These opening words bring Abimelech’s chaotic and turbulent career into focus as the backdrop to Tola’s judgeship. Abimelech, the son of Gideon and his Shechemite concubine, was a cruel, narcissistic, power-hungry, bloodthirsty man who desperately wanted to be king, basically a king like the Canaanites. He set brother against brother. He used money from the temple of Baal to hire worthless men to kill seventy of his brothers, one-by-one, on a single stone. He snuffed out a rebellion against his rule by mercilessly slaughtering the citizens of his hometown of Shechem. He killed them in the open field, captured and destroyed the city, forcing about one thousand men and women into the Tower of Shechem before he burned it and them to the ground. Then he was going to do the same thing in Thebez. But a certain woman messed up his plan, dropping an upper millstone on his head, crushing his skull. Abimelech’s reign of terror lasted a mere three years before the Lord ended it, with a stone to the head, a sword thrust through him, and the curse of Jotham fulfilled. And the people were thrown into disarray. With no clear leader to take over, they simply returned home (Judges 9:55). The view is black indeed. And when the reader's emotions have been so intensely involved in dilemma and brutality, the quickest way to engage them again is to ease the tension, to invoke an interlude.¹