A Watermelon Named Abimelech

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Then Abimelech went to Thebez … Within the city was a strong tower and all the people of the city fled to it, all the men and women, and shut themselves in; and they went to the roof of the tower. And Abimelech came to the tower and fought against it, and drew near to the door of the tower to burn it with fire. And a certain woman threw an upper millstone upon Abimelech’s head and crushed his skull. Then he called hastily to the young man his armor-bearer, and said to him, “Draw your sword and kill me, lest men say of me, ‘A woman has killed him.’”

(Judges 9:50–54)

The woman hefted the black basalt grinding stone. She squinted into the sunshine and made out the rotund form of Abimelech on the ramparts. She took aim and hurled the stone straight at him. Red gore splattered as it found its mark. A shout went up from the watchers on the city walls and the rooftop. Victory was theirs!

This may sound like the story of the unnamed woman of Thebez who killed Abimelech, but it is not. Instead, this woman has a name: Gina Rogers. The story is not set in the Iron Age but on Wednesday, July 26, 2000, and although she was standing on an Iron Age I house, she was not at Thebez near Shechem (modern Nablus). Instead she was at Tall al-‘Umayri just south of Amman, Jordan.^a The rotund form of her enemy was not a man, but a watermelon that we had named “Abimelech.”

The woman of ancient Thebez had only one purpose in mind: to defend the city from its attackers. The participants of our millstone throw, however, had three: to have fun, to defend the strength of women and to advocate the use of archaeological data by Biblical scholars and commentators.

What inspired us to launch this attack on Abimelech the watermelon? Several things. We are, respectively, an English professor and writer (Denise), and a doctoral candidate and pastor (Mary). Both of us were participating in the excavations at Tall al-‘Umayri. As over the years we have prepared classes, lectures, dissertations and sermons, we have often been impressed by the physical strength of women in the ancient world. They carried water, probably helped lift heavy stones for house-building, milked sheep and goats, spun, wove and engaged in the daily “grind” of preparing bread for themselves and their families.

Thus we were astonished to read that “the notion that a millstone is even present at the top of a tower is at least a highly unrealistic detail,” and that it echoes the mythological story of Anat; that the woman was an “Amazon”; and that the account of her throwing the millstone was “hyperbole”—she “must have ‘dropped’ it, and probably had help, as a single individual could hardly manage to throw one.”¹

This was especially surprising, because not only does the Biblical text insist that it was one woman (Hebrew: ishah achat) who threw the millstone,² but also we—women who primarily write, read, teach, grade and preach for our careers—knew that we could easily carry upper millstones. We have excavated many of them during several seasons at ‘Umayri, and carried them, along with full pottery pails, down the tell and back to camp. We had never actually tried throwing them, but we were sure we could.

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To prove our point and vindicate the woman of Thebez, we held a millstone-throwing contest on the upper story of ‘Umayri’s reconstructed four-room Iron Age I house dating to the time of the Judges. To prepare for the event, we assembled and weighed all the complete or nearly complete upper millstones found up to that point in the 2000 excavation season. The weights ranged from 4 to 9 pounds. Together, the six upper millstones weighed 41 pounds, 8 ounces. We packed them into a crate and one of us (Denise), waving aside offers of assistance from dig directors and workmen, carried the full crate from the workroom to the car, from the car up the tell and from the top of the tell to the second story of the house.

After dig artist Rhonda Root drew a bearded face on our watermelon and volunteer Garrick Herr placed it in position on the rampart, nine women from the dig, 037fortified with ample servings of felafel, climbed the ladder to the roof of the house and hefted the millstones. Not one of us complained about the weight and all could have easily thrown a complete millstone.³

But we agreed that it would be unwise to throw complete ancient artifacts, so we compromised by using broken millstones to replicate the actions of the woman of Thebez.

We were successful: The first participant, Gina, hit Abimelech dead-on. With the damage she did, if she had hit a warrior rather than a watermelon, he would not have been able to ask his armor-bearer to finish him off!

Thus the woman of Thebez was vindicated from her detractors. Not only could she have thrown the millstone, she could easily have killed the enemy. Why then do scholars of both genders (and feminists at that!) belittle her feat by saying it is unlikely or hyperbolic?

The answer is that some Bible scholars do not know the archaeological record well enough to make correct assumptions about mills and milling.

