Judges 9:7
And when they told it to Jotham, he went and stood in the top of mount Gerizim, and lifted up his voice, and cried, and said unto them, Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you. And when they told it to Jotham, he went and stood in the top of mount Gerizim, and lifted up his voice, and cried, and said unto them, Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you.
Jotham stood on the top of Mount Gerizim and called out to the men of Shechem to listen to him. Shechem was a very ancient place where Jacob stopped when he returned from Padan-aram to Canaan. The call stands in the history in which Abimelech, the son of Gideon's maid, caused Gideon's sons and brothers to be slain so that he might become ruler of Israel, hired worthless followers, and utterly destroyed Shechem.
The verse introduces Jotham's parable or apologue of the trees, in which trees are imagined as holding a council and an election and as speaking, acting, and reasoning, saying such things as Come thou and reign over us, though trees cannot do so. That speaking and reasoning is personification, the giving to inanimate beings the sentiments and language of rational beings, illustrating how speech can be put into the mouths of nonhuman beings. Their speech is figurative and imaginary, an object lesson meant to impress a moral truth and teach a lesson, not an account of trees actually talking, not evidence that trees are conscious or can literally speak, and not teaching that the events literally happened. It is the same device by which the dead are made to speak and act in reference to the facts of their cases as though they were alive. The parable exposes the folly of the men of Shechem in choosing Abimelech as ruler, teaching that those doing the most valuable work in the Lord's cause do not seek rule over their brethren and that ambition to be exalted over others shows a person is unfit to rule. Jotham's Hearken unto me warns that their response to him bears on whether God will hearken unto them. The address so begun is a satirical invective and one of the great speeches and best specimens of eloquence and oration in the Hebrew Scriptures, showing the intrinsic literary value of Hebrew literature.