This article has two distinct aims. The first is to identify a puzzle about the development of republican political theory in the West, and the second is to suggest a solution to that puzzle. Briefly stated, the puzzle is as follows. Republicanism in late medieval and Renaissance Europe was always a ‘relative’ position. That is, it was characterized by the claim that republics are better than monarchies. Republicans could, of course, disagree sharply among themselves as to whether republics were always better, how much better they were, and why exactly they were better. But none had any interest in arguing that republics were the only legitimate or acceptable regimes. Even the most strident republican text of the period, Leonardo Bruni's oration in praise of Nanni Strozzi (1428), concedes that monarchy is ‘lawful’ (legitimus), one of the ‘correct’ constitutions identified by Aristotle in Book iii of the Politics.Footnote 1 This commitment reflects the fundamental pluralism and modesty of the humanist persuasion; it follows from a deep scepticism concerning the ability of any principle to take sufficient account of all possible circumstances and situations, and from the conviction that there are always good arguments on both sides of any important question. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, we see for the first time the appearance of what we might call republican ‘exclusivism’, the claim that republics are the only legitimate regimes. This transformation is largely responsible for the shape of political life and thought in the modern world, so we have good reason to ask why it took place. Our question quickly turns into a puzzle, however, once we recognize that the most obvious traditions of thought to which we might initially turn for an answer simply cannot provide one. There is nothing in the surviving sources from Greek or Roman antiquity which defends such a view (early modern authors were quite aware of this fact),Footnote 2 nor is it explained by anything in the ‘social contract’ tradition passing from Grotius through Locke and Pufendorf. Indeed, authors in what became known as the ‘modern school’ of natural right were at pains to insist that there is nothing in the contractarian position which precludes monarchical government – most were, after all, monarchists of some stripe. So where should we look for the origins of republican exclusivism?
A valuable clue is to be found in a most improbable place: chapter 35 of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), entitled ‘Of the signification of the kingdom of God’. Hobbes's aim in this chapter is to refute the suggestion that the phrase ‘the kingdom of God’ refers to a spiritual realm to which we are dispatched ‘after this life’. His motivation is straightforward. As he had already explained in chapter 29, if belief in such a spiritual kingdom ‘moveth the Members of a Common-wealth, by the terrour of punishments, and hope of rewards’ to disobey the orders of their civil sovereign, the state will be thrust ‘into the Fire of a Civill warre’.Footnote 3 Hobbes therefore attempts to show that the phrase ‘kingdom of God’ refers in the Bible, not to the world to come, but rather to the ancient commonwealth of the Hebrews, ‘wherein God was king’.Footnote 4 He defends this claim with a three-paragraph discussion of a famous passage in I Sam. 8:
when the Elders of Israel … demanded a King, Samuel displeased therewith, prayed unto the Lord; and the Lord answering said unto him, Hearken unto the voice of the People, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. Out of which it is evident that God himself was then their King.Footnote 5
Later, Hobbes adds that the prophets foretold the restoration of God's kingdom. He characterizes God's promise as follows: ‘I will reign over you, and make you to stand to that Covenant which you made with me by Moses, and brake in your rebellion against me in the days of Samuel, and in your election of another King.’ In short, Hobbes defends his claim that ‘the kingdom of God’ refers to God's civil sovereignty over Israel by reading 1 Sam. 8:7 to mean that, when the Israelites asked for a mortal king, they were in fact deposing God as their temporal ruler.
There are two striking facts about this passage which explain why it ought to be regarded as an important clue for our purposes. The first is the hostility with which it was greeted by Hobbes's contemporaries. Indeed, there are few passages in Leviathan which received as much direct criticism as this one in the first two decades of the book's reception. Robert Filmer, for example, attacked Hobbes by name on precisely this point in his 1652 Observations concerning the originall of government: ‘I do not find’, he observed, ‘that the desiring of a king was a breach of their contract or covenant, or disobedience to the voice of God. There is no such law extant.’Footnote 6 Clarendon was even more insistent in his review of the English Leviathan: ‘We are not oblig'd’, he wrote, ‘nor indeed have any reason to believe, that God was offended with the Children of Israel for desiring a King, which was a Government himself had instituted over them.’Footnote 7 Hobbes's analysis had clearly touched a nerve. The second striking fact is that, when Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin over a decade later (for inclusion in his 1668 Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia), he excised this entire discussion.Footnote 8 It might initially seem as if the first fact is a sufficient explanation of the second: Hobbes responded to his critics by removing the offending passage. There is presumably an element of truth in this, but it is important to recall that Clarendon's Brief view was not published until 1676, and, although Hobbes was certainly familiar with Filmer's polemic, this is, so far as I can tell, the only instance in which he actually removed an argument that offended his patriarchal antagonist.
My suggestion is that Hobbes's decision to remove this passage from the Latin Leviathan is not so much a capitulation to Filmer as it is an alarmed response to what had become of republican political theory in the 1650s. During that period, republican pamphleteers in England had taken the exclusivist turn, and, on their own account, had been convinced to do so by a particular reading of the very same Biblical verses which Hobbes used to make his case in chapter 35. On this reading, God's rebuke in 1 Sam. 8:5 should be taken to mean that human kingship is inherently a usurpation of the kingdom of God, and that monarchy is therefore an instance of the sin of idolatry. This of course was not Hobbes's position – on his account, the civil kingship of God was unique to Israel, and so asking for a mortal king was only a sin in this one instanceFootnote 9 – but, given the political circumstances of the Restoration, he evidently felt that it was too close for comfort. The view from which Hobbes wished to distance himself was unprecedented in Christian Biblical criticism before the mid-seventeenth century (indeed, Hobbes's own less radical reading was itself exceedingly rare before 1600). It turned its back on every standard authority from Augustine to Aquinas, from the glossa ordinaria to Luther and Calvin. It was not contemplated by even the most militant resistance theorists of the late sixteenth century. The reason is simple: the reading in question derives from a tradition of rabbinic commentary on Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel that became available to the Christian West only during the Hebrew revival of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The English pamphleteers who took up this position were deeply aware of its provenance, and enthusiastically endorsed what one of them called the tradition of the ‘Talmudical commonwealthsmen’. In doing so, they transformed the politics of the modern world. The rest of this article attempts to tell their story.
