After Royal Nightmares

No Laws, No Caesars...

The lore of Moses didn't forbid the appointment of Kings, nor did it prescribe them. It describes monarchies as a bad idea that the Israelites would probably want to try at some point. It says:

“When you have come into the land… and you say “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king…”

After this permissive note, there follows a string of conditions designed to make the best of the situation, or prevent the worst, rather. They're not to accept imperialist rulers from elsewhere. They're not to put up with kings who amass gold and keep harems. Nor should they tolerate kings who import horses from Egypt (the arms trade of the ancient world). If there must be a king he should have a copy of this lore by his bedside, so he remembers what not to do.

There's a fascinating narrative tension in the Hebrew bible, at the beginnings of the ancient Israel’s kingdom. On one hand, the appointment of monarchs is understood as a lapse from the anarchic wilderness ideal, where there was no Pharaoh and no Caesar: no king but YHWH, their imageless god. On the other hand, the protracted violence and misery of the Book of Judges ends with those knowing words: “In those days there was no King in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” It might have been a hopeful statement if the stories in Judges were not so bleak. It’s as though the narrator holds up his hands in defeat. What were they to do? Was it required that they be slowly and faithfully crushed in their principled kingless precarity?

And so they give in. The world was rigged toward kingdoms. Why perish on the romantic hill of being different from everyone else? When the prophet Samuel brings the matter to YHWH, the response comes: “Give them what they want. They've not rejected you but me as their king.”

And then YHWH addresses the community:

“These will be the ways of the King who reigns over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and couriers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to work. He will take one tenth of your flocks and you will be his slaves.”

The ending is rather scornful:

“...And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but YHWH will not answer you.”

Even so, the people respond: “we are determined to have a king, like the other nations, to govern us and to fight our battles…”

I have always read into this episode a very honest uncertainty about the great political questions before us. There's no suggestion in these histories that YHWH’s misgivings are unfounded. These narratives are generally thought to have been compiled well after the divine warnings proved quite true. On the other hand, what should this stateless tribe do? How are they to survive in a world where everyone else has the advantage? Where everyone else has gone down the road of conjuring material wealth and military might out of that mysterious abstraction, the myth of royalty? What else could they do?

This question remains unanswered. All we have is a complex picture of the tragedies that happened, the web of reasons around it all, and also a persistent shard of light, through some crack. In the end, there was no hope that a beautiful life in the world would take shape out of their excellent choices. This was a tale of regret. Hope came with some whispered possibility that even their disastrous choices might yet be transfigured. Even the fall might lead to recovery. Even failure might be somehow redemptive. Even wounds might heal. 

Centuries later they found themselves at the far end of this ruinous tale. They had played the game of kings and lost. There has never been any other ending to that story. Concentrated power is theft. It returns to the world sooner or later.

Here is a sort of epilogue to this long tragedy.

The Israelite Daniel was carried off as a prisoner shortly before the collapse of the Judean kingdom. He was likely castrated and made to serve his conqueror, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.

The story goes that the tyrant was troubled by a dream. He saw a statue with a golden head, silver chest, bronze middle, iron legs and feet composed of iron and clay. And then he saw a stone, that was not cut by any human craft. It smashed the statue into dust. The King was so unsettled that he threatened, in one of his familiar dramatic turns, to execute all the wise men of Babylon if none could explain the dream.

In comes Daniel, the kingless, stateless, emasculated Judean. He has the strange air of one stood after the end of the world. And he re-tells the dream like so: the different parts of the statue represent different kingdoms and empires, starting with Babylon and running into the future, with each usurping the power of the one before. This is the way of things. But then one day this lineage of kings, pharaohs and Caesars comes to an end. It is smashed by a kind of ecological image. A rock that comes from the more-than-human world interrupts the procession of power. It destroys the statue and becomes a mountain that fills the whole world.

King Nebuchanezzar is oddly grateful for Daniel's interpretation, and keeps him close for the rest of his days.