_THE SPEAKERS FOR GOD--I. THE KING_
DEUT. xvii. 14-20
In approaching the main section of the legislation it will be
necessary, in accordance with the expository character of the
series to which this volume belongs, to abandon the consecutive
character of the comment. It would lead us too far into archæology
to discuss the meaning and origin of all the legal provisions which
follow. Moreover nothing short of an extensive commentary would
do them justice, and for our purpose we must endeavour to group
the prescriptions of the code, and discuss them so. As it stands
there is no arrangement traceable. So utterly without order is it,
that it can hardly be thought that it is in the exact shape in
which it left its author's hands. Transpositions and misplacements
must, one thinks, have taken place to some extent. We are thus
left free to make our own arrangements, and it would appear most
fitting to discuss the code under the five heads of National Life,
Economic Life, and three fundamental qualities of a healthy national
life--Purity, Justice, and the Treatment of the Poor. Every phase
of the laws which remain for discussion can easily be brought under
these heads, and this chapter will discuss the first of them, the
organisation of the national life.
It is a striking instance of the accuracy of the national memory
that there is a clear and conscious testimony to the fact that for
long there was no king in Israel. Had the later historians been at
the mercy of a tradition so deeply influenced by later times as it
pleases some critics to suppose, it would seem inexplicable that
Moses should not have been represented as a king, and especially
that the conquest should not have been represented as a king's work.
Evidently there was a perfectly clear national consciousness of
the earlier circumstances of the nation, and it presents us with
an outline of the original constitution which is very simple and
credible. According to this the tribes whom Moses led were ruled
in the main by their own sheikhs or elders. Under these again were
the clans or fathers' houses similarly governed; and lastly, there
were the families in the wider sense, made up of the individual
households and governed by their heads. So far as can be gathered,
Moses did not interfere with this fundamental organisation at all.
He added to it only his own supremacy, as the mediator and means of
communication between Yahweh and His people. As such, his decision
was final in all matters too difficult for the sheikhs and judges.
But the fundamental point never lost sight of was that Yahweh alone
was their ruler, their legislator, their leader in war, and the doer
of justice among His people. From the very first moment of Israel's
national existence therefore, from the moment that it passed the
Red Sea, Yahweh was acknowledged as King, and Moses was simply His
representative. That is the cardinal fact in this nation's life,
and amid all the difficulties and changes of its later history
that was always held to. Even when kings were appointed, they were
regarded only as the viceroys of Yahweh. In this way the whole of
the national affairs received a religious colour; and those who look
at them from a religious standpoint have a justification which would
have been less manifest under other circumstances.
It is, therefore, no delusion of later times which finds in
Israelite institutions a deep religious meaning. Nor is the
persistence with which the Scriptural historians regard only the
religious aspects of national life to be laid as a fault to their
charge. It is nothing to the purpose to say that the bulk of the
people had no thoughts of that kind, that the whole fabric of the
national institutions appeared to them in a different light. We have
no right to lower the meaning of things to the gross materialism of
the populace. One would almost think, to hear some Old Testament
critics speak, that in this most ideal realm of religion we can be
safe from illusion only when ideal points of view are abandoned,
that only in the commonest light of common day have we any security
that we are not deceiving ourselves. But most of these same men
would resent it bitterly if that standard were applied to the
history of the lands they themselves love. What Englishman would
think that Great Britain's career and destiny were rightly estimated
if imperial sentiment and humanitarian aims were thrust aside in
favour of purely material considerations? Why then should it be
supposed that the views and opinions of the multitude are the only
safe criterion to be applied to the institutions of God's ancient
people?
In truth, there is no reason why we should think so. The Divine
kingship made it impossible that the higher minds should be content
with the low aims of the opportunists of their day, whether these
were of the multitude or not. Even the entrance into Canaan,
which to the mass of the people was, in the first place, a mere
acquisition of territory and wealth, was idealised for the leaders
of the people by the thought that it was the land promised by
Yahweh to their fathers, the land in which they should live in
communion with Him. Generally, it may be said that the desire for
communion with God was the impelling and formative power in Israel.
The thoughts of even the dullest and most earthly were touched by
that ideal at times; and no leader, whether royal, or priestly, or
prophetic, ever really succeeded among this people who did not keep
that persistently in view as the true goal of his efforts. Moreover
this gave its depth of meaning to the whole movement of history in
Israel. Every triumph and defeat, every lapse and every reform had,
owing to this direction of the people's efforts, a significance far
beyond itself. These were not merely incidents in the history of
an obscure people; they were the pulsations and movements of the
world's advance to the full revelation of God. All that would have
been wholly national or tribal in the institutions and arrangements
of an ordinary people was in Israel lifted up into the religious
sphere; and the orders of men who spoke for the invisible King--the
earthly king, the priest, and the prophet--became naturally the
organs of the national life.
