“…membership in the Traditionist Party continually employs an understanding of the primal import of religion on culture and daily life.”

Under a system of Judges, there was no national religion as consecrated by the King’s submission to it. Passages such as Judges 6:1 “Then the sons of Israel did evil before the Lord, and the Lord delivered them into the hand of Midian for seven years” reveal again and again that the children of Israel were flailing about in terms of religion and culture, a pain to the quick that the modern man is all too familiar with.

Little to no definitive structure existed in the Israelites’ lives. They had the Mosaic Law, but other than that no structural government prevailed. It must be noted that this was the Israelites own fault, since they had obeyed neither the command to thoroughly expel the other nations from the promised land, and they had not set up a king. Moses was told that though he held monarchical office, and was also a prince of Egypt, his line was not to inherit. 1 Chronicles 23:14-15 “Now the sons of Moses the man of God were reckoned to the tribe of Levi. The sons of Moses were Gershon and Eliezer.” Deuteronomy 10:9 “Therefore Levi has no portion nor inheritance with his brethren; the Lord is his inheritance, just as the Lord your God promised him.” Joshua was inaugurated as duke of all Israel, to be their first Judge, but the people did not choose to follow the Lord’s commandment to set a king over themselves. As a result, God had not yet given them the government that would provide order, and though the king was to be the answer to that problem, it was to be a long time before the people would have enough of the punishment of disobedience.

Thus, the issue the Israelites began to experience was with the presence of perceptible power. Judges 6:13 “Gideon said to Him, “It is I, my Lord?” If the Lord is with us, why then have all these evils come upon us? And where are all the miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, “Did not the Lord bring us out of Egypt?” But now the Lord has driven us out and delivered us of the hands of the Midianites.” The Israelites wanted protection, so many worshipped what they perceived as the strongest gods in the pantheons of their neighbours. This was not the only reason they left off the worship of God for Baal and others, but it is one of the most important reasons. For a time, they perceived the power of the Midianites, for example, and calculated that their gods were the strongest, since the living representation of their gods was the power of the people of Midian, and they proceeded to follow Midian’s gods. What the people needed was a physical representation of the spiritual truth they wanted to believe. They wanted to believe in Yahweh, but it seemed blatantly obvious that the gods of the people around them were stronger.

This is, of course, somewhat pathetic. If the Judeo-Christian God, who is not only not on the scale of any spiritual entity (no matter how powerful) as He is being itself and not just a slice of reality, but is, by that nature, exclusive to any other possible equivalent, is real and the other gods false, then no matter the power of the enemy, or the grand scale of impending calamity, total faith and trust should be placed in  Him. However, real people living real lives cannot, or perhaps merely will not, see things through such a black and white lens. It is too difficult to forget in the day-to-day mundanity about the real presence of the being that is being itself. The local gods seemed more down-to-earth and interested in making deals. If men were as angels, they would have never forgotten God, but the needs of water bread and roof serve to distract mere mortals from such divine faithfulness. While this reality is, of course, not an admirable quality of humanity, it is, nevertheless, an undeniable one.

The period of time represented in Judges reveals very plainly that groups of individual humans are not capable of governing themselves properly. People need a flesh-and-blood leader to govern them or else they descend into absolute anarchy; but more than that, they need a king whose function includes submission to the authority of God in order that those people may be ruled peaceably and freely, for a leader is, after all, just another human. The wickedness that Samuel told the people that they had done in choosing a human king instead of God was that they had done so on their own initiative instead of at His bidding and in His time. The people were impatient and ran after other gods, which demonstrated their weakness when they openly declared that they could not continue in boundless faith. People are too weak to rely wholly on an invisible God, and the whole history of Judges reveals this. Chaos and anarchy prevailed during the days of the judges. Even the judges themselves were weak and chaotic, some sacrificing their own children, some sacrificing their concubines to save their own skin, and some breaking their vows before God. The days of the judges were chaotic and miserable for the people, and the condemnation God gives them in Samuel is simply that the nature of man is wicked, and so he may not rule himself. Man must be put into subjugation. A king is both punishment and salvation for the weakness of man.

