in a backwater town; it is a worked-out illustration of divine providence, showing how God weaves even the most wicked and foolish human choices into the tapestry of His perfect and righteous judgment.

Outline

Clause-by-Clause Commentary

v. 50 Then Abimelech went to Thebez, and he camped against Thebez and captured it.

Abimelech is on a roll, or so he thinks. Having brutally put down the rebellion in Shechem, burning a thousand of them alive in their little tower, he moves on to the next town that dared to defy him. Thebez was likely allied with Shechem. Abimelech is acting like a true king, putting down insurrection, consolidating his power. But his kingdom is a kingdom of brambles, built on nothing but sharp edges and self-interest. He is a whirlwind of violence, and whirlwinds do not last. They just blow themselves out. His capture of the city is just the setup for his final fall.

v. 51 But there was a strong tower in the center of the city, and all the men and women with all the lords of the city fled there and shut themselves in; and they went up on the roof of the tower.

This is a replay of what happened at Shechem. The people of the city, seeing the writing on the wall, flee to their last defensible position. They know what Abimelech is capable of. They saw the smoke from Shechem. The tower represents their last hope of survival against this madman. Everyone is in there, from the common folk to the city leadership. They bolt the doors and head for the roof, the highest point, hoping to hold out or perhaps rain down projectiles on their attacker. It is a desperate scene, but God often uses desperate scenes to display His power.

v. 52 So Abimelech came to the tower and fought against it and approached the entrance of the tower to burn it with fire.

Abimelech has a one-track mind. What worked at Shechem ought to work here. He is arrogant, flush with his recent victory, and he sees no reason to change tactics. Fire is his instrument of choice. He intends to repeat his atrocity, to burn these people alive just as he did the others. Notice his personal involvement. He himself approaches the entrance. This is the pride that comes before the fall, writ large. He is not directing the battle from a safe distance; he is at the very door, eager to light the match. He wants to be the agent of their destruction, but in doing so, he places himself directly in the line of God's judgment.

v. 53 But a certain woman threw an upper millstone on Abimelech’s head, and she smashed his skull.

And here is the pivot of the story. All of Abimelech's masculine, violent, fiery ambition is brought to nothing by a certain woman. The text does not even give us her name. She is an anonymous agent of the Most High. She uses a domestic tool, an upper millstone, something used for grinding grain to make bread. It is an instrument of life, and she turns it into an instrument of judgment. God's sense of irony is unparalleled. Abimelech, the great warrior, the son of Gideon, the self-made king, is not struck down in glorious battle by a worthy opponent. He is taken out by a woman he never saw, with a piece of kitchen equipment. His skull, full of proud and bloody schemes, is smashed. The Hebrew is emphatic; it means it was decisively crushed, cracked into pieces. This is the hand of God, using the weak to confound the mighty.

v. 54 Then he called quickly to the young man, his armor bearer, and said to him, “Draw your sword and put me to death, lest they say of me, ‘A woman killed him.’ ” So the young man pierced him through, and he died.

Abimelech's final moments are a perfect reflection of his life. His chief concern is not his soul, not his impending meeting with God, but his public relations. His vanity is his last thought. He cannot bear the shame of it being known that a woman was his undoing. In his pagan, macho worldview, this was the ultimate disgrace. So he begs for a quick death from his armor bearer to preserve his pathetic legacy. Saul would later try a similar move on Mount Gilboa, for similar reasons of pride. The young man complies, and Abimelech dies. But the joke is on him. His effort to avoid the shame is the very thing that records the shame for all time. We only know he was worried about a woman killing him because he said so. His vanity wrote his own humiliating epitaph.

v. 55 Then the men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead, so each went away to his home.

The whole enterprise was built on one man's charisma and brutality. With the head of the snake cut off, the body goes limp. The army was not fighting for a cause, for a nation, or for God. They were fighting for Abimelech. Once he is gone, their motivation evaporates. They simply melt away and go home. This shows the utter hollowness of a movement built on a wicked man. There is no cohesion, no loyalty to anything higher than the tyrant himself. His death is the end of the story. The bramble bush has been burned up.

v. 56 Thus God returned the evil of Abimelech, which he had done to his father in killing his seventy brothers.

Now the narrator steps forward to give us the theological interpretation. This was not a fluke. This was not a lucky shot. This was God. The word returned is key. God is in the business of returning evil back onto the heads of those who perpetrate it. The evil is treated like a boomerang. Abimelech's great sin, the foundation of his bloody reign, was the slaughter of his brothers. God did not forget that. The justice for that crime was not immediate, but it was certain. God settled the account.

v. 57 God also returned all the evil of the men of Shechem on their own heads, and the curse of Jotham the son of Jerubbaal came upon them.

And God was not finished. The men of Shechem were Abimelech's co-conspirators. They funded his massacre. They made him king. Their evil is also returned to them, right on their own heads. The narrator then connects all of this directly to the curse spoken by Jotham, the one brother who escaped the massacre. Jotham had stood on Mount Gerizim and told the parable of the trees and the bramble, and he had pronounced a curse: that fire would come from Abimelech to devour the men of Shechem, and fire from the men of Shechem to devour Abimelech. And that is precisely what happened. God honored the words of Jotham and brought his curse to full and fiery fruition. This is a potent reminder that words have power, and that the curses and blessings of God's covenant are not idle threats or empty promises. God's world is intensely moral, and He sees to it that the accounts are always, eventually, settled.

Application

The story of Abimelech is a cautionary tale for any age, but particularly for our own. We live in a time when men are eager to anoint their own kings, to find political saviors who promise to be tough and get things done, regardless of their character. Abimelech is the prototype of the godless strongman. His story shows us that such leadership is a dead end. It is a bramble bush that offers nothing but shade for a moment, and then consumes everyone in fire.

We must learn that God's justice, while sometimes slow by our reckoning, is always perfect and precise. The millstone that crushed Abimelech's skull was not random; it was aimed by the hand of God. The evil that men do comes back to them. This should be a terror to the wicked and a profound comfort to the righteous. God is on His throne, and He is working all things, even the sordid politics of a backwater Canaanite town, according to the counsel of His will.

Finally, we see the folly of living for our own reputation. Abimelech's last gasp was an attempt to manage his legacy, to avoid shame. But true honor is found not in what men say of us, but in what God says of us. Our task is to live faithfully before Him, to reject the bramble kings of this world, and to submit ourselves to the one true King, the Lord Jesus Christ. His kingdom is not built on bloodshed and pride, but on His own shed blood and perfect humility. He is the true tree of life, and only under His branches can we find true safety.