“When you have entered the land Adonai your God is giving you, have taken possession of it and are living there, you may say, ‘I want to have a king over me, like all the other nations around me.’ In that event, you must appoint as king the one whom Adonai your God will choose. He must be one of your kinsmen, this king you appoint over you — you are forbidden to appoint a foreigner over you who is not your kinsman.”-Deuteronomy 17:14-15
As of yesterday, we just got done discussing “judges”, one of the four basic types of human authorities we’ll find in the Scriptures.
Now from verse 14, we’re going to transition over to discussing “kings”.
A couple of points.
First, this section is literally the ONLY PLACE IN THE TORAH where the subject of a king ruling over Israel ever comes up.
Second, the fact that the subject of a king ruling over Israel even comes up in the first place surprises a lot of people.
Why?
Because when most people think about kings in the Bible they think about King Saul who was appointed by Samuel and how that rulership turned into a total disaster.
Most folks view kingship over Israel as an eventual concession to the wishes of the people, but not something that God really wanted for them.
Hence, there is this misplaced tendency for most people to harbor negative attitudes towards even the idea of a king ruling over Israel.
Yet, right here in the Torah we have God anticipating the day when Israel will be ruled by a king and thus begins to spell out the boundaries and rules that all of Israel’s kings must obey.
There are two main restrictions listed.
The first one is that the King must be a person who God Himself personally chooses (however, it isn’t spelled out exactly how this divine decision-making process is to be carried out).
The second restriction is that a King of Israel must be an Israelite.
No foreigners allowed.
I want to comment for a second on the prophetic nature of this passage in Torah.
First, have you ever heard of an area of scholarship called Biblical Minimalism (also known as the Copenhagen School because two of its most prominent figures taught at Copenhagen University)?
Proponents of Biblical Minimalism believe that…
…the Bible cannot be considered reliable evidence for what had happened in ancient Israel…
…and that “Israel” itself is a problematic subject for historical study.
Or to put it simply, Biblical Minimalists believe that the ancient scholars of Jewish tradition simply made up what is written in Scripture in order to legitimize their own religious community and their religion-political claims to the land of Israel (quite an anti-Semitic view to say the least).
Well, these Minimalist folks argue that this section of Deuteronomy wasn’t penned until AFTER the Babylonian exile because by that point in time, Israel would have experienced some awful interactions with kings and thus wanted to establish some rules to prevent a king from turning into a tyrant and abusing his power.
What do I say to this theory?
It’s a bunch of hogwash!
Why?
Because Israel didn’t have to wait until the Babylonian exile to know what kings are all about and how they can turn into evil tyrants.
The whole known world during the time of Moses had kings.
Heck, even Canaan, the very land they were going to be invading had tons of kings ruling over different territories.
What a king did, how he assumed power, and how he ruled etcetera was pretty well established.
In fact, it was considered pretty much unthinkable for a nation to not have a king in those days.
Therefore, in spite of the Lord’s offer to be both their God and King, we shouldn’t be surprised when Israel eventually demanded that God provide them a visible human king to reign over them just like their neighbors had.
We’ll continue this discussion about kings the next time we meet.
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