The king's position was entirely dependent upon Yahweh. He was
to be chosen by Yahweh, he was to act for Yahweh, and no king
could rightly fill his place in Israel who was not loyal to that
conception. It is in this sense that David was the man after God's
own heart. He, in contrast to Saul and to many of the later kings,
accepted with entire loyalty, notwithstanding his great natural
powers, the position of viceroy for Yahweh. It is, therefore,
an essential truth which underlies the Scriptural judgment that
the kings who made themselves, or attempted to make themselves,
independent of Yahweh, were false to Israel and to their true
calling. And this is why Samuel, when the people demanded a king,
regarded the movement with stern disapproval, and why he received
an oracle denouncing the movement as a falling away from Yahweh.
For, in the first place, the motive for the people's request, their
desire to be like other nations, was in itself a rejection of their
God. It repudiated, in part at least, the position of Israel as His
peculiar people, and implied that an earthly king would do more for
them than Yahweh had done; whereas if they had been faithful and
united enough in spirit they would have found victory easy. In the
second, the request in itself was a confession of unfitness for
their high national calling; it was a confession of failure under
the conditions which had been Divinely appointed for them. Not only
in the eyes of the Biblical historian therefore, but as a plain
matter of fact, the demand was an expression of dissatisfaction on
the people's part with their invisible King. They needed something
less spiritual than Yahweh's invisible presence and the prophetic
word to guide them. But since they had declared themselves thus
unfaithful, Yahweh had to deal with them at that level, and granted
their request as a concession to their unbelief and hardness of
heart.
That is the representation of the Books of Samuel; and the absence
of any similar law from the codes before Deuteronomy confirms the
view that the earthly kingship was not an essential part of the
polity of Israel, but a mere episode. Nowhere in legislation save
here in Deuteronomy is the king ever mentioned, and nowhere, not
even here, is any provision made for his maintenance. No civil taxes
are appointed by any law, while the most ample provision is made for
the presentation direct to Yahweh, as Lord paramount, of tithes and
firstfruits.
The history and the law alike agree therefore in regarding the
kingship as somewhat of an excrescence upon the national polity;
and this law, where alone the king's existence is recognised,
confines itself strictly to securing the theocratic character
of the constitution. He must be chosen by Yahweh; he must be a
born worshipper of Yahweh, not a foreigner; and he must rule in
accordance with the law given by Yahweh. Further, the ideal
Israelite king must be on his guard against the grossly voluptuous
luxury which Oriental sovereigns have never been able to resist,
either in ancient or modern times; and also against the lust for war
and conquest which was the ruling passion of Assyrian and Egyptian
kings. Evidently too the ideal king of Israel was, like Bedouin
sheikhs now, expected to be rich, able to maintain his state out
of his own revenues. The tribute paid by subject peoples, together
with the booty taken in war and the profits of trade, were his only
legitimate sources of income beyond his own wealth. Every other
exaction was more or less of an oppression. He had no right to make
any claims upon the land, for that was held direct of Yahweh. Nor
were there any regular taxes, so far as the Old Testament informs
us. The only approach to that would appear to be that the presents
with which his subjects voluntarily approached the king were
sometimes and by some rulers made permanent demands; at least that
would seem to be the meaning of the somewhat obscure statement in
1 Sam. xvii. 25 that King Saul would reward the slayer of Goliath
by making "his father's house free in Israel." Some kind of regular
exaction from which the victorious champion's family should be free
must here be referred to; but it would not be safe, in the absence
of all other evidence, to suppose that regular taxes in the modern
sense are referred to. More probably something of the nature of the
"benevolences" which Edward IV. introduced into England as a source
of revenue is meant. If a popular and powerful king of Israel was in
want of money, he could always secure it by ordering those able to
afford handsome presents to appear yearly before him with such gifts
as a loyal subject should offer. For the convenience of all parties
an indication of how much would be expected might be made, and then
he would have what to all intents and purposes would be a tax.
Along with this he might also enforce the _corvée_; but such things
were always regarded as excesses of despotic power. That Samuel in
his _mishpat hammelekh_ (1 Sam. viii. 15) warns the people that the
king would demand of them a tithe of their cereal crops and of the
fruit of their vineyards and of their sheep, does not contradict
this reading of the passage in 1 Sam. xvii. For though chapter
viii. belongs to the later portion of 1 Samuel and may therefore
represent what the kings had actually claimed, yet it in no way
endorses such demands. On the contrary, it indicates that such
exactions would bring the people into slavery to the king by the
phrase "And ye shall be to him for slaves." All that is mentioned
there, consequently, is part of the evil the kingship would bring
with it, and cannot in any way be regarded as a legal provision for
the maintenance of royalty.
