Today, I am reading and commenting on Judges 9-10.
The Israelites had attempted to make Gideon their king, with one of his sons and then one of his grandsons inheriting the throne after him, but Gideon declined that title for himself or his heirs. However, one of his sons, Abimelek, attempted to claim that title for himself by appealing to his mother’s brothers in Shechem. At the behest of Abimelek’s uncles, the people of Shechem provided money for Abimelek to hire some men to support his claim to kingship. Using those hired men as muscle, Abimelek did what many kings before and after him have done: he killed his brothers, except for one who managed to escape. As is often the case with rulers who start their reign in such a manner, things ended badly for both Shechem and Abimelek. One could say that the people of Shechem did not know what Abimelek was going to do after he hired the men they gave him the money to hire, and that would be fair, except that they still went ahead and crowned him king after he had killed his half-brothers.
I want to dig a little closer into what went wrong in the account of Abimelek. Abimelek appealed to the people of Shechem by suggesting that if they made him king they would gain advantages over others in Israel because they were closely related to him, and they supported him as king out of that selfish desire. They continued to support him even after he killed his half-brothers, who were at least as closely related to him as they were. So, they initially supported him as king because they believed they would benefit from him being king, not because they thought he would make a good king. They continued to support making him king even after he demonstrated that he would be a bad king. Unfortunately, too often we follow the example of the people of Shechem rather than learning from it. Support people to become good leaders because we believe they will make good leaders, not because we believe it will be to our personal advantage for them to lead.
I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.