Thebez

Thebez was a fortified town in the hill country of Manasseh, north-east of Shechem, remembered in Scripture for one event only: the death of Abimelech, the son of Gideon, beneath its tower (Judges 9:50-55). The Hebrew name is Tebets, which occurs three times in the Old Testament, twice in Judges 9:50 and once in 2 Samuel 11:21. Older lexicons connect the name with a root for brightness or whiteness, but its meaning is not certain.

Biblical Account

After destroying Shechem and burning the stronghold of the temple of El-berith with about a thousand people inside, Abimelech marched on Thebez, encamped against it and took the town (Judges 9:46-50). The town had a strong tower in its midst, and all the men and women, with all the leaders of the town, shut themselves inside and went up onto its roof (Judges 9:51). Abimelech came up to the door of the tower intending to burn it, as he had done at Shechem, and a woman threw an upper millstone down on his head and crushed his skull (Judges 9:52-53). He ordered his armor-bearer to run him through so that it would not be said that a woman killed him; the young man did so, and the men of Israel went home (Judges 9:54-55). The narrator closes by stating that God returned the evil of Abimelech, who had killed his seventy brothers, and the evil of the men of Shechem, on their own heads, fulfilling the curse of Jotham (Judges 9:56-57). The wider episode is treated in Abimelech's Conspiracy. The Judges chronology places these events at about 1130 BC.

The death at Thebez became a stock example of a commander lost by fighting too close to a wall. During the siege of Rabbah under David, Joab instructed his messenger that if the king asked why the troops approached the wall, and cited the woman who cast an upper millstone on Abimelech the son of Jerubbesheth so that he died at Thebez, the messenger was to add that Uriah the Hittite was dead also (2 Samuel 11:18-21). The upper millstone, the "rider" that turns on the fixed lower stone of a household hand mill, was a heavy object of ordinary domestic use.

Geography and Identification

Thebez is identified with the town of Tubas, about 16 km north-east of Nablus (ancient Shechem), on the road that descends from the central hill country toward Beth-Shean and the Jordan Valley. Eusebius in the Onomasticon placed Thebez thirteen Roman miles from Neapolis (Nablus) on the road to Scythopolis (Beth-Shean), a distance that agrees approximately with Tubas, and Jerome records a village of that name there in his day; the modern name preserves the ancient one with little change. Edward Robinson made the identification in the nineteenth century, and it is accepted as established by the standard reference works. Tubas stands at about 362 m above sea level in a fertile valley with olive groves and cisterns; the Tubas valley forms one of the landscape units of the Manasseh Hill Country Survey. The text gives no reason for Abimelech's move from Shechem to Thebez (Judges 9:50); the older reference works infer that the town had joined Shechem's revolt, and it lay within the same district of Manasseh, on the road toward Beth-Shean.

Archaeology

The ancient site lies beneath the modern town and no excavation of the biblical-period settlement has been published. Surface remains recorded at Tubas, including tombs and olive presses, attest occupation in the Roman period, consistent with the Onomasticon of Eusebius and Jerome recording it as a village in the fourth century AD. No excavated strata from the Iron Age town of Judges 9 have been published, so the identification rests on the continuity of the name and the Onomasticon distance rather than on excavated remains. The "strong tower" of Judges 9:51 belongs to a known type of fortified refuge within a Canaanite or early Israelite town, comparable to the tower of Shechem in the same chapter.

Theological Significance

Thebez is where the narrator of Judges shows the curse of Jotham reaching its conclusion. Abimelech, made king by the lords of Shechem after killing his brothers on one stone (Judges 9:5-6), died from one stone thrown by an unnamed woman, and the text records the reversal without comment beyond its closing verdict (Judges 9:56-57). Joab's later use of the episode shows that by David's reign the name of Thebez had become shorthand in Israel for a leader's needless death (2 Samuel 11:21).