British monarchs should know what's behind the Israelites' famous cry: "Give us a king!" Starting with George V, they've all studied Walter Bagehot's 1867 classic The English Constitution,1 and Bagehot makes clear what makes monarchy desirable to the masses. Republics are complex, Bagehot says, and their workings are "difficult to know and easy to mistake."2 But a king's will is easy for the masses to grasp:
When you put before the mass of mankind the question, "Will you be governed by a king, or will you be governed by a constitution?" the inquiry comes out thus—"Will you be governed in a way you understand, or will you be governed in a way you do not understand?"3
A constitutional monarchy, Bagehot says, "has a comprehensible element for the vacant many, as well as complex laws and notions for the inquiring few."4 Imagine, based on this intelligibility criterion, the even greater appeal of an absolute monarch.
In response to Israel's cry for a king, the prophet Samuel describes a king who seems rather absolute, and certainly intelligible: he'll tax you, take your land and your livestock, and eventually make you slaves.5 But Samuel’s warning doesn't dissuade what might be called Israel's "vacant many." The Israelites want what they can see: in asking for "a king to rule us," they want to be "like all the other nations."6 Reading this passage, Bagehot might have associated the Israelites' demand to a failure of the collective imagination:
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.7
A greater imagination—one informed by faith—might have led the Israelites to understand what God tells Samuel about their demand: "They have rejected Me from being King over them."8 The invisible God is their true king. Centuries later, Paul would rhapsodize about this invisible king: "Now to the King of the ages, the incorruptible invisible . . ."9
If it was often hard for the Israelites to imagine how the invisible God was their king, it was even harder for Israel's conquerors to understand the concept. The Jewish historian Josephus coined the term "theocracy" in an effort to explain God's government to his Roman masters:
Some people have entrusted the supreme political power to monarchies, others to oligarchies, yet others to the masses. Our lawgiver [Moses], however, was attracted by none of these forms of polity, but gave to his constitution the form of what—if a forced expression be permitted—may be termed a "theocracy," placing all sovereignty in the hands of God. To Him he persuaded all to look . . .10
Josephus's understanding of Israel's theocracy had nothing to do with a hierocracy, which is a government by priests or by other religious leaders. Instead, Josephus understood that the Torah presents a government without human sovereignty at all. Harvard professor Eric Nelson calls Josephus's understanding of theocracy "revolutionary."11
Likewise, Nelson finds the seventeenth-century republican association of monarchy with idolatry both inspired by the Hebrew Bible and revolutionary. The early modern consensus around the idea of what Nelson calls "Republican exclusivism" came during a century of debate among European Protestant political theorists about the relative merits of monarchy and republicanism. The theorists used the Bible's story of Israel's demand for a king as one of their chief texts. The other chief text was Deuteronomy 17, which permits kings but severely limits their powers.12
The two texts seem to contradict each other concerning God's attitude to human sovereigns. In Samuel, as mentioned, God says that in demanding a human king, "they have rejected Me from being King over them."13 In Deuteronomy, however, God seems to anticipate the demand and sets out a constitution balancing the powers of king, prophets, priests, and judges.14 Seventeenth-century republicans resolved the apparent discrepancy in favor of 1 Samuel. They found in Deuteronomy’s allowance for kingship something like Moses’s allowance for divorce—something Jesus said was permitted “because of the hardness of your hearts” that “from the beginning . . . was not so.”15
The Hebrew revival, which began in the late sixteenth century, brought on this new form of political analysis centered on the Hebrew Bible. The Reformation, with its call of sola scriptura, made close readings of the Hebrew Bible desirable beyond its previous use as a source of typological prefigurations of the New Testament.16 (By contrast, the Catholic Church during the same period shunned the study of Hebrew. The 1545-1563 Council of Trent made the study of Hebrew irrelevant, and Pope Clement VIII in 1596 banned the Talmud.)17 Around the same time, and for the first time, "Hebrew texts and grammars became widely available to Christian scholars."18
