for a
livelihood, or which was dependent upon him, would bind him to the soil,
and expose his property to disasters likely to be as keenly felt as
wounds inflicted on his person. He would feel the need, therefore,
of laws to secure to him in time of peace the quiet possession of his
wealth, of an army to protect it in time of war, and of a ruler to
cause, on the one hand, the laws to be respected, and to become the
leader, on the other, of the military forces. Jerubbaal is said to have,
in the first instance, refused the crown, but everything goes to prove
that he afterwards virtually accepted it. He became, it is true, only
a petty king, whose sovereignty was limited to Manasseh, a part of
Ephraim, and a few towns, such as Succoth and Penuel, beyond the Jordan.
The Canaanite city of Shechem also paid him homage. Like all great
chiefs, he had also numerous wives, and he recognised as the national
Deity the God to whom he owed his victories.

Out of the spoil taken from the Midianites he formed and set up at
Ophrah an ephod, which became, as we learn, "a snare unto him and unto
his house," but he had also erected under a terebinth tree a stone altar
to Jahveh-Shalom ("Jehovah is peace").* This sanctuary, with its altar
and ephod, soon acquired great celebrity, and centuries after its
foundation it was the object of many pilgrimages from a distance.

Jerubbaal was the father by his Israelite wives of seventy children,
and, by a Canaanite woman whom he had taken as a concubine at Shechem,
of one son, called Abimelech.**

* The _Book of Judges_ separates the altar from the ephod,
placing the erection of the former at the time of the
vocation of Gideon (vi. 11-31) and that of the ephod after
the victory (viii. 24-27). The sanctuary of Ophrah was
possibly in existence before the time of Jerubbaal, and the
sanctity of the place may have determined his selection of
the spot for placing the altar and ephod there.

** Judges viii. 30, 31.

The succession to the throne would naturally have fallen to one of the
seventy, but before this could be arranged, Abimelech "went to Shechem
unto his mother's brethren, and spake with them, and with all the family
of the house of his mother's father, saying, 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 y