Judges 9:5 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

He went and slew his brethren The persons who were most likely to hinder him in establishing his tyranny. Threescore and ten Wanting one, as is here expressed. Here we see the power of ambition; what savage beasts it will render men to each other; how it will break through all the ties of natural affection, and natural conscience, and sacrifice that which is most sacred, dear, and valuable to its designs. We see also the peril attending high birth and honour. It was their being the sons of so great a man as Gideon that made Abimelech jealous of them, and exposed them thus to danger and to death. We find just the same number of Ahab's sons slain together at Samaria, 2 Kings 10:1. “Let none then,” says Henry, “envy those of high extraction, or complain of their own meanness and obscurity: the lower the safer.” Upon one stone As a stone was sometimes used for an altar, (1 Samuel 6:14,) some have conjectured from hence, that Abimelech intended to make his brethren a great victim to Baal, in revenge of the sacrifice of the bullock prepared for Baal, chap. Judges 6:25; and to expiate the crime of Gideon, as these idolaters accounted it, by the sacrifice of all his sons.