Before the Hebrew revival, political theorists—even the republican ones—relied on the Greek and Roman notion that monarchy and republicanism (what Aristotle had referred to as "polity") were both valid forms of government.19 During the revival, however, most republican theorists found in the Hebrew Bible and in the writing of the rabbis of the Midrash evidence that monarchy was forbidden by God for any nation. James Herrington's political theory in the form of biblical exegesis is typical:
"They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me that I should not reign over them." The government of the senate and the people is that only which is or can be the government of laws and not of men, and the government of laws and not of men is the government of God and not of men. "He that is for the government of laws is for the government of God, and he that is for the government of a man is for the government of a beast."20
John Milton, likewise:
. . . as God was heretofore angry with the Jews who rejected him and his forme of Government to choose a King, so that he will bless us, and be propitious to us who reject a King to make him onely our leader and supreme governour in the conformity as neer as may be of his own ancient government.21
For Milton, Israel's theocracy—its republicanism—is no longer a unique case, as Nelson points out: "God, it now seems, can be enthroned as monarch in any commonwealth, and perhaps must be if, as Milton says, the kingdom of God is the ‘only just & rightful kingdom.’"22
What did Israel’s theocracy, this “government of laws and not of men,” look like? One would need to look at both the historical evidence as well as the Bible’s blueprint found in Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Ezekiel, among other places—a blueprint that most scholars believe was never fully practiced. I’ll convey governmental principles applicable in all biblical eras, and I’ll concentrate on Deuteronomy as a model constitution. These principles and this constitution seem to support the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant republicans in finding “what European authors began to call the respublica Hebraeorum (republic of the Hebrews).”23
Government took on different forms in each of ancient Israel’s four constitutional epochs, according to Daniel J. Elazar—epochs separated by the installation of Israel’s first human king, Israel’s exile, and Israel’s return to construct the Second Temple.24 In all four epochs, however, “the fundamental principles animating government and politics . . . were theocratic, federal, and republican.”25
Theocracy, federalism, and republicanism all require a balance of powers, Professor Stuart A. Cohen suggests:
. . . the Jewish political tradition—like all covenantal traditions—demands that power be shared out among properly constituted institutions and offices. It has no sympathy with a system of government in which a single body or group possesses a monopoly of the attributes, prerogatives, and privileges of political authority.26
While these principles permit limited human rule, so long as no person or group monopolizes rule, these three principles also locate sovereignty in God alone, Elizar says:
God is sovereign and exercises His sovereignty more or less directly, mediated only through His servants who act as national leaders and the traditional institutions of the people. Those institutions are federal and republican in character, with the federation of tribes at their base . . .27
This base, the federation of tribes, was extended to clans and families as well to involve everyone in at least some aspects of politics:
. . . when the Israelites were semi-nomads . . . the various mishpahot (clans) formed by the combination of households (bet ab) formed the tribal substructure in those times. After Israelite settlement of Canaan during the first constitutional period, the clans settled down in discrete villages or townships (a more accurate term) and the relationship among those households was transformed into one that was linked with the particular locality of their settlement. Final human authority for each tribe and clan was located in an assembly of all males for ordinary decisions and all—men, women, and children—for major constitutional decisions such as covenanting.
