Dear Editor,
I am grateful for David Reynolds’ comments on my article about the monarchy. It is good to be challenged!
When Samuel tells Israel that a king would exploit them (1 Sam.8v1-22) David assumes that the elders are making a wrong-headed request for a king on the pagan model, “A king like the other nations have” (verses 5 and 19). They had a law for kings in Deuteronomy 17v14-20, but this is not the time and they are jumping the gun. The result is Saul who turns out to be a disaster.
I want to suggest that a closer look at those two passages should lead to a different conclusion. The elders of Israel are not ignoring the instructions in Deuteronomy, they are quoting them (Deut.17v14).
Samuel, the clear-eyed prophet of the Lord, knows that a king will exploit the people. Perhaps he knew that Deuteronomy was an ideal that can never be realised.
“Part of God’s purpose in Israel was to demonstrate the completeness of the Fall of man”, writes the Old Testament scholar, H.L. Ellison, “That he would continue to fall, even under the most favourable of circumstances. Since at Sinai God gave a Torah, but not the power to keep it”. There is no better illustration of this than the law for kings in Deuteronomy. I think Samuel knew this and trembled at what was about to happen.
Reynolds points out that the “divine right of kings” was a French invention used by the Stewarts to shore up their position. But the idea of divine right was alive way before that. In the early medieval period, pagan kings would justify their status by tracing their descent to Odin. Christian monarchs seem to have done something similar, creating “saints” in their family line to do the same thing.
I fear that Reynolds may have a starry-eyed view of early medieval kingship. The elves had left Middle Earth long before then!
Warm regards to you all at en and to David Reynolds.
Yours sincerely,
Dave Burke
By email
