They gave him seventy pieces of silver out of the house of Baal Berith, with which Abimelech hired vain and reckless fellows who followed him.
World English Bible
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They gave him seventy pieces of silver out of the house of Baal Berith, with which Abimelech hired vain and reckless fellows who followed him.
World English Bible
Questions where the Bible appears to say two different things, with the passages on each side set together.
Judges 8:30 says Gideon had seventy sons. Judges 9:5 reports that Abimelech slew his seventy brothers on one stone, but the youngest, Jotham, escaped — leaving Gideon with seventy-one sons in total when Abimelech is counted, or seventy-two when Jotham survives the slaughter that supposedly killed all seventy.
Critical scholarship: Leans toward a genuine contradiction.
The proposed answers and sources for each reading are on the question page.
Each section sets the viewpoints side by side; you weigh the evidence. Here, "critical scholarship" means academic study, not a value judgment. How this is built →
Within each section, grouped by shared field or question type — not a cross-section comparison.
This citation refers to this GEBible page — the verse and the analysis gathered here. To cite the underlying scholarship, cite those sources directly.
"Judges 9:4 — Scripture Analysis" GEBible, https://gebible.app/analysis/verse/judges/9/4?version=WEB (retrieved 26 August 2026).