I
The Biblical account of monarchy had always been of immense interest to Christian exegetes, and all agreed that the challenge was to make sense of the relationship between two specific passages from the Hebrew Bible: Deut. 17 and 1 Sam. 8. The central section of the Deuteronomy passage contains a set of instructions given by God to the Israelites; it reads as follows in the King James version:
When thou art come unto the land which the lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; 15: Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the lord thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother. 16: But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the lord hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. 17: Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. (Deut. 17:14–17)
The passage from 1 Sam. 8 stages the moment anticipated in Deuteronomy:
Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, 5: And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. 6: But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the lord. 7: And the lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. 8: According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. 9: Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. (1 Sam. 8:4–9)
Samuel then proceeds to tell the Israelites all of the terrible things that kings will do to them.
This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. 12: And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. 13: And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. 14: And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. 15: And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. 16: And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. 17: He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. 18: And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the lord will not hear you in that day.
The challenge for interpreters was to reconcile God's apparent acceptance of kingly rule at Deut. 17:14 with his evident anger when the Israelites request a king in 1 Sam. 8.Footnote 10 Medieval and Renaissance exegetes tended to pursue one of two strategies of harmonization. The first was to suggest that the Israelites sinned in selecting kings who did not meet the criteria established by God in the Deuteronomy passage. That is, the kings they wished to institute over them were avaricious and tyrannical, quite unlike the virtuous monarchs described in God's instructions. A deeply influential statement of this view is found in the glossa ordinaria, the standard Biblical commentary composed by Walafrid Strabo in the ninth century. It reasons as follows at Deut. 17:14:
It might be asked why the people displeased God when they desired a king [in 1 Sam. 8], since here we find it permitted? But it should be understood that it was certainly not according to God's will, because he did not command that this should be done, but rather permitted it to the people who desired it.Footnote 11
And why in particular was God angry? Because ‘the inhabitants of the land constituted a king over themselves in a manner contrary to God's instructions’ – namely kings who, like Solomon, took numerous wives and concubines.Footnote 12 Another notable proponent of this reading is John of Salisbury, who argues in the Policraticus (1159) that the Israelites abandoned rule by ‘the authority of the law’ when they asked for kings with tyrannical powers.Footnote 13 Aquinas likewise appears to follow this approach in the De regimine principum,Footnote 14 as does Erasmus in the Institutio principis christiani (1516).Footnote 15
The second strategy of reconciliation was to argue in an Augustinian vein that, in asking for a change of government, the Israelites committed the sin of rebellion against God's established order.Footnote 16 All kings rule by divine appointment, and insurrection against them accordingly constitutes a rejection of God's sovereignty. This reading was particularly popular among sixteenth-century Protestants.Footnote 17 It is, for example, Calvin's position in the Institutes: those who preach disobedience and rebellion
do not reject magistrates, but they reject God, ‘that he should not reign over them’ [1 Sam. 8:7]. For if this was truly asserted by the Lord respecting the people of Israel, because they refused the government of Samuel, why shall it not now be affirmed with equal truth of those who take the liberty to outrage all the authorities which God has instituted?Footnote 18
This Augustinian account was not, however, limited to Protestants. Jean Bodin endorsed it strongly in his Six livres de la république (1576).
There is nothing greater on earth, after God, than sovereign princes … Contempt for one's sovereign prince is contempt toward God, of whom he is the earthly image. That is why God, speaking to Samuel, from whom the people had demanded a different prince, said ‘It is me that they have wronged.’Footnote 19
Neither this reading nor its counterpart suggested that kingship itself was the cause of God's displeasure.
One would, of course, expect to find such conservative readings in overtly monarchist works such as Bodin's. What is extraordinary is that even the most radical republican authors and resistance theorists writing before the seventeenth century tended to understand these passages in one of the two conventional ways, and, even if they deviated from those readings, never understood 1 Sam. 8 to involve a critique of monarchy per se. Consider, for example, Ptolemy of Lucca, whose completion of Aquinas's De regimine principum is widely considered to be the most radical scholastic endorsement of republican politics. He is certainly willing to argue that kingship was ‘less fruitful’ for the Israelites, which for him explains why Samuel went to such lengths to dissuade them from pursuing their request. But his gloss on the relevant section of 1 Sam. 8 is the following:
Kings and rulers stand in the place of God on earth, and it is through them, as secondary causes, that God exercises governance over the world. Hence, when the Israelite people spurned the prophet Samuel's lordship and he laid his complaint before God, he received the response that they had not spurned him but God, in whose place he stood. As it is said in Proverbs: ‘Through me kings reign and those who institute laws decree what is just.’Footnote 20
This is the Augustinian argument. For Ptolemy, God has been rejected in this passage only insofar as his royal designee, Samuel, has been rejected. The sin of the Israelites was in asking for a different king from the one God had established among them.Footnote 21 Kingship remains a fully lawful form of government, established by God himself among the nations.
