The plain of Meonenim - Translate "the oak of the soothsayers" (see the margin). Some well-known oak, so called, but which is not mentioned elsewhere.

By the plain of Meonenim - Some translate, by the way of the oaks, or oaken groves; others, by the way of the magicians, or regarders of the times, as in our margin. Probably it was a place in which augurs and soothsayers dwelt.

And Gaal spake again, and said,.... Looking towards the mountains, and taking another view of what he before saw, for further satisfaction:

see, there come people down by the middle of the land; either in the valley between the two mountains; or rather those he first saw on the top of the mountains were now come down about the middle of them, called in the Hebrew text the navel, from the prominence of the mountains thereabout, or because the navel is in the middle of the body, as this part of them was the middle on which he saw them. R. Isaiah interprets it, between the two cities:

and another company come along by the plain of Meonenim; of which we read nowhere else. Montanus renders it, "the oak of Meonenim"; or of the soothsayers; oaks being had in great esteem with idolaters for their oracles and divinations; and perhaps this was a place, whether an oak or, a plain, where such persons used to meet to make their divinations.

But Gaal said again, "Behold, people come down from the navel of the land," i.e., from the highest point of the surrounding country, "and a crowd comes by the way of the wizard's terebinths," - a place in the neighbourhood of Shechem that is not mentioned anywhere else, and therefore is not more precisely known.

And Gaal spake again, and said, See there come people down by the middle of the land, and another company come along by the plain of Meonenim.

middle: Heb. navel

Meonenim: or, the regarders of times

9:30-49 Abimelech intended to punish the Schechemites for slighting him now, but God punished them for their serving him formerly in the murder of Gideon's sons. When God uses men as instruments in his hand to do his work, he means one thing, and they another. That, which they hoped would have been for their welfare, proved a snare and a trap, as those will certainly find, who run to idols for shelter; such will prove a refuge of lies.