Jotham’s Parable

The men of Shechem have crowned Abimelech as king—despite the fact that he has just carried out a mass fratricide. God is clearly judging Israel by leaving the people to their sin. As Matthew Henry notes, “It was a sign they had provoked God to depart from them that neither any prophet was sent nor any remarkable judgment, to awaken this stupid people, and to stop the progress of this threatening mischief.” However, God has not left Himself without a witness against evil. One of Gideon’s 70 sons managed to survive the massacre—Jotham, the youngest of them all, who hid himself from Abimelech and his thugs (Judg. 9:5). Does Jotham seek to raise an army to avenge his brothers or to defend his alleged crown rights? No, he contents himself with reproving Abimelech and the Shechemites, and warning them of the evil their actions will bring.

From the top of Mount Gerizim, Jotham cries out to the men of Shechem on some occasion when they are gathered at the mountain’s foot. “ ‘Listen to me,’ ” he urges them, “ ‘that God may listen to you!’ ” He is warning them that they must heed his call to turn from their evil or God will not relent in His judgment. Ironically, Gerizim was the mountain from which the blessings of God’s covenant were proclaimed in a ceremony mandated by Moses (Deut. 27:11–13; Josh. 8:33). Jotham’s words will bring blessing if the Shechemites will receive them, but as things turn out, they will bring curse.

Jotham tells a parable designed to illustrate the foolishness of the Shechemites’ choice of Abimelech as king. The trees, he says, once determined to anoint a king over them. They first approached useful plants: the olive tree, the fig tree, and the vine. But those plants chose to serve rather than to rule. “[Jotham] hereby applauds the generous modesty of Gideon, and the other judges who were before him, and perhaps of the sons of Gideon, who had declined accepting the state and power of kings when they might have had them,” Henry writes. Thus, the trees invite a worthless plant to be their ruler. But the bramble displays his inherent unfitness to rule by promising to give the far-larger trees shade if they are sincere and warning that he will burn them down if they are false. Thus, Jotham shows that the Shechemites have chosen as their king one who is full of vanity and pretensions.