Under the system of Judges, the Israelites were consistently placed under the subjugation of foreign powers. Judges 2:13-14 “They forsook the Lord and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel. So He delivered them into the hands of plunderers who despoiled them; and He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, so that they could no longer stand before their enemies.” At one point or another they were under the tyranny of Mesopotamia, Syria, Moab, Philistine, Canaan, Midian, the seditious Abimelech, Ammon, and the Amorites as well as myriad internal conflicts and civil wars, and more subjugations as mentioned elsewhere. This all spanned a period of about 350 years, which meant that there was only ever about 20-40 years of peace before some grand calamity came upon them again. The days of the Judges were clearly fraught with every difficulty, and the lawlessness of the land led to the inability of both the elders and the Judges to right the ship of state—and it certainly led to an impossibility of keeping it that way.

The chaos and anarchy within led to internal weakness that made the Israelites vulnerable to outside influence and attack, but also led to a number of severe internal conflicts within the very people of Israel. This conflict came about because they had little to no government to speak law, and, more importantly, to enforce it. Judges 18:1-2 “In those days there was no king in Israel. And in those days, the tribe of Dan sought for itself an inheritance to inhabit, because no inheritance had befallen it until that day in the midst of the tribes of Israel. So the sons of Dan sent five men of their family to spy upon the land and search it out. They said to them, “Go, search the land.” And they went as far as Mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, and there they lodged.” As there was no law and order, when the tribe of Dan realized that they had done a poor job holding onto their territory, they were willing to invade the other tribes and steal their brothers’ lands.

As the passage clearly enumerates, the issue began because there was no king to pass judgement and to enact justice. This is further reinforced in Judges 18:7: “So the five men departed and went to Laish. They saw the people who were there, how they dwelt safely, in the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure. There were no rulers in the land who might put them to shame for anything. They were far from the Sidonians, and they had no ties with anyone.” One of the great purposes of a king is to put an end to squabbles within the tribes and the lords of the land (the elders of the people) and to be a unifying pressure to bind a nation together.

The chaos had gotten so out of hand that wickedness of such intensity as we do not know even in our morally repugnant day was allowed to bubble up as a miasma of pure evil. Judges 19:1 “And it was so in those days that there was no King in Israel, there was a certain Levite Sojourning on the lower slopes of Mount Ephraim. He took for himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah…” the story goes on to say in shocking recitation of a day that there was such lawlessness in Israel that homosexuality and the rape of male travelers had become as in the unbelievably evil days of Sodom and Gomorrah. A day where a man had to sacrifice his concubine to the ravishes of a totally uncontrolled mob of lust crazed men to save his own skin, and then find that she was raped to death in the night. A gruesome tale of the lawless days before the coming of God’s anointed king—David. Not only was the story shocking and terrible on its own, but these lawless men then even went on to cause a civil war between the tribe of Benjamin and the rest of Israel in which the former was nearly wiped out and women were kidnapped from other tribes to forcibly marry to the survivors in order to preserve the tribe from annihilation.

The very last verse in Judges condemns the period of lawlessness of the Israelites. Judges 21:25 “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” This verse effectively damns all the days of the judges to anarchy and lawlessness. The entire book of Judges is expectantly leaning towards the days of David in the book of 1 Samuel.

Judges 21:25 “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

The king is many things and fulfils many roles, and one of them is a righteous judgement for a rebellious people. The office of monarchy is a necessary establishment to govern a weak people prone to wickedness. The whole history of judges is one of tyranny and lawlessness, till the point where the people themselves begged to be put into bondage, since the pain of lawlessness was in fact worse than the promise of taxation, lordship, and the sword that would be wielded by the king.

