Judges 9:35
And Gaal the son of Ebed went out, and stood in the entering of the gate of the city: and Abimelech rose up, and the people that were with him, from lying in wait. And Gaal the son of Ebed went out, and stood in the entering of the gate of the city: and Abimelech rose up, and the people that were with him, from lying in wait.
Gaal son of Ebed went out and took his stand in the entrance of the gate of the city at Shechem, while Abimelech rose up with the people who were with him from lying in wait to attack him. Abimelech was the son of Gideon's maidservant, who had Gideon's sons slain in order to make himself ruler of Israel, who gathered vain and light followers about him, and who later utterly destroyed Shechem. This confrontation at the gate belonged to the rebellion against Abimelech and to the retribution that followed his tyrannical rule. The surrounding account includes Jotham's parable of the trees, which exposes the folly of Shechem's choice of Abimelech as ruler.
In the larger record of Judges 3-17, the verse belongs to the history of Israel's backsliding and the suffering and oppression that followed. The account teaches that those doing the most valuable work for the Lord have no desire to rule over their brethren, and that ambition to be exalted over others shows a lack of qualification for rulership. Shechem itself was a very ancient place where Jacob stopped when he returned from Padan-aram to Canaan. Jeroboam later rebuilt it as the capital of his kingdom.