It is not probable, therefore, that in these prescriptions the
author of Deuteronomy is repeating a more ancient law. No such
law has come down to us. Dillmann supposes the provision that the
king should always be an Israelite to be ancient; and indeed at
first sight it is difficult to see why such a provision should be
introduced for the first time in the last days of the Southern
Kingdom, where the kingship had so long been confined, not only to
Israelites, but to the Davidic line. But Jer. xxxii. 21--"Their
potentate shall be of themselves, and their governor shall proceed
from the midst of them"--shows that, whatever the cause might be,
there was in the first years of the sixth century a longing for a
native king similar to that here expressed. In any case, as the
obvious intention here is to make entire submission to Yahweh the
condition of any legitimate kingship, it was only consistent to
require expressly that the king should be one of Yahweh's people.
That motive would be quite sufficient to account for raising what
had been the invariable practice into a formulated law; and no other
of the prescriptions need have been ancient. On the other hand,
the curious phrase "Only 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 Yahweh hath said unto you, Ye shall
henceforth return no more that way," can hardly belong to the
Mosaic time. There was no doubt then much danger that the people
should wish to return to Egypt; but that a king should cause them
to return for horses, is too much of a subordinate detail to have
been portion of a Mosaic prophecy. If, as is most probable, the
phrase condemns the sending of Israelites into Egypt to buy horses
and chariots, it can have been written only after Solomon's days.
Before that time Israel, as an almost exclusively mountain people,
regarded horses and chariots with dislike, and usually destroyed
them when they fell into their hands. With the extension of their
power over the plains and the growth of a lust for conquest, they
sought after chariots eagerly. To procure them they entered into
alliances with Egypt which the prophets denounced, and which brought
to the nation nothing but evil. It was natural, therefore, that
the Deuteronomist should specially mention this detail, and should
support it by reference to a Divine promise, which does not appear
in our Bible, but which probably was found in either the Yahwistic
or the Elohistic narrative.
But whether the whole is Deuteronomic or not, there can be no
question that the command that the king shall have "a copy of this
law" prepared for him and shall read constantly therein is so;
and perhaps of all the prescriptions this is the most important.
In purely Eastern states there is no legislature at all, and the
greater part of the criminal jurisdiction especially is carried
on without any reference to fixed law save in cases affecting
religion. This was the case in the Mahratta states in India so long
as they were independent. The ruler and the officers he appointed
administered justice, solely according to custom and their own
notions of rectitude, "without advertence to any law except the
popular notions of customary law."[83] Now in Israel the state of
things was entirely similar, save in so far as the fundamental
principles of Yahwistic religion had been formulated. In all other
respects customary law ruled everything. But it was the religious
influence that gave its highest and best developments to the life
of Israel. It was this, too, which brought to such early maturity
in Israel the principles of justice, mercy, and freedom. Elsewhere
these were of exceedingly slow growth. In Israel, the influence
of the lofty religious ideas implanted in the nation by Moses did
for them what the influence of the higher political and social
ideas of the governing Englishmen are said to do, under favourable
circumstances, for the Indian peoples. Without disturbing the
general harmony which must subsist between all parts of the organism
of the State if the nation's life is to be healthy, and without
putting it out of relation with its surroundings, that influence
has been, and is still, moving the more backward Indian societies
along the natural paths of human progress at a greatly accelerated
speed.[84] In a similar way the Israelite people was moved by the
Mosaic influence, in its aspirations at least, with an elsewhere
unexampled speed and certainty, towards an ideal of national life
which no nation since has even endeavoured to realise. But whenever
the kings threw off the yoke of Yahweh and plunged into idolatry,
then the evils of despotic Oriental rule made their appearance
unchecked. These evils have been enumerated in the following words
by one well acquainted with Oriental states: "Cruelty, superstition,
callous indifference to the security of the weaker and poorer
classes, avarice, corruption, disorder in all public affairs, and
open brigandage." With the exception perhaps of the last, these are
precisely the sins which the prophets are continually denouncing.
Long before Hezekiah they were rampant, especially in the Northern
Kingdom, and in the evil days between Hezekiah and Josiah, when we
suppose Deuteronomy to have been written, they were indulged in
without shame or compunction.
[83] Tupper, _Our Indian Protectorate_, pp. 248, 249.
[84] _Ibid._, p. 321.
The result was that an inarticulate cry, like that we hear to-day
from Persia in the articulate form of newspaper articles, must have
filled the hearts of all righteous men and the multitude of the
oppressed. What it would be we may learn from the following extract
from a letter written from Persia to the _Kamin_, _i.e._ "Law," a
Persian newspaper published in London, and translated by Arminius
Vambéry in the _Deutsche Rundschau_ for October 1893: "Oh, brothers,
behold how deeply we have sunk into the sea of ignominy and shame.