The solemn warning given to the elders of the people in 1 Samuel 8:11-17: “And he said, “This will be the behaviour of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants.”

In this warning, we see that the tyrannically and chaotically governed Israelites were to be put to the first tax they had yet experienced from a domestic government, though under the rule of foreign powers they were often required to pay the tribute tax and were plundered and despoiled (Judges 3:15, 2:14). So, it is easy to see that the elders of Israel realized that the trade between foreign rule and domestic rule was an easy decision. Rarely will a foreign power be as gracious as a domestic, and since they would be taxed either way, a king who would fight for them—and not against them—was an easy choice.

Rather than be under the cruel subjugation of a foreign power, as they so often were, the Israelites wanted a king they could call their own. A person of their own flesh and blood, with familial ties and roots in their own land would be more likely to care about that land—and be less tyrannical.

As for the sword, the Israelites were more than ready to give their sons to the king’s army. This would be a great relief to them, especially considering the injustices they were regularly suffering under foreign tyrants. The dignity and safety a standing army would provide was a considerable change from the days under Philistine rule when they were forbidden to even have their own blacksmiths, for fear they would fashion weapons (1 Samuel 13:19). Under the judges, the people of Israel had no standing army, and no method to procure one. They were consistently vulnerable to attacks. Judges 5:8 “They chose new gods; Then the cities of the rulers waged war; not a shield or a spear was seen among the forty thousand in Israel.” This is the equivalent of a nation not being allowed to have metal refineries within its own land for fear it would begin to make tanks, and not being allowed to have their own police force. It means that the Israelites were completely dependent on foreign powers for fundamental infrastructure.

All the things that God made Samuel to solemnly warn the Israelites of regarding civil duties would have sounded as a great relief to the beleaguered people. However, there is still an element of punishment in the king. Because God made it clear that He was supposed to be their king (1 Samuel 12:12), the people would be righteously punished for looking to salvation from another. The punishment was the taxation, the lordship, and the sword; but like a child desperate for peace, the punishment was an easy way out of a future of prolonged pain. Taxation is quite unpleasant, as is being ruled over by a mere man, and watching your sons go to war is pain untold. There is no way to look at these things as anything other than the rule of law; which, however, as a righteous law, was a law both of punishment and salvation. It must be clearly understood that if men were as angels there would be no need for such a law; but this was not to be, for the weakness of man means we may expect the hateful tax collector to be with us always.

“The whole history of judges is one of tyranny and lawlessness, till the point where the people themselves begged to be put into bondage, since the pain of lawlessness was in fact worse than the promise of taxation, lordship, and the sword that would be wielded by the king.”

The whole history of the Christian Bible is one of continued revelation. The chosen of God are like a seed that God waters to a larger and more complete version of itself, fruiting and flowering more and more beautifully with each revelation. God is shown to be continually revealing greater and better truth and method of life to His children: from the wild days around the flood, to the establishment of a chosen patriarch, to the patriarchal tribe growing into a people, the people being rescued from bondage and receiving an established law and the tabernacle, to them receiving nationhood status and coming home into promise. And then, purely by the grace of God, they received God-appointed judges to help guide them, first to the realisation that God was the true establisher of rulers, then that the governmental portion of the Mosaic Law was “a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors were able to bear” (Acts 15:10). Followed by the understanding that without restraint, there was no moral and/or irrational depths to which they would not stoop (a similar theme in our republic today). Then finally to the knowledge that only in a government consisting of, and centred around, the nuclear family could the aforementioned moral free-fall be reversed. The establishment of their first king and capital city, which resulted in the safety of the people after being brutally destroyed again and again by their enemies, was the great event which stabilised the virtue and culture of the nation, and indeed, restored to them the idea that they were a nation in the first place. A new covenant was established between God and the line of David 9 (II Samuel 7:12-16). The establishment of the great temple of Solomon which became the centre for their culture was the final step in this long process of continued revelation.