An even more instructive example is that provided by the Calvinist resistance theorist Theodore Beza in his De iure magistratum (1574). By the time Beza was writing, radicals had begun to read Deut. 17:14 and 1 Sam. 8 through the prism of a famous comment by the Jewish historian Josephus, taken from his attack on the Egyptian Apion:
Some peoples have entrusted the supreme political power to monarchies, others to oligarchies, yet others to the masses. Our lawgiver, 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 and authority in the hands of God. To Him he persuaded them to look, as the author of all blessings, both those which are common to all mankind, and those which they had won for themselves by prayer in the crises of their history.Footnote 22
This view of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth made it possible for Josephus to understand God's rejection in 1 Sam. 8 in the following terms: ‘they [the Israelites] deposed God from his kingly office’ (θε
ν ἀποχειροτονο
σι τ
ς βασιλε
ας).Footnote 23 God, not Samuel, had been king in Israel before the insurrection of 1 Sam. 8, and, in asking for a mortal king, the Israelites had rebelled against God's sovereignty. This was indeed a radical reading, and was understood to be: it argued that kingship itself was inconsistent with God's plan for his chosen nation. It provided the foundation for the reading we encountered earlier in the English Leviathan. But – and this is the crucial point – it continued to treat Israel as a special case.Footnote 24 It had been a sin for the Israelites to ask for a king because they found themselves in the unique position of having God as their civil sovereign. It is this view, and nothing more sweeping, that we find in Beza:
What raised [Israel] up above the very skies was that at its beginning the Eternal himself was its monarch, and not only in the sense that He is the sovereign Lord of all things, but in the more specific sense as well, in that He visibly gave the Law through Moses, then brought the people to the promised land through Joshua, and, finally, governed through the judges whom He alone had chosen. In this period, Israel's government was truly monarchy (although God made us of men as he saw fit). And if all kingdoms could be governed by this Monarch, or if kings would always be governed by Him who is sovereign of all the world, our present inquiry would be as superfluous as now it is necessary. But that happy government, which was given to no other people, was changed in a curious way. For whereas other monarchies change into tyrannies through the misdeed of the monarch, the Israelites, not appreciating their good fortune, constrained, so to speak, their true Monarch, who can never be a tyrant, to let them have a human king like other peoples. This was finally granted to them by the Lord, but granted in His wrath and anger, which was not because the monarchical state is of itself condemned by God, but because the people had insisted on a change.Footnote 25
Even for Beza, monarchy itself is not all unacceptable, and his fellow resistance theorists (including the author of the 1579 Vindiciae contra tyrannos Footnote 26) followed his lead.Footnote 27
II
The European discovery of rabbinic sources dramatically reorganized this debate. To begin with, the central discussion of monarchy in the Talmud (bt Sanhedrin 20b) – also based on Deut. 17:14 and 1 Sam. 8 – offered a powerful new perspective on the monarchist position. The point of entry for this Talmudic analysis is the question of whether the catalogue of frightening royal behaviours listed by Samuel in 1 Sam. 8:9–18 (which the rabbis referred to as the ‘section on the king’, parashat ha-melekh) simply anticipates kingly abuses, or actually establishes royal prerogatives. This question became particularly urgent in light of a rabbinic gloss on Deut. 17:14 (‘When thou art come unto the land which the lord thy God giveth thee … and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me’). At issue is the phrase ‘and shalt say’ (ve-amarta). Although the syntax of the Hebrew sentence makes clear that this is purely descriptive, several rabbis pointed out that the same form of the verb could express the imperative.Footnote 28 That is, instead of ‘you will say’ or, better, ‘if you say’, they chose to read ‘you shall say’. As a result, these rabbis were prepared to argue that Deut. 17 did not simply offer a prophecy of what would happen when the Israelites entered the land (as both conventional Christian readings had assumed),Footnote 29 but rather expressed a positive commandment to establish monarchy. On this latter reading, the Israelites were actually obliged to ask for a king. The relevance of this new gloss for the controversy over 1 Sam. 8:11–18 is clear enough: one who believes that kingship is in fact commanded by God will tend not to believe that God meant for kings to behave tyrannically.Footnote 30 But it was also deeply relevant to the debate over the Israelite sin in 1 Sam. 8:4–7. If God had actually commanded the Israelites to ask for a king, then why did he become angry when they obeyed him? The Talmudic debate proceeds as follows:
Rav Yehudah said, citing Shmu'el: All items mentioned in the section about the king are the king's prerogatives. Rav said: The section about the king was only pronounced in order to scare them.
This [dispute] corresponds to a tannaitic dispute [i.e., a debate among certain ‘tannaim’, rabbis of the Mishna (c. 70–200 ce)]:Footnote 31
Rabbi Yose says: All items mentioned in the section about the king are the king's prerogatives. Rabbi YehudahFootnote 32 says: The section was only pronounced in order to scare them.
Rabbi Yehudah also used to say: There were three commandments that Israel were obligated to fulfill once they had entered the land: appointing a king, exterminating the offspring of Amalek, and building the temple.
Rabbi Nehorai says: The section was only pronounced in response to their complaints, as written, ‘And you shall say, I will set a king over me, as do all the nations about me’ (Deut. 17:14).
Rabbi Eleazar b. Tzadok says: The wise men of that generation made a proper request, as written: ‘[All the elders of Israel assembled and came to Samuel … and they said to him,] … “Appoint a king for us, to govern us”’ (1 Sam. 8:4–5). But the common people [
] amongst them spoke wrongly, as written, ‘that we may be like all the other nations’ (1 Sam. 8:19–20).Footnote 33
The crucial position here is that of Rabbi Yehudah. He argues explicitly that Deut. 17:14 is a commandment, and classes it with the commandments to take revenge on the Amalekites and to build the Temple. As a result, he also concludes that the parashat ha-melekh did not enumerate legitimate royal powers (God would never have enjoined tyranny), but had simply been designed to scare the Israelites. But if that is the case, then why is God angry, and why do the Israelites need to be scared in the first place? Rabbi Eleazar ben Tzadok provides the answer. The Israelites were indeed obliged to ask for a king, but they sinned in asking for a king ‘like all the other nations’. There were, on Eleazar's account, actually two requests for a king in 1 Samuel: the first, by the wise elders (zekenim), was appropriate because it emphasized the need for law and order, while the second, by the mob, was sinful because its aim was to imitate the surrounding idolatrous nations. The ‘section on the king’ describes what having a king ‘like all the other nations’ would look like; its aim is to dissuade the mob from pursuing a ruinous course. This view was taken up by the most important medieval Jewish exegetes, and therefore became a powerful orthodoxy in the European rabbinic tradition.