The clans had local executives for the day-to-day political operation—elders who met in what the Bible sometimes refers to as the city gates.28
The tribal and national institutions varied during each epoch. The rabbis discovered a similar balance of functions in each epoch, however, which they called the three ketarim, which Cohen summarizes:
. . . the sphere of the torah; that of the kehunah (priesthood); and that of the malkhut (kingship).29
Deuteronomy’s constitution, however, can be understood to balance not three but five powers, according to Professor Bernard M. Levinson:
The local court system with its procedural rules [Deuteronomy 17:2-7]
The “High Court” at the Temple in Jerusalem [Deuteronomy 17:8-13]
The office of the monarch [Deuteronomy 17:14-20]
The priesthood [Deuteronomy 18:1-8]
The office of prophet [Deuteronomy 18:9-22]30
In both the three ketarim and in Deuteronomy, the kingship is a limited monarchy. In fact, it’s severely limited in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy sets out a constitution in which the king’s powers are curtailed by the rule of law, and he has no specific duties except to study the law, Levinson points out:
Deuteronomy has reduced the king to mere titular head of state, more restricted than potent, more otiose than exercising real military, judicial, executive, and cultic functions. The sole potent authority is the Deuteronomic Torah, the very law book in whose original reception, formulation, transcription, an implementation Deuteronomy’s king play absolutely no role.31
Therefore—at least on paper, and even after the advent of Israel's kings—federalism, theocracy and republicanism kept sovereignty in God’s hands and out of the kings’ hands.32 Whenever one person or one group threatened to eliminate public space, from the time of King Saul through seventeenth-century Polish Jewry, according to Cohen, “. . . Jews persistently attempted—albeit with varying degrees of success—to divide communal governance in a way which might preserve and foster the federal requirements of their political heritage.”33
The United States’s federalism, too, along with the earlier federalism of the British colonies in America, derives in large part from the Bible’s emphasis on covenants. “Modern federalism,” Professor Charles S. McCoy writes, “emerged in Switzerland as the recovery of the Bible with its emphasis on covenant was combined with the political practice derived from Teutonic tribal covenants.”34 The Bible’s covenants left America a federal legacy, helping the United States’ founders conceive of ways for the state and national governments to relate federally.
But unlike the Bible’s model of federalism, the U.S. Constitution failed to extend this federalism to local assemblies—a failure that Hannah Arendt found to be tragic.35
Because we have little associational political life, our Constitution's federalism is failing us. “Only recently,” Elazar says, “as we have come to see the consequences of unrestrained individualism, both philosophically and practically, have political scientists begun to explore problems of liberty in relation to primordial groups—families, particularly, and ethnic communities.” Elazar points out that European forms of federalism removed from the political life of such “primordial groups” gave way in the last century to totalitarianism.36 Because we don't develop our public lives, we’re less likely to value federalism or the other forms of constitutional checks and balances. Those concepts and provisions become, as Bagehot would put it, unintelligible to us. We end up demanding a king.
And if God didn't refuse Israel a flesh-and-blood king, he won't refuse America one, either.
But we can choose associational life even if the Constitution doesn't provide for it. We can create public space together, much as Elazar and Cohen describe Israel as doing despite their kings and later despite their long exile.
It's actually remarkable how quickly associational life can redeem a people. Francesco Guicciardini, a Florentine political theorist during the Italian Renaissance, believed that people's political dispositions can be changed in two ways, one slow and one fast. The slow way is “custom and use.” By this means, a king could change a polity’s public life from an active, three-dimensional life to one of a listless, two-dimensional observer of the ruler’s political life.
The fast way, Guicciardini says, to change a people’s political disposition is through political participation. Human nature has an appetite for it. In J. G. A. Pocock’s words, Guicciardini believed that his fellow Florentines were “addicted to converting themselves with public business.”37
Professor Nathan Schneider uses the same word—"addicted"—to describe many Occupy Wall Street participants' relationships to OWS's General Assembly:
After a month and a half of meetings, those in the General Assembly were getting addicted to listening to one another and being heard. Rather than discussing the Glass-Steagall Act or campaign-finance reform, they were talking about making assemblies like this one spread, around the city and around the country. The process of bottom-up direct democracy would be the occupation's chief message at first, not some legislation to be passed from on high.38
This addiction to democratic process frustrated those outside the movement who, in Schneider's words, "kept demanding demands." But the only demands that came out of OWS for the first few weeks were essentially "the right to carry out a process." Its eventual "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City" made only three "demands" on the outside world:
"Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone."39
OWS started out as a protest against the excesses of capitalism, but it quickly became something many of the participants hadn't experienced before—an expression of lived-in public freedom.