The line of kings extended for many generations until it was lost at last in bondage to the Babylonians. During the Captivity they were purposefully made to struggle without a nation for a while until the rebellion of the Maccabees gained Israel’s independence and the restoration of the monarchy once again. With the underhanded takeover of the kingdom by the Edomite Herods, the capitulation to the incoming Roman Republic was inevitable and independence was lost again until 1948. The monarchy itself was to disappear forever.

But the fulfilment of all their history, promises, and covenants was met in the coming of the Messiah. With Jesus Christ came a fulfilment of all the promises of each successive covenant and revelation, and with His resurrection came more promises of a second coming and the finality of a kingdom which was to have no end. With each successive shift in the Judeo-Christian religion, things are revealed to be better and better. Even the Babylonian captivity was purposeful to open the hearts and minds of the people to the coming of the High King which from their circumstances they could see they desperately needed.

One reason that God considered it wickedness to ask for a king as the Elders of Israel did lies in a matter of timing. He wanted them to wait for Him as Penelope waited for Ulysses. However, due to the fallen state of Man, people can’t stand waiting for God to come down to them in power and majesty only once every 20-40 years, like Adam waiting for God in the garden. Men will rejoice in the presence of God, but they will also forget Him in the long years that make up the rest of their lives, and their children will have no memory at all of that day of glory. During the time of the Judges, God came to them only fleetingly, and as He is eternal, the daily passage of transient life is foreign to His nature. He was too long away from them, and so the people looked for a personal governor. They needed a mediator, and one judge among the million or so people of the tribes was insufficient. They wanted stability, but God wanted to be their king. With each successive revelation, God was giving the people a better relationship with Him and showing them a better way. People need a human king to be with them always, and they needed the archetype of the king to be revealed to them in the person of David so that they could be made ready for the coming of the God King. Both the period of judges and the period of kings were critical to making the people ready, as the theocratic nature of a god-rulership had to be revealed, and the human kingship form of rule had to be revealed as well. Both will be fulfilled ultimately in the second coming of the Christ.

“With each successive shift in the Judeo-Christian religion, things are revealed to be better and better.”

Two major Christological implications are revealed in Judges and 1 Samuel: the first is that the Judeo-Christian God jealously desires to be king over men, and the second reveals that a physical kingship is necessary for the ship of state not to flounder. Both are fulfilled in Christ, though the ultimate fulfilment must wait until the prophesied second coming. Until that coming, men are still to have a government, and none better could be chosen than that which is the most godly of all the forms, as to have a government headed by a king is to emulate Christ as closely as possible without being God Himself. Innumerable passages of the Christian New Testament command Christians to be Christlike in all their thought, heart and strength, and this is no different.

It must not be misunderstood that a purely human king is in any way the fulfilment of God’s desire for His people. Nothing could be clearer than the passage in 1 Samuel 12:17 “Is it not wheat harvest today? I will call upon the Lord, that he may send thunder and rain. And you shall know and see that your wickedness is great, which you have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking for yourselves a king.” The reason for this is obvious. 1 Samuel 8:12 “And when you saw that Nahash the king of the Ammonites came against you, you said to me, ‘No, but a king shall reign over us,’ when the Lord your God was your king.” The Lord is the rightful king of His people, but human beings are too weak to have any but a human Lord. The Orthodox Christian teaching about God shows that though He is just in His anger at men’s weakness, and rightly punishes that unfaithfulness, He nevertheless supplies human deficiency with manifest grace. The gift of Christ is that human lord so necessary for human frailty, but until His coming men must have the second-best option. The author of the book of Judges made it abundantly clear that to have no king is to be plunged into growing chaos and anarchy, so the best that a Christian can hope for is a physical king under the High King’s spiritual rule.