Christian commentators were quick to seize on these arguments as soon as they entered wide circulation during the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, perhaps more than any other source, the Talmud came to organize debates between Christian exegetes on the question of Biblical monarchy. The German scholar and Hebraist Sebastian Münster – who taught Hebrew to John Calvin – is representative. He simply reproduces the rabbinic discussion in his gloss on Deut. 17:14:
The Hebrews observed that there were three commandments for the Israelites when they entered the promised land, namely to constitute a king over them, to wipe out the seed of the Amalekites, and to build a Temple for God. The Hebrews also posed this question, ‘Why did God react with anger because they asked for a king in the time of Samuel, when in this place he either commands, or at least creates a right to constitute one?’ They respond to this that the elders who lived at this time did not ask for a king wickedly and impiously when they said to Samuel ‘Give us a king who can judge us, etc.’, but rather the mob sinned, because they did not wish to listen to the voice of Samuel, but said, ‘By no means; but let there be a king over us, so that we may be like the other nations.’Footnote 34
Claude de Saumaise (Salmasius), Milton's famous antagonist, likewise assigns great importance in his Defensio regia (1649) to the fact that ‘the rabbis of the Jews teach that there were three obligations for the Israelites which it was necessary for them to fulfill after they were brought to the Holy Land, to constitute a king over themselves, to eliminate the Amalekites, and to build the Temple’.Footnote 35 Salmasius continues by noting that ‘many of them [the rabbis] write that the elders of that time [i.e. the time of 1 Sam. 8] rightly and properly asked for a king, but the mob sinned in this, because they asked that he be given to them in the form of the kings which the other nations had’.Footnote 36 Salmasius even quotes ‘Rabbi Jose in Gemara Sanhedrin’ by name, to the effect that ‘that which is said in the section on the king is included in the rights of the king’.Footnote 37
There were, however, other Christian exegetes who endorsed the Talmudic reading of Deut. 17:14, but took their understanding of the Israelite sin, not from Rabbi Eleazar, but instead from a suggestion in Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. For Maimonides (who agreed that monarchy was a command), the problem was not the sort of king the Israelites asked for in 1 Sam. 8, but rather the manner in which they asked for one. The Dutch Hebraist Peter van der Cun (Cunaeus) quotes him directly on this subject in the De republica hebraeorum (1617):
Maimonides answers learnedly, that the divine Indignation [over the request for a king in 1 Sam. 8] arose from hence, Because they desir'd a King by unfaithfull complaints and seditious murmurings, not that they might comply with Gods design in the Law, but out of a distast of the most holy Prophet Samuel: to whom it was spoken by the voice of God, They have not rejected thee, but me.Footnote 38
Cunaeus's teacher, the Dutch exegete Johannes van den Driesche (Drusius), who in 1572 became professor of Oriental languages at Oxford, concurred in his commentary on 1 Sam. 8:
Why then did this request [for a king] displease God? Because they petitioned him out of a wicked spirit, and not on account of the commandment [i.e. the presumed commandment in Deut. 17:14 to establish a king] … it was through murmuring, not so that [a king] might judge them, but so that he might fight their battles.Footnote 39
Another statement of this view is found in Edmund Bunny's The scepter of Iudah (1584): it was necessary for the Israelites to ask for a king, ‘although on their parts it were very disorderly done’.Footnote 40 Hugo Grotius puts it slightly differently, but in a similar vein. He accepts the Talmudic view that ‘the laws of the king, the temple, and the destruction of the Amalekites pertain to the time of possessing the Land’,Footnote 41 but his gloss on 1 Sam. 8:7 reads ‘at another time they could have erected a king for themselves without sin’.Footnote 42 The problem was not asking for a king, but asking for one ‘during that time in which they had an interregnum established by God’.Footnote 43
The Talmud, then, exerted a powerful and radicalizing influence on monarchist expositors of Biblical kingship, leading them to the conclusion that God had commanded, rather than simply permitted, monarchy in Israel. Indeed, these developments make sense of John Locke's claim in chapter 8 of The second treatise of government that Europeans ‘never dreamed of monarchy being iure divino … till it was revealed to us by the divinity of the last age’.Footnote 44 Not until the proliferation of the Talmudic reading of Deut. 17:14 were Christian theologians prepared to argue that God requires monarchical government. But that is only half of the story. There was, after all, another important rabbinic discussion of Deut. 17:14 and 1 Sam. 8 – one found, not in the Talmud, but in Devarim Rabbah, a compendium of classical Midrashim (rabbinic exegetical commentary) to Deuteronomy, most likely redacted at the end of the ninth century. This analysis took an entirely different view of Biblical monarchy. It appears as the gloss on Deut. 17:14, and is worth quoting at length.
when thou art come unto the land … The Rabbis say: God said to Israel: ‘I planned that you should be free from kings.’ Whence this? As it is said, A wild ass used to the wilderness (Jer. 2:24): just as the wild ass grows up in the wilderness and has no fear of man, so too I planned that you should have no fear of kings; but you did not desire so: ‘snuffing the wind in her desire’ (Jer. 2:24), and ‘wind’ is nothing but kingship. Whence this? As it is said, And, behold, the four winds of the heaven broke forth upon the great sea (Dan. 7:2) [referring to Daniel's vision of the four world kingdoms]. God said: ‘Should you assert that I do not know that in the end you will forsake me, already long ago I have forewarned [you] through Moses, and said to him: “Seeing that in the end they will ask for a mortal king, let them appoint one of their own as a king, not a foreigner.”’ Whence this? From what we have read in the section, and shalt say: i will set a king over me, etc. (Deut. 17:14).
