Abimelech: The First Serpent King of the Jews

In order to understand why Jesus was put to death, and what the Last Supper truly represented, we have to start with the fact that Israel was never supposed to have a king. And to see why, we have to look at the very first experiment with monarchy,by Abimelech in Shechem.  

Abimelech, who's name means "my father is king," was the son of judge Gideon and Gideon's Shechemite concubine. He would eventually claim he had inherited the right to rule over all of Shechem, much in the same way that David would claim the right to rule over all 12 Tribes, two centuries later. He is introduced in Judges 8:31 and is described as being an unprincipled, ambitious ruler, who often engaged in war with his own subjects; again, much as David and Solomon would later do. 

His father, Gideon, had previously refused such a crown for precisely the same reason Samuel would later oppose kingship in general - namely, that Yahweh alone was Israel's king. 

 

Ignoring his father's humility, Abimelech would declare himself "king" of the people of Shechem anyway, by the house of Milo next to a pillar within Shechem. Echoing the death of the sons of Egypt at the first Passover, as well as the "massacre of Innocence" by King Herod and the execution of Jesus by the Sanhedrin, Abimelech would come to power as the lone ruler of Shechem only after he killed his 70 brothers,with only Jotham getting away.

And when Jotham was later told of this news, he went on top of Mount Gerizim and cursed the people of Shechem and the house of Millo for their declaration, then fled to Beer to hide in fear of Abimelech.

As it says in Judges:

Speak, I pray you, in the ears of all the men of Shechem, Whether is better for you, that all the sons of Jerubbaal, which are threescore and ten persons, rule over you, or that one rule over you? remember also that I am your bone and your flesh." This advice was well received; it flattered the vanity of the people to think that the new king was to be one of themselves; "their hearts inclined to follow Abimelech; for they said, He is our brother. And they gave him threescore and ten pieces of silver out of the house of Baal-berith (the Lord of the Covenant), wherewith Abimelech hired vain and light fellows, which followed him.... He slew his brethren the sons of Jerubbaal, being threescore and ten persons, upon one stone." The massacre having been effected, "all the men of Shechem assembled themselves together, and all the house of Millo,* and made Abimelech king, by the oak of the pillar which was in Shechem.

Here, the silver pieces foreshadow those that would later be given to Judas, and as the one was thought to have broken the Covenant, the other was believed to renew it. And in the same way that people had paid for their enslavement to Abimelech, so too do people often only forge their own chains through their devotion to one ruler or king, one god or religion, or another.

And like Abimelech, Chirst is called "the king of the Jews" when he is put to death, not because he was, in fact, a "king," but because it was the office of the monarchy itself that needed to be executed, so that the people could rise. Jesus, in this respect, is Moses, and the monarchy was simply the office of the Pharoah by another name. 

We see this when the prophet Hosea condemned the institution of the monarchy, seeing in it a rejection of Yahweh as King (Hos. 8:49; 9:15; 10:3,9). When the Southern Kingdom fell almost a century and a half later (587 BCE), it was clear to discerning interpreters that Israel’s history as a kingdom had ended in failure.

 

Abimelech would die in 1233 BCE, when during the battle of Thebaz, he was struck on the head by a mill-stone hurled from a woman in a heavily fortified tower in the middle of the city, which just happens to be an echo of the Tree in the Garden of Eden motif, and recalls the passage in Genesis 3:15 of the "enmity between thee and the woman," and how her seed shall crush  thy head.  And the line, "thou shalt strike his heel," is essentially what Abimelech is doing by attacking the foot of the tower she was in. Abimelech, in other words, is the serpent in the garden, and the stone cast down upon him was, like the one used to slay Goliath, essentially Christ. 

But this did not mean the struggle had ended. The lust for power would continue to grow like a cancer among the people of Israel, eventually manifesting itself in the tumor of David and Solomon. And in the very same way the Catholic Church would rise up in the form of a spiritual empire where once Imperial Rome had stood, so to would the Sanhedrin rise up from the ashes of the Davidic monarchy.