The next issue that will be raised is the fear that the institution of monarchy usurps the rightful rule of God. This is partially true. The Judeo-Christian God is jealous of His right to rule, and great caution must be employed upon the part of any who takes on any form of leadership. However, human leaders are clearly endorsed by the very same Scriptures from which an understanding of God’s jealousy is found. Persons in positions of authority, especially in a spiritual office, will always be held to a higher standard by both God and men, and this archetype plays out even in the broken modern justice system, when the masterminds behind large scale criminal enterprises are held responsible for all the injustice done by the rest of the gang, regardless of whether or not the person in question themselves engaged in any pernicious activity. The Christian Scripture also says that the shepherds will be judged more harshly. James 3:1 “My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment.”

Thus, the unity of the three books of the law of Deuteronomy, and the history of Judges and 1 Samuel is revealed to be completely Christological in two ways. One, God is jealous of His reign over His people, and must be king, and two, people are too weak to live without a human king, and that human king is Christ. It is clearly God’s will that He reign, but the author of the book of judges reveals that humans can’t handle the absence of their governor in day-to-day affairs. The fact is that they were conquered at least 8 times as recorded in Judges, and more subjugations were hinted at elsewhere. This yoke was too much for the people, and God was kind enough to not only grant them their request, but literally anoint the human king with His holy oil and to hand-select him for them, twice. Additionally, David made it clear on four separate occasions that God’s anointed (king Saul) was not to be touched. God then, as revealed in Ruth, the book sandwiched between the two histories of Judges and Samuel, brought the Christological conclusion to the royal line that He consecrated as His own for the ultimate salvation of His people.

It is impossible to imagine that God would hand-select said king, grant him His holy anointing, then raise up His own son out of that royal lineage if He disapproved entirely of the office. However, no human king can ever hold the high office of King of Kings. That must be Christologically fulfilled in the second coming. No mere human could be The Christ; therefore, all kings are but pale shadows of the king to come.

Here it is important to briefly mention that the King loses the right to the title when he ceases to meet the second monarchical criteria and no longer submits to a higher power. Nowhere does this play out more clearly than in the first king of Israel. Saul lost the right to kingship when he refused to submit to the higher power of God in not destroying the Amalekites, and his disregard for the Old Testament church is shown again and this time in even more stark revelation in 1 Samuel 22 when he orders the slaughter of over 300 priests of God.

Lastly, we have many clear examples of God’s wrath being poured out over the sin of the people, but this does not happen when they ask for a king. Instead, God tells them that even this new king was given to them by Him, and then their new king goes on, with the help of God, to defeat their enemies. Additionally, from the perspective of the Israelites, nothing has changed in their relationship to God: “Now therefore, here is the king whom you have chosen and whom you have desired. And take note, the Lord has set a king over you. If you fear the Lord and serve Him and obey His voice, and do not rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then both you and the king who reigns over you will continue following the Lord your God. However, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord, but rebel against the commandment of the Lord, then the hand of the Lord will be against you, as it was against your fathers” (1 Samuel 12:13-15). As long as the people continued to serve the Lord, the favour and blessing of God followed them as was promised before. They had everything to gain by a king, and nothing to lose.

In conclusion, the author of the book of Judges makes an excellent case that the reason for the chaos in post-conquest Israel was a lack of a king, but 1 Samuel takes a different tone and reminds the people that God should be king. These books are not in contradiction with each other, but serve to teach a wholistic, Christological message. Men need human kings to function properly, God wants to be man’s king, but is spirit, therefore a human God-King is the best solution. Since those that wait upon the Lord cannot have the God-King yet, man must settle on a human king who is under God. If the people served the Lord, He promised to be with the king and with the people. Christians look forward to not only a theocracy, but a monarchical theocracy. There is no conflict with Traditionism’s embrace of monarchism and Christianity; just the opposite is true: Monarchism is part of our commitment to do on earth that which is done in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

“…revealed to be completely Christological in two ways. One, God is jealous of His reign over His people, and must be king, and two, people are too weak to live without a human king…”