… the Rabbis say: When kings arose over Israel and began to enslave them, God exclaimed: ‘Did you not forsake me and seek kings for yourselves?’ Hence the force of, i will set a king over me.
This bears out what Scripture says, Put not your trust in princes (Ps. 146:3). R. Simon said in the name of R. Joshua b. Levi: Whosoever puts his trust in the Holy One, blessed be He, is privileged to become like unto Him. Whence this? As it is said, Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose trust the Lord is (Jer. 17:7). But whosoever puts his trust in idolatry [
] condemns himself to become like [the idols]. Whence this? As it is written, They that make them shall be like unto them (Ps. 115:8). The Rabbis say: Whosoever puts his trust in flesh and blood passes away and his dignity [
prob. from the Greek προστασα] also passes away, as it is said, Nor in the son of man in whom there is no help (Ps. 146:3). What follows on this verse? His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his dust. God said: ‘Although they know that man is nought, yet they forsake my Glory and say: “Set a king over us”. Why do they ask for a king? By your life, in the end you will learn to your cost what you will have to suffer from your king.’ Whence this? As it is written, All their kings are fallen, there is none among them that calleth unto Me (Hos. 7:7) …
Another comment on, i will set a king over me. The Rabbis say: The Holy One, blessed be He, said, ‘In this world you asked for kings, and kings arose in Israel and caused you to fall by the sword.’ Saul caused them to fall on Mount Gilboa. Whence this? And the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines (1 Sam. 31:1). David brought about a plague, as it is said, So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel (2 Sam. 24:15). Ahab was the cause of the withholding of rain from them, as it is said, There shall not be dew nor rain these years, etc. (1 Kings 17:1). Zedekiah was the cause of the destruction of the Temple. When Israel saw what befell them on account of their kings they all began to cry out: ‘We do not desire a king, we desire our first king [
]’, [as it is said], For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us (Isa. 33:22). Whereupon God replied: ‘By your life, I will do so.’ Whence this? For it is said, And the Lord shall be king over all the earth, etc. (Zech. 14:9).Footnote 45
On this view, monarchy itself is a sin; it is everywhere and always the act of bowing down to flesh and blood instead of God, and is therefore tantamount to idolatry.Footnote 46 Man inhaled the emptiness of monarchy like a desert mirage, worshipping kings in whom ‘there is no help’, rather than the true, heavenly king, and his punishment has accordingly been great. It was this aspect of the rabbinic tradition which, in the hands of Christian exegetes, would transform republican political thought.
III
The first European political writer to make a straightforwardly exclusivist argument for republican government was John Milton. But, as many scholars have noted, Milton's attitude towards monarchy was by no means consistent over time.Footnote 47 When he published The tenure of kings and magistrates in 1649, only weeks after the execution of Charles I, his brief was to defend the principle of resistance, not to dispute the legitimacy of monarchy.Footnote 48 Accordingly, he was happy to read Deut. 17:14 and 1 Sam. 8 in a relatively conventional manner, clearly indebted in the first instance to Josephus. God's remarks in Deuteronomy, he explains, were simply meant to underscore that
the right of choosing, yea of changing thir own Government is by the grant of God himself in the People. And therfore when they desir'd a King, though then under another form of government, and thir changing displeas'd him, yet he that was himself their King, and rejected by them, would not be a hindrance to what they intended, furder then by perswasion, but that they might doe therein as they saw good, 1 Sam. 8. onely he reserv'd to himself the nomination of who should reigne over them.Footnote 49
The central issue for Milton is that the people choose their government, not God; if God is willing to allow even himself to be deposed, why not Charles I? There is no hint in this passage of an argument against kingship. God was ‘displeas'd’ because the Israelites proposed to abandon their special relationship with him, not because kingship is inherently sinful. Indeed, Milton almost immediately softens his position yet further.