Perhaps when they think of millstones, they think of the large, commercial rotary mills. There are two types of these, both powered by donkeys: the wheel-shaped stone, 4 to 5 feet in diameter, turned on a round lower stone; and the hour-glass shaped basalt mill, which stands about 2 feet high and 2.5 feet in diameter atop a cone-shaped base. Scholars are correct that such mills would not be found at the top of a tower. The weight of the millstones, the animals needed to operate them and the quantity of grain and flour that would have to be carried up and down stairs or ladders would make them impractical anywhere but on the ground. Nor could one person throw—or perhaps even easily push—this type of millstone. But these large rotary mills were uncommon in the Near East until the Hellenistic period, nearly 1,000 years after the period of the Judges. The text of Judges 9 surely refers to something else.

Perhaps scholars imagine that the woman used a round millstone, a foot or more in diameter and about 2 inches thick, weighing approximately 27 pounds. This upper stone would have been turned by a wooden handle upon a fixed lower stone.⁴

She would have been able to lift and drop this, but it would have been very unwieldy to throw. This type of millstone, however, did not become common until the Middle Ages and therefore could not have been used by the woman of Thebez.⁵

Instead, for millennia women ground their grain daily using a saddle quern (Hebrew: pelah tahtit), a concave stone that was about 1.5 to 3 feet long and 0.5 to 1.5 feet wide, along with a loaf-shaped hand grinder (pelah rekeb), or upper millstone. The upper stone, which could be grasped easily in one hand, was about as long as the quern was wide. Typically, querns and upper millstones are made of black basalt because the hard yet porous stone provides a rough surface and many cutting edges. These millstones, whole or fragmented, are found frequently at Bronze and Iron Age sites throughout Jordan and Israel.⁶

Archaeological evidence attests to milling on an upper story. In 1994 a saddle quern, estimated to weigh 300 062pounds, was found on top of 35 inches of mud brick rubble that once had been the upper story of ‘Umayri’s four-room Iron Age I house. Although it would have been difficult to carry such a heavy quern to the second floor or roof of a house, it would need to be done only once. After that, the repetitive, daily task of grinding grain would be more pleasant: The women or servants could benefit from the breeze as they worked in the shade of reed awnings or grape arbors.

What’s more, it would be easy and natural for the woman of Thebez to carry a stone weighing between 4 and 9 pounds to the tower to grind some grain. Although she had left her household for the security of the tower, she certainly could have brought her grinding stone along with her. The siege might last several days and food would need to be prepared. The stone was very portable and there were no local sources of basalt, making replacement difficult if her home were looted or burned. She needed it daily to prepare flour for bread. Millstones were recognized to be so important that Deuteronomy 24:6 states, “No one shall take a mill or an upper millstone in pledge, for that would be taking a life in pledge.”

The strong tower referred to in Judges 9:51 could easily be the tallest house or public building in the city, perhaps located conveniently along the edge of town and using the city wall to support and fortify it (consider Rahab’s house in Joshua 2:15). Because of the great amount of work involved in erecting one Iron Age house, it would be logical for buildings to serve multiple purposes. From here, defenders could easily hurl rocks, slingstones, arrows and spears at invaders as they negotiated the steep ramparts that may have surrounded the city.

We found this to be true in 1992 when a group of excavators staged a mock attack up the 35-degree slope of ‘Umayri’s Iron Age I rampart, directly below the house. They slipped and slid, often losing their balance as they tried to avoid the rain of nerf balls that showered down on them from the city’s “defenders.” Although from inside the city our house appears quite ordinary, in the past it would have served as a strong tower of defense. Its roof stood a commanding 16 feet above the top of the rampart.

The roof of the tower of Thebez may not normally have been used for grinding grain; nor may it have been used that way during the siege. But if the woman had been grinding the day’s flour on a lower level, she may well have ascended the tower clutching her millstone in her hand. Or she may have seen a millstone on a neighboring roof (houses in ancient cities were often built very close together or even connected, much like our modern townhouses) and run across the flat roofs to get this convenient weapon. After all, if people can take the effort to “beat their plowshares into swords” (Joel 3:10) in time of war, they might reasonably be expected to use other daily tools for war, too.

The woman of Thebez undoubtedly would have been strong enough to throw an upper millstone. Her might, though creating victory for her townspeople and for the history of Israel, should not be seen as extraordinary, or as hyperbole or mythological allusion. She was an ordinary woman who used the ordinary resources at hand to achieve heroic results.

If Bible scholars studied archaeology more carefully, their conclusions might not fall so short of the mark. Fortunately for the ancient Israelites, the woman of Thebez was a better shot.

Then Abimelech went to Thebez … Within the city was a strong tower and all the people of the city fled to it, all the men and women, and shut themselves in; and they went to the roof of the tower. And Abimelech came to the tower and fought against it, and drew near to the door of the tower to burn it with fire. And a certain woman threw an upper millstone upon Abimelech’s head and crushed his skull. Then he called hastily to the young man his armor-bearer, and said to him, “Draw your sword and […]