Tyranny, famine, disease, poverty, calamity, decay of character, and
all the misery in the world has overflowed our country. The cause
of all this misfortune lies in this, that we have no laws; only in
this, that our conscienceless and foolish great ones have wilfully
and purposely rejected, trodden under foot, and destroyed the laws
of the sacred code.... We are men, and would have laws! It is not
new laws we ask for, but we desire that our secular and spiritual
heads should assemble and press for the enforcement of the holy laws
of the sacred code. Therefore we ask of you this one thing, that you
should proclaim: 'We are men, and would have laws.'" The East is so
perennially the same, that the two thousand five hundred years which
separate that pathetic cry from the prayers of the true Israel in
Manasseh's and Amon's days make no radical difference. The situation
was the same, and the need was the same. Hence came this prophetic
and priestly redaction of the Law of the Covenant. "They were men,
and would have laws." They sought to be freed from the greed, the
cruelty, and the lawlessness of their rulers; and having produced
their revised code, they wished to secure that it should not
disappear from memory, as the more ancient law had been suffered to
do. It must be kept continually before the king's mind. "It shall be
with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that
he may learn to fear Yahweh his God, to keep all the words of this
law and these statutes to do them." In this way it was thought that
future "great ones" would be prevented from "rejecting, treading
under foot, and destroying the laws of the sacred code."
But the king of Israel was not only to be a law-abiding and a
law-enforcing king. He was to learn from this new law even a deeper
lesson. He was to read daily in the law, "that his heart might not
be lifted up above his brethren." Oriental despots either openly
claim that they are of higher and purer blood than their subjects,
or they deal with these latter as if they had nothing in common with
them. In the laws of Manu it is said, "Even an infant king must not
be despised, (from an idea) that he is a (mere) mortal; for he is
a great deity in human form." It was not to be so in Israel. His
subjects were the Israelite king's "brethren." They all stood in
the same relation to their God. All equally had shared Yahweh's
favour in being delivered from the bondage of Egypt. Each had the
same rights, the same privileges, the same claims to justice and
consideration as the king himself had. That, this law was to teach
the king; and when he had learned the lesson, it is taken for
granted that the root from which the other evils spring would be
destroyed.
Such, then, the ruler of Israel was to be. He was to feel, first
of all his responsibility to God. Then he was to deny himself to
the lust of conquest, to the voluptuous pleasures of the flesh, to
the most devouring lust of all, the love of money. Last of all, and
above all, he was to acknowledge his equality with the poorest of
the people in the sight of God. Could there be even yet a nobler
ideal set before the kings of the world than this? The reign of only
one king of Israel, Josiah, promised its realisation. That seemed,
indeed, to be "the fair beginning of a time." But it was not so;
it proved to be only an afterglow, a mere prelude to the night.
None of his successors made even an attempt to imitate him, and
the destruction of the Jewish State put an end to all hope of the
appearance of the Yahwistic king in Israel. Elsewhere, before the
coming of Christ, he did not appear. Since Christ's coming, here
and there, at rare intervals, such rulers have been found. But in
the East perhaps the only rulers who can be said to have made any
attempt in this direction are the best of the great uncrowned kings
of India, the British viceroys.
Such, for example, was Lord Lawrence's aim, and his reward. From the
beginning to the end of his Indian career he lived a pure and simple
life, laboured with untiring energy for the good of the people,
and kept in his mind, as his aspirations for his Punjaub peasantry
show, the Old Testament ideal of both ruler and ruled. He was, too,
entirely free from the lust of conquest, as some Indian viceroys
have not perhaps been; and he did all his work under a solemn sense
of responsibility to God. To a large extent, the Biblical ideal made
him what he was as a ruler, and the life and power of that ideal
now, in such men, sufficiently show the truth of the prophetic and
priestly insight which is embodied here. Many who have disregarded
these rules have done great things for the world; but we are only
the more sure, after two thousand five hundred years, that on these
lines alone can the ruler attain his highest and purest eminence.
All the aspirations of men to-day are towards a state of things in
which rulers, whether they be any longer kings or no, shall stand on
a level of brotherhood with their subjects, and shall set the good
of the ruled before them as their sole aim. All men are dreaming
now of a future in which personal ambition shall have little scope,
in which none will be for himself or for a party, but "all will
be for the State." If ever that good dream be realised, rulers of
the Deuteronomic type will be universal; and the depth of wisdom
embodied in the laws of this small and obscure Oriental people, so
many ages ago, will be manifested in a general political and social
happiness such as has never yet been seen, on any large scale at
least, in the history of men.