Monarchy: An Ambivalent Institution
Parashat Shofetim contains the command to appoint a king. But it is a very strange command indeed. This is how it opens:
When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,” be sure to appoint over you the king the Lord your God chooses. (Deut. 17:14–15)
The oddity here is self-evident. The Israelites were not commanded to be “like all the nations around us.” They were commanded to be different. That is the root meaning of the word “holy,” kadosh. It means: distinctive, singular, set apart. Four times in the book of Deuteronomy Moses calls the Israelites an am kadosh, a holy people. The last thing a holy people does is copy its institutions from “the nations around us.”
Second, the command is curiously conditional. It is only triggered when the people say, “Let us set a king over us.” Why so? There is no such condition attached to the other two leadership roles in this parasha: the priest and the prophet. The existence of priests in Israel did not depend on the people asking for them. As for the prophet, according to the Torah, the institution did follow a request from the Israelites. Having heard the voice of God at Mount Sinai, the Israelites asked Moses to listen on their behalf and convey the divine word to them, because the direct experience of God’s voice was simply too intense for them to bear (Ex. 20:16). Moses now tells the people that there will be prophets in the future also. But it will be God who will raise them up and put His words in their mouths (Deut. 18:18). The initiative will not come from the people. So why is the appointment of a king dependent on the people’s request?
Third, there is no description of the powers of the king – his role, his task, his mission. Instead there is a series of restrictions. He must not accumulate horses, wives, or wealth (Deut. 17:17). He is to have his personal Torah scroll that he is to read “all the days of his life” (17:18–19) and not deviate from its teachings “to the right or to the left” (17:20). He must be humble and “not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites” (17:20). These are all negatives, not statements of positive purpose.
The problem deepens as we trace the history of monarchy as described in Tanakh. The Israelites did not immediately appoint a king after conquering the land. Instead, in times of crisis, they relied on charismatic leaders known as “judges,” who led the people in battle but thereafter held no formal office. A classic example is the case of Gideon, who led the people to victory over the Midianites. The people sought to make him king, but he refused. “The Israelites said to Gideon, ‘Rule over us – you, your son, and your grandson – because you have saved us from the hand of Midian.’ But Gideon told them, ‘I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you’” (Judges 8:22–23).
Even more perplexing is the account of the moment when the Israelites did request a king, in the days of Samuel. Samuel was distressed. He thought that the people were rejecting him. God, however, told him, “It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected Me as their king” (I Sam. 8:7). God then told the prophet to spell out the consequences of appointing a king. He would take their children, their property, and their produce for his own purposes. Nonetheless, if the people persisted in wanting a king, Samuel should accede to their request.
The problem is obvious. If God wanted the people to appoint a king, why would He say that it meant that they were rejecting Him? If, to the contrary, God did not want them to appoint a king, why did He tell Samuel to accede to their request?
Eventually, Samuel did appoint a king and the monarchy was established. But the story is haunted by failure. Saul failed to carry out God’s command. David unified the tribes and established Jerusalem as the kingdom’s capital but committed a terrible sin. His son Solomon was wise. He consolidated the kingdom and built the Temple. But his failure was momentous. He disobeyed all the prohibitions set out in this parasha: not to accumulate many horses, wives, or wealth. The sages spoke of this in a piercing Talmudic passage:
Why were the reasons of the Torah’s laws not revealed? Because in two cases reasons were revealed, and they caused the greatest man in the world (Solomon) to stumble. It is written, “He shall not take many wives lest his heart be led astray” (Deut. 17:17). Solomon said, I will take many wives but my heart will not be led astray. Yet we read, “When Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart astray” (I Kings 11:4). Again it is written, He must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself lest he make the people return to Egypt. Solomon said, I will acquire many horses but I will not make the people return to Egypt. Yet we read (I Kings 10:29), “They imported a chariot from Egypt for six hundred shekels.” (Sanhedrin 21b)
Solomon, the wisest of men, thought himself wiser than the Torah. Hubris led to nemesis. After his death, the kingdom split in two and was never subsequently reunited.
These are extraordinary ambivalences, and they led to a marked divergence of opinion among the commentators as to what kind of command was the mitzva of appointing a king. According to Maimonides, the appointment of a king is a positive command. Monarchy is the Torah’s ideal form of government. God was angry with the people in the days of Samuel, not because they asked for a king but because they asked in the wrong way.
Ibn Ezra, however, sees the appointment of a king not as an obligation but as a permission: not “you should” but “you may.” Abrabanel, who among the medieval rabbis was closest to kings and queens – he was a diplomat in the service of King Afonso V of Portugal, Queen Isabella of Castille, King Ferdinand of Naples, and the republic of Venice – held that the entire institution is only a concession to wayward human instincts.
This divergence reflects a profound tension that played itself out in the course of the biblical era. On the one hand, there is opposition in Judaism to the very idea of one human being exercising power over another. “To Me the children of Israel are servants,” says the Torah (Lev. 25:55), on which the rabbis commented, “But not the servants of other servants [i.e., other humans]” (Bava Metzia 10a). R. Akiva said it most simply in the prayer Avinu Malkeinu: “Our Father, our King, we have no other king but You” (Taanit 25b).
On this view, there should be no need for a human ruler in the form of a king. Yet in practice this proved to be not a viable option. The book of Judges ends with the sentence: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Without monarchy, anarchy.
Hence the view of Ibn Ezra and Abrabanel, that God gave the Israelites permission to decide how they would be governed, and, if they so chose, they were permitted to appoint a king. Abrabanel’s view is strikingly similar to that of the eighteenth-century radical Thomas Paine – a key figure in both the American and French Revolutions – who wrote, “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of bowers of paradise.”1Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 3.
In the twentieth century, Rav Kook, first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, wrote that in the absence of a king, sovereignty returns to the people, who are empowered to choose the form of governance they prefer – including, if they wish, a democratically elected parliament. For him the Knesset was the functional equivalent of a king: testimony that democracy is compatible with Judaism.2Responsa Mishpat Kohen (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1966), responsa 144.
There is undeniably another strand in Jewish thought, represented by Maimonides, that sees monarchy as an ideal, epitomised in the figure of King David, a brilliant military tactician, adroit politician, and visionary statesman and one of the greatest religious poets of all time. With him, God made an eternal covenant, and though the Davidic monarchy came to an end, its re-establishment is at the heart of the Jewish idea of the Messiah, an anointed king of direct descent from David, who will restore Jewish sovereignty, rebuild the Temple, and inaugurate an era of peace.
Yet in pre-messianic time, we are left with a significant distinction between the eternally valid and God-given laws of morality and halakha, and the time-bound nature of politics and government. How high should the percentage of national income taken by the government in taxation be? To what extent should the rich be taxed proportionately more than the poor? How much morality should be enforced by civil law and how much left to individual conscience? How should governments be elected and how long should they last?
There is no timeless answer to these questions. Politics will always be an arena of conflict, compromise, and context, and it is a measure of the wisdom of the Torah that it does not attempt to specify a single model valid for all time. There are, however, moral limits to the use of power, and it was the role of prophets to remind kings of those limits, “speaking truth to power.”
The debate about monarchy from biblical times to the present is a fine example of Judaism’s refusal to simplify the complex. There was, and until the Messianic Age always will be, a conflict between the religious ideal of “We have no other King but You,” and the practical requirements of politics and governance in a world still marked by violence and injustice. A good society is one in which people understand the difference between the time-bound demands of politics and the timeless truths of faith. In pre-messianic time, politics and religion are two different things, and work best unmixed.