But som will say to both these examples [i.e. the deposition of Samuel's sons, and the subsequent deposition of Rehoboam], it was evilly don. I answer, that not the latter, because it was expressly allow'd them in the Law to set up a King if they pleas'd; and God himself joyn'd with them in the work; though in som sort it was at that time displeasing to him, in respect of old Samuel who had govern'd them uprightly.Footnote 50
Here Milton in effect moves from the more radical Josephan argument (according to which kingship itself is unacceptable for Israel, although acceptable for everyone else), back to a variant of the traditional argument. God was not angry at the Israelites because he did not want them to be governed by kings, but rather because they rebelled against Samuel. But that is not where Milton leaves matters in Tenure. Nearer the end of the text, he expresses his hope
that 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.Footnote 51
The crucial move here is Milton's suggestion that Israel is not a unique case. 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’.Footnote 52 It is this revolutionary line of argument that Milton develops in the 1650s.Footnote 53
His most explicit discussion of this argument's provenance occurs in his great reply to Salmasius, the Pro populo anglicano defensio of 1651. The context is his analysis of Salmasius's use of rabbinic arguments in favour of his monarchist position. Recall that Salmasius, in the Defensio regia, had quoted the Talmud to argue that God had given the Israelites a positive commandment to establish monarchy, and that He had intended the ‘section on the king’ to catalogue the legitimate powers of royal government.Footnote 54 Milton begins by addressing himself to the first argument. God did not order the Israelites to ask for a king, he insists, but, on the contrary, ‘God was angry not only because they wanted a king in imitation of the gentiles, and not in accordance with his law, but clearly because they desired a king at all.’Footnote 55 Here Milton explicitly rejects the Talmudic view, and moves in a more radical direction. He then addresses the argument about kingly prerogatives, insisting that the parashat ha'melekh simply prophesied kingly abuses: ‘Such is the explanation of this passage by all orthodox theologians and jurisconsults, and as you might have learned from Sichardus, by many of the rabbis too, and no rabbi ever held that this passage treated of an absolute right of kings.’Footnote 56
This passage is interesting for two reasons. The first is the way in which Milton deals with the problem of Rabbi Yose, who had, after all, argued in the Talmud that the parashat ha'melekh enumerated legitimate powers. Milton tries to avoid the difficulty as follows:
It is obvious [he claims] that the chapter about the king which Rabbi Jose spoke of as containing the rights of kings is in Deuteronomy and not in Samuel; and Rabbi Judas [i.e.Yehudah] declared quite correctly, contradicting you, that the passage in Samuel concerns only his putting fear into the people.Footnote 57
Milton argues, in short, that the ‘section on the king’ Rabbi Yose had in mind was not the one in 1 Sam. 8, but rather the passage in Deut. 17, where God lists the duties of an Israelite king. This is clearly false, but very clever. The second point of interest is Milton's mention of ‘Sichardus’. This is Wilhelm Schickard, a German Lutheran who became professor of Hebrew at the University of Tübingen in 1619 (he was also a noted astronomer, and the calculating machine that he invented in 1623 is widely considered to be the first computer).Footnote 58 In 1625, he published a treatise entitled Mishpat ha-melekh, Jus regium hebraeorum, an analysis of Biblical monarchy based on rabbinic materials. Milton knew this book well (he cites it in his Commonplace Book),Footnote 59 and he recognizes that Salmasius is getting all of his rabbinic references out of it. On the question of whether Israelite kings could be judged for their crimes, Milton writes ‘that Hebrew kings can be judged and even condemned to the lash is shown at length by Sichard from the rabbinical writings; and it is to him that you owe all this matter, though you are not ashamed to howl against him’.Footnote 60 The reason this is so important is that it explains Milton's remarkable final verdict on Salmasius's reading of Deut. 17:14 and 1 Sam. 8:
In order to show all that you have failed to prove in any way from the works of the Hebrews what you had undertaken to prove in this chapter, you freely admit that some of their rabbis deny that their fathers should have recognized any king but God, though such a king was given to punish them. With these rabbis I cast my vote.Footnote 61
These are the rabbis of the Midrash. Salmasius did indeed have to admit their existence, because Schickard had catalogued their opinions in his treatise, and anyone who read this influential work would have recognized Salmasius's omission. The question of Milton's direct access to the Midrashic account need not, therefore, depend on the notoriously vexed question of his level of reading fluency in rabbinic Hebrew.Footnote 62 The view for which he ‘casts his vote’ had been translated into Latin in a text he knew intimately.
Schickard, like Salmasius, only mentions the Midrashic view in order to refute it, but, in the course of doing so, he reproduces large sections of the discussion in Devarim Rabbah. He begins by endorsing the majority view in the Talmud: kingship was divinely ordained for Israel at Deut. 17:14, and the Israelite sin in I. Sam. 8 was simply the act of asking for a king ‘like all the nations’: ‘He [Samuel] did not upbraid the people because they asked for a King, but because they did not ask lawfully.’Footnote 63 Before moving on, however, Schickard notes that ‘there is no lack among the Jews of those who contradict this position and believe that their fathers did not in the least require kings. Their reasons are diverse, and we will examine them carefully.’Footnote 64 He begins by paraphrasing the view of Bahya ben Asher, a thirteenth-century kabbalist and exegete, whose commentary was deeply influenced by the Midrash:
God the Master of the Universe was enough for them; nor did he grant them kings except as a punishment, perhaps just as Zeus gave the frogs a stork [as their ruler] in Aesop's fable. This is what he [Bahya] says in his commentary on Parashat Shofetim [Deut. 17:14]: ‘It was not the will of God the Master of the Universe that there should be any king in Israel apart from himself. For he is truly the highest king, who walks in the midst of their camp and carefully attends to all of their particular needs. Nor did they need any other king. For what would an elect nation whose king is the Lord of the Universe do with a king who is mere flesh and blood? … As it is written (Hos. 13.11), “I give you a king in my anger.”’Footnote 65
Schickard then adds an even more crucial passage, this time purporting to cite a figure he calls ‘Rabba B. Nachmoni’,Footnote 66 but, in actuality, quoting the Midrash verbatim:
Rabba b. Nachmoni judges that this [institution of kingship] conflicts with the liberty of the Jewish people, whose condition should not involve being ruled by another, as cattle are ruled by a herdsman; but rather should let them wander free, like animals in the wild … He says: ‘Thus said the Lord, Master of the Universe, to Israel, Oh my children! I meant for you to be free from masters. Whence this? Because it is said (Jerem. 2. v.24) “A wild ass used to the wilderness.” Therefore just as a wild donkey who grows up in the wilderness is awed by no man above him, in the same way I intended that there should be no fear of a king over you. But you did not desire this. Rather (as comes next in the text) “he sucked up the wind in the desire of his heart”. Nor is this “wind” anything other than kingship. Whence this? Because it is said (Dan. 7.2), “Behold the four heavenly winds broke forth on the great sea.”’Footnote 67
In closing his discussion of these dissenting rabbis, Schickard then returns to Bahya, who paraphrases the last paragraph of the Midrashic commentary on Deut. 17:14:
Go and learn what befell us under the hand of the kings … Saul fell at Mount Gilboah; David caused a plague, as it is said (2 Sam. 24.15) ‘and God sent Israel a plague’; Ahab kept the rains from them, as it is said (1 Kings 17.1), ‘As God lives, if there will be dew or rain in these years’, etc.; Zedekiah made the sanctuary desolate.Footnote 68
Monarchy was not a command, but a fierce punishment for ‘sucking up’ the emptiness of ‘flesh and blood’ kingship. As Schickard puts it, quoting the fourteenth-century commentator Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides), ‘the kings were the cause of the beguiling of Israel, so that they were alienated from the Lord their God, and were then taken away from their land into exile’.Footnote 69
Interestingly, the one paragraph of the Midrashic commentary which Schickard does not reproduce is the one that most explicitly draws the connection between monarchy and idolatry (‘Whosoever puts his trust in flesh and blood passes away and his dignity also passes away, as it is said, “Nor in the son of man in whom there is no help” (Ps. 146:3)’). But Milton had no trouble drawing the appropriate conclusion, either by inference, or, just as likely, because he had encountered the rest of the Midrash elsewhere (any number of sources were available to him).Footnote 70 Whatever the case, just after announcing that he was ‘casting his vote’ with the rabbis of the Midrash, he proceeds to gloss 1 Sam. 8 in the Midrashic manner. As far as I am aware, this is the first appearance of this reading in Christian exegesis:Footnote 71
God indeed gives evidence throughout of his great displeasure at their [the Israelites'] request for a king – thus in [1 Sam. 8] verse 7: ‘They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them, according to all the works which they have done wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods.’ The meaning clearly is that it is a form of idolatry to ask for a king, who demands that he be worshipped and granted honors like those of a god. Indeed he who sets an earthly master over him and above all the laws is near to establishing a strange god for himself, one seldom reasonable, usually a brute beast who has scattered reason to the winds. Thus in 1 Samuel 10:19 we read: ‘And ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulation, and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us’ … just as if he had been teaching them that it was not for any man, but for God alone, to rule over men.Footnote 72
Milton concludes with the obvious coda: ‘When at last the Jewish people came to their senses they complained in Isaiah 26:13 that it had been ruinous for them to have other lords than God. This evidence all proves that the Israelites were given a king by God in his wrath.’Footnote 73 Indeed, this concluding passage constitutes good evidence that Milton was familiar with sections of the Midrash not excerpted by Schickard. The verse from Isaiah to which he refers appears as part of the ‘song’ which will greet the dawn of the Messianic age, and simply reads: ‘o lord our God, other lords beside thee have had dominion over us: but by thee only will we make mention of thy name’ (Isa. 26:13). There is nothing at all in this verse to suggest that the Israelites came to recognize that they had made an egregious error in asking for a king in 1 Sam. 8 – Isaiah is plainly talking about something completely different. Milton's analysis does, however, precisely mirror the reading offered in the last paragraph of the Midrash: ‘When Israel saw what befell them on account of their kings they all began to cry out: “We do not desire a king, we desire our first king [
]”, [as it is said], For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us (Isa. 33:22).’ The Midrash attaches its reading to a different verse from Isaiah, but was almost certainly responsible for suggesting to Milton the notion that, at a certain point, the Israelites ‘came to their senses’ and regretted their request for a mortal king.Footnote 74 They now recognized that they had sinned by turning to idolatrous kingship, and had been punished with the curse of monarchy.
To be sure, Milton had been interested in the relationship between monarchy and idolatry for some time before he wrote the Defensio. As early as 1639, he had reflected in his Commonplace Book on the manner in which kingship distorts the mortality of rulers:
Kings scarcely recognize themselves as mortals, scarcely understand that which pertains to man, except on the day they are made king or on the day they die. On the former day they feign humanity and gentleness, in the hope of capturing the voice of the people. On the latter, having death before their eyes and in the knowledge of their evil deeds, they confess what is a fact, namely, that they are wretched mortals.Footnote 75
Milton developed this idea further in Eikonoklastes, his 1649 polemic against the Eikon Basilike – an account of Charles I's life and last days then thought to have been written by the king himself. Milton begins his assault by announcing that he takes the title of the king's book very seriously:
In one thing I must commend his op'nness who gave the title to this Book, Εικὼν Βασιλ ικ
, that is to say, The Kings Image; and by the Shrine he dresses out for him, certainly would have the people come and worship him. For which reason this answer also is intitl'd Iconoclastes, the famous Surname of many Greek Emperors, who in their zeal to the command of God, after a long tradition of Idolatry in the Church, took courage, and broke all superstitious Images to peeces. But the People, exorbitant and excessive in all thir motions, are prone ofttimes not to a religious onely, but to a civil kinde of Idolatry in idolizing thir Kings; though never more mistak'n in the object of thir worship.Footnote 76
Milton argues here that monarchies lend themselves to a ‘civil kinde of Idolatry’, but he does not yet make the argument that kingship per se is idolatry.Footnote 77 That case would wait for the 1651 Defensio, and would then be amplified in Milton's 1659 pamphlet, The readie and easie way, written on the eve of the Restoration.
