God Never Wanted Kings

The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed—which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.

First, let me start with something that's always bothered me about 1 Samuel. As we talked about earlier, Eli's sons are corrupt priests who steal from sacrifices and abuse their religious authority. God's response? The entire lineage gets cut off. Divine judgment, full stop.

But fast forward a few chapters, and Samuel's sons are taking bribes and perverting justice as judges. The consequence for Samuel? Absolutely nothing. The text never addresses this glaring double standard, never explains why one father faces devastating judgment while the other walks away unscathed.

Sometimes scripture's inconsistencies are worth sitting with rather than explaining away.

But this smaller inconsistency points us toward a much larger theological tension. When Israel demands a king after Samuel's sons fail, God's response should shake any simplistic theology that claims everything happens according to divine plan. God explicitly tells Samuel: "They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Samuel 8:7). The people are literally rejecting God's kingship in favor of human monarchy.

What follows in 1 Samuel 8 reads like dystopian political theory. God, through Samuel, lays out exactly what monarchy will mean. There's a 4x repetition of the Hebrew verb יִקָּח/yiqqāḥ, "he will take" (which correlates with what Samuel's own sons are doing, "taking bribes"). Samuel says, "Your sons conscripted for war and forced to run before royal chariots, your daughters taken as perfumers and cooks and bakers, your best fields and vineyards and olive orchards confiscated and given to royal officials. A tenth of your grain, your vineyards, your flocks—all flowing upward to sustain the machinery of monarchy."

God essentially says, "You want hierarchical human power structures? Here's your future."

And they choose it anyway. Not everything happens according to divine plan.

Redactors

From a textual perspective, this is super interesting. The biblical editors who had to make decisions about what was included in the Bible—we call them redactors—had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. These ancient editors were working during or after the monarchic period, when kings were simply a fact of life in Israel and Judah. Many of them, particularly those we call the Deuteronomistic historians, clearly favored David and worked to legitimize dynastic succession.

Yet they kept this blistering anti-monarchy critique right at the foundation of the monarchy narrative. They could have smoothed over this tension, could have edited the story to make monarchy look like God's idea all along. Instead, they preserved this text that essentially says kings were never part of the plan. The Hebrew Bible's ambivalence toward monarchy isn't an accident or an oversight—it's theological resistance preserved in canonical form.

This preservation of competing perspectives matters enormously for how we read scripture today. The Bible isn't a monolithic document with a single perspective on power. It's a collection of texts that argue with each other, that preserve minority reports and dissenting opinions. The same tradition that gives us royal psalms and Davidic covenant theology also maintains this fundamental critique that God never wanted human kings in the first place.

Jesus is...Lord?

Which brings us to contemporary theology and the language we use for the divine. Hebrew scholar Dr. Wil Gafney points out that even the word "Lord" in our prayer language emerges from slaveholding contexts. The Greek kyrios, the Latin dominus, the English "master"—these are terms from imperial and slaveholding societies. When we exclusively use imperial metaphors for the divine, we're theologically legitimizing the very power structures that significant portions of scripture critique.

Think about how often our God-language relies on metaphors of domination: King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Sovereign, Ruler. We've so internalized these power metaphors that we rarely stop to ask whether they actually align with the God revealed in scripture—the God who warns against human kings, who sides with the oppressed, who shows up as a refugee baby rather than a conquering emperor.

The biblical editors understood something we sometimes forget: divine authority and human power structures are not synonymous. In fact, scripture often presents them as opposed to each other. The prophets consistently critique royal power. Jesus explicitly rejects the devil's offer of all the kingdoms of the world. The early church proclaimed "Jesus is Lord" as a direct challenge to "Caesar is Lord," not as an endorsement of lordship as a concept.

If scripture itself preserves skepticism toward concentrated power, then reimagining our God-language isn't liberal revisionism or theological innovation. It's fidelity to what the Bible itself does—preserving tension, maintaining critique, refusing to let power structures go unchallenged.

The God who warned against kings might not be thrilled with our imperial Christologies either.

Real theological imagination means finding language that sounds like liberation rather than domination. It means taking seriously scripture's own skepticism about power rather than selectively reading only the texts that reinforce hierarchical authority. It means being honest about the ways our traditional God-language might actually work against the liberation that God desires for creation.

The ancient redactors left us a gift: a sacred text that argues with itself about power, that refuses to resolve the tension between divine sovereignty and human authority. Maybe it's time we stopped trying to resolve that tension and started learning from it instead.