Elazar points out that we Americans invented modern federalism “on the basis of individualism.”40 But this sole basis of federalism no longer works. Elazar advocates for a “postmodern federalism” that is based not only on individual rights but also on associational life:
A postmodern federalism must reckon with one of the basic principles of postmodern politics, namely that individual are to be secured in their individual rights, yet groups are also to be recognized as real, legitimate, and requiring an appropriate status.41
For ancient Israel, politics was meant to combine these individual and group emphases with a view to the future:
Political institutions were viewed not as serving the state but as serving this partnership that united the people with each other through their common linkage with God.
At the same time, politics was important because the establishment of the Holy Commonwealth, later to be called God’s Kingdom on Earth in some quarters, was a primary goal of the Israelite nation, a goal mandated by God.42
These political traditions, Cohen says, “in effect comprise the vehicles whereby the Congregation of Israel attempts to transport the kingdom of heaven (malkhut shamayim—’the good commonwealth’) to earth.”43
The world needs this good republic. Once people participate in it locally, they’ll no longer accept Bagehot’s false dilemma: "Will you be governed in a way you understand, or will you be governed in a way you do not understand?" Instead, they’ll choose not to be governed by others at all.
This is our work, I believe—not just to protest kings who wish for what God reserves to himself—sovereignty—but to create political communities that model futures without them.
Above: Occupy by Claudia Gabriel. Used by permission. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Vernon Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford New York: Clarendon Press, 2010), 40-41.
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 38.
Bagehot, 38.
Bagehot, 41.
1 Samuel 8:9-18.
1 Samuel 8:5 REB.
Bagehot, 38.
1 Samuel 8:7 NNAS.
1 Timothy 1:17, Hart, New Testament, 416.
Quoted in Nelson, Hebrew Republic, 30
Nelson, 89-90.
Nelson, 23-28.
1 Samuel 8:7 NNAS.
Levinson, “First Constitution.”
Matthew 19:8.
Nelson, 13-14.
Nelson, 13.
Nelson, 10.
Nelson, 23-24.
Nelson, 52.
Nelson, 38.
Nelson, 38-39. Italics in the original.
Nelson, 16.
Elazar, Covenant & Polity, 349-63.
Elazar, 354.
Cohen, “Concept of the Three Ketarim,” 29.
Elazar, 354.
Elazar, 349. For example see Proverbs 31:23, 31.
Cohen, 34.
Levinson, “First Constitution,” 1873.
Levinson, 1880-81.
Elazar, 356.
Cohen, 32.
McCoy, “Federalism,” 7-8.
Arendt, On Revolution, 227-28.
Elazar, xxxix.
Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 142-44.
Nathan Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 20.
Schneider, 56-57.
Elazar, “Althusius’ Grand Design,” xxxviii.
Elazar, xl.
Elazar, Covenant & Polity, 355.
Cohen, 27.
Your remarks make a powerful case by connecting Bagehot’s defense of monarchy’s clarity with the Hebrew Bible’s warning about kingship. You show how a failure of civic imagination—then and now—can lead people to choose rule by one over the more demanding work of self-governance.
By drawing a line from Israel’s covenantal, federal structures to modern movements like Occupy, you bring out a deep human desire not just to be ruled, but to take part in ruling.
That said, the contrast you draw may be a bit too absolute. Even Israel’s theocracy involved visible roles—judges, elders, prophets—that gave form to God's rule. And while your account of horizontal assemblies is stirring, such spaces still need some structure to endure.
Rebuilding public life, as you argue, does take imagination—but it also takes institutions that can carry that imagination forward. Just as a workable localism requires laws and regulations beyond just its own to avoid self-determined silos of prejudice and provincialism.
A rich and thought-provoking piece (as always)—thank you!
Oh- may we indeed “Create the future in the present.” and be informed and inspired by all we are learning today about it. My POV: All we need is Love.