Here Milton casts 1 Sam. 8 as an intimation of a verse from the Gospel, but the Midrash once again makes its presence strongly felt:
God in much displeasure gave a king to the Israelites, and imputed it a sin to them that they sought one: but Christ apparently forbids his disciples to admit of any such heathenish government: the kings of the gentiles, saith he, exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise autoritie upon them, are call'd benefactors. But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that serveth [Luke 22:25–6] … And what government comes neerer to this precept of Christ, then a free Commonwealth; wherein they who are greatest, are perpetual servants and drudges to the publicke at thir own cost and charges, live soberly in thir families, walk the streets as other men, may be spoken to freely, familiarly, friendly, without adoration. Whereas a king must be ador'd like a Demigod, with a dissolute and haughtie court about him, of vast expence and luxurie, masks and revels, to the debaushing of our prime gentry both male and female; nor at his own cost, but on publick revenue; and all this to do nothing but … pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him.Footnote 78
Milton looks forward ‘to the coming of our true and rightfull and only to be expected King, only worthy as he is our only Saviour, the Messiah, the Christ, the only heir of his father’.Footnote 79 In the meantime, he warns his countrymen that if
after all this light among us, the same reason shall pass for current to put our necks again under kingship, as was made use of by the Jews to return back to Egypt and to the worship of thir idol queen, because they falsly imagind that they then livd in more plenty and prosperitie, our condition is not sound but rotten, both in religion and all civil prudence.Footnote 80
The union of monarchy and idolatry could not be more explicit; kingship is always illegitimate because it is sin.
IV
Milton's derivation of an exclusivist commitment to republican government from a set of rabbinic materials would have profound and long-lasting consequences. Indeed, perhaps the most extraordinary fact about this story is the degree to which Milton's own contemporaries were aware of its contours. James Harrington, writing in 1658 in The stumbling-block of disobedience and rebellion, offers the following commentary on Biblical kingship, and the manner in which its status had recently been contested:
[Hosea says] ‘O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in me is thine help; I will be thy king (which foretells the restitution of the commonwealth, for) where is any other that may save thee in all thy cities? and thy judges of whom thou saidst, give me a king and princes? I gave thee a king in mine anger (that is in Saul) and I took him away in my wrath.’ That is in the captivity, so at least saith Rabbi Bechai, with whom agree Nahmoni, Gerschom, and others. Kimchi, it is true, and Maimonides are of opinion that the people, making a king, displeased God not in the matter but in the form only, as if the root of a tree, the balance of a government, were form only and not matter: nor do our divines yet, who are divided into like parties, see more than the rabbis. Both the royalists and the commonwealthsmen of each sort, that is whether divines or Talmudists, appeal unto the letter of the law, which the royalists (as the translators of our Bible) render thus: ‘When thou shalt say’, the commonwealthsmen, as Diodati,Footnote 81 thus: ‘If thou come to say, I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are about me, thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose.’ The one party will have the law to be positive, the other contingent and with a mark of detestation upon it; for so, where God speaketh of his people's doing anything like ‘the nations that were about them’, it is everywhere else understood.Footnote 82
This is a remarkably revealing passage. To begin with, it reminds us once again of the astonishing impact of Schickard's Jus regium hebraeorum. The two rabbinical camps – Bahya ben Asher, the misnamed Rabba bar Nahmoni, and Gersonides (Ralbag) on one side, and David Kimchi (Radak) and Maimonides on the other – are lifted directly from Schickard's presentation of the dispute (Harrington refers to him by name on the next page). But it does a great deal more than that. Harrington here exhibits an astute understanding of the way in which the debate over monarchy had developed in the 1650s. It had become a controversy over whether Deut. 17:14 and 1 Sam. 8 placed a ‘mark of detestation’ on kingship – that is, characterized it as inherently wicked – or treated it as a ‘positive’ commandment. Monarchy was now either required or forbidden; there was no middle ground. Harrington was also aware of the startling degree to which this debate had been shaped and radicalized by the Christian encounter with ‘Talmudists’. These Talmudists could of course be either ‘royalists’ or ‘commonwealthsmen’, but Harrington left no doubt as to which side he himself came down on. He glosses 1 Sam. 8:7 as follows:
‘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.’Footnote 83
His ‘Talmudical commonwealthsmen’ could hardly have put it better.
The Miltonic position with which Harrington engages, according to which monarchy is always and everywhere illicit because it constitutes the sin of idolatry, would continue to capture the republican imagination. Algernon Sidney, writing in 1664 in his Court maxims, concludes that ‘monarchy is in itself an irrational, evil government, unless over those who are naturally beasts and slaves’.Footnote 84 His defence of this proposition is straightforward:
The Israelites sinned in desiring a king, let us be deterred by it. God foretold the misery that would follow if they persisted in their wickedness and guilt, and brought upon themselves the deserved punishment thereof. Let their guilt and punishment deter us, let us take warning though they would not. And if we have no communication with satan, let us have none with those thrones which uphold that which he endeavors to set up against God.Footnote 85
Sidney elaborates on this point later in the treatise, explaining that 1 Sam. 8 reveals ‘how strict a union there is between idolatry and tyranny’.Footnote 86 Another pamphlet makes the very same point:
Government by kings was first introduced into the world by the Heathens, from whom the children of Israel copied the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The Heathens paid divine honors to their deceased kings, and the christian world hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust … Near three thousand years passed away from the Mosaic account of the creation, till the Jews under a national delusion requested a king. Till then their form of government (except in extraordinary cases, where the Almighty interposed) was a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes. Kings they had none, and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts. And when a man seriously reflects on the idolatrous homage which is paid to the persons of Kings, he need not wonder, that the Almighty, ever jealous of his honor, should disapprove of a form of government which so impiously invades the prerogative of heaven.
Of course, this pamphlet was written over a hundred years after the contributions of Milton, Harrington, and Sidney. Its author was an English émigré named Thomas Paine, and he called his reflections Common sense.Footnote 87
culto extraneo in Maimonidis editis aliquot libris aliorumque saepitis occurrit … 
Cultus astrorum & Planetarum’. Selden, De synedriis & praefecturis iuridicis veterum Ebraeorum, 
