In his native town
of Ophrah he kept up a great establishment, where also he built
a temple with an image of Jehovah overlaid with the gold which
he had taken from the Midianites. He transmitted to his sons
an authority, which was not limited to Abiezer and Manasseh
alone, but, however slightly and indirectly, extended over
Ephraim as well.
On the foundations laid by Gideon Abimelech his son sought to
establish a kingship over Israel, that is, over Ephraim and
Manasseh. The predominance, however, which had been naturally
accorded to his father in virtue of his personal merits, Abimelech
looked upon as a thing seized by force and to be maintained with
injustice; and in this way he soon destroyed those fair
beginnings out of which even at that time a kingdom might have
arisen within the house of Joseph. The one permanent fruit of his
activity was that Shechem was destroyed as a Canaanite city and
rebuilt for Israel. /1/
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1. On the narratives contained in the Book of Judges see Bleek,
Einl. ins Alte Testament (4th ed.), 88-98, and especially the
sections on Barak and Sisera, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson, the Danite
migration, and the Benjamites of Gibeah (93-98).
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