Royalty is like gender. It’s assigned at birth. Technically you can renounce it, but traditionalists get really shirty if you try. God started the ball rolling on both, but I’m more than willing to give humanity all the blame for the millennia of discrimination and strife it has caused. In royalty as in gender, it pays to be a bloke.

Historically, the Divine Right of Kings has been at the root of explanations of how and why one person is born poor and another is born owning everybody else. Looking at the beginning of Israel’s monarchy, in the first book of Samuel, I’m not so sure God’s actually in favour of it, as an institution. Chapter 9 begins with Samuel, son of Hannah, who has lived a long life as probably the best prophet Israel has had up to this point:

So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

To paraphrase, Samuel makes a big speech saying ‘if you have a king he’s going to shaft you. You’ll be a subject and a slave and you are asking to be put into an inescapable trap. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. The Lord answered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”

The people ask for a king, God takes it as, at best, an insult, a wish to be oppressed in a secular way. This is perhaps a divine right in the same way we have the right to sin, and Satan has permission to bother Job. That is, it is the people’s will to have monarchs, and God’s response is that they have free will. Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.

So Samuel is sent to annoint Saul as king. Saul is a good fellow and a good king, before immediately becoming a very bad king for no particular reason, except, perhaps, that power corrupts, and he turns his back on God. God sends Samuel to annoint David the shepherd-boy as king, even though that’s still Saul’s job, so there’s war, of course. I have some issues with David that I might bring up another time, but he loves God with a great, sincere passion. David is a really good king, to the extent that one can be, but then he really makes a mess of naming his successor, meaning two of his sons both believe they’re the rightful king, and they’re both correct, and so there’s war of course. His son Solomon is famous for his wisdom, but we forget that he was wise at the start of his reign but a disastrous fool by the end. God made him wise, but you have to actually choose to follow your own wisdom. I have often known clearly what the good and wise path is, and ignored it, and he did so a hundredfold. He also made a hash of naming a good successor, so there was more war, and the entire nation of Israel was split into two countries, Israel and Judah.

The books of Kings and Chronicles list the kings, and it’s honestly difficult to read it and keep focus, because it’s just a lot of names. I made notes last time I read through, and they were my first foundation stone for what would become Ben-Them, so I’ll summarise


THE ORDER OF KINGS:
Let’s begin in 1050 Before Christ:

Saul (good then bad)

1000BC

David (good)
Solomon (good then bad)
Jeroboam 1 (I, bad), Rehoboam (J, bad)
Nadab (I, bad), Abijah (J, bad)

900BC

Baasha (I, bad), Asa (J, good)
Elah (I, bad)
Zimri (I, bad)
(Tibni), Jehosophat (J, good)
Omri (I, bad)
Ahab (I, bad)
Ahaziah (I, bad)
Jehoram (I, bad), a different Jehoram (J, bad, died of a prolapsed anus)
Jehu (I, bad), Ahaziah (J, bad)

800BC

Jehoahaz (I, bad), Jehoash (J, good)
Jehoash (I, bad), Amaziah (J, good)
Jeroboam II (I, bad)
Zechariah (I, bad), Azariah (J, good)
Shallum
Menahem (I, bad)
Pekah (I, bad)
Hoshea (I, bad)

...at which point the kingdom of Israel was invaded and carried away into bondage, so the rest of our list are all kings of Judah

Jotham, good
Ahaz, bad — in the time of Micah

700BC

Hezekiah, very good, but not great — in the time of Isaiah
Manasseh
Amon, bad
Josiah, good - at a time when the lawbook, containing the long-lost law of Israel was found again.
Jehoahaz, bad

600BC

Jehoiakim, bad — in the time of Nebuchadrezzar
Jehoiakin, bad — who was exiled
Zedekiah, bad, in whose time the temple was burned.

450 years, 2 nations, 43 kings, among whom only 8 or 9 were considered good, with only David and Hezekiah distinguishing themselves. Yet this is the monarchy that has been used to support monarchs ruling by divine right. It is difficult to think of a good ruler in the Bible whose child is also a good ruler, with the only real exceptions being God, who is his own son, and and Asa, Jehoash and Amaziah from the long long list I just read, about whom we know next to nothing.

And then there were no kings, because both nations were carried away by Babylonians or Medes or Persians. The Persians let them go back to their historical territory, but there were no kings. Then there’s the gap between the old and new testament. The greek empire happens in that gap, and you can find it in the books of Maccabees. Then it was the Romans’ turn, but you may recall there is a king of Judea in the gospels. Judea is what the Romans called their territory in the current realms of Israel and Palestine. If you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or just with Italy’s Julius Caesar, you’ll remember the people tried to make him king, but the idea of inherited monarchy was so monstrous to the republic that he was slain, and there was a civil war. One of the minor figures in that war, who very much helped Augustus, was Herod, who was appointed by the newly-crowned emperor as a minor-grade king among his people. Officially he was an Ethnarch - a king only over people of his ethnicity. Herod was famous for his excellent architecture, building a palace, building Jerusalem’s excellent second temple, to replace the one destroyed in the time of Zedekiah, and various other sites of interest, which were all destroyed again in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed the city. Herod was also famous for descending into Caligula-like paranoia and killing a lot of his family members and close confidantes. The Bible tells that he wasn’t too keen on a rival king, even a baby one, and he reacted quite poorly. When he died, in something like 4BC, his three children inherited. One of them killed John the Baptist, but after that none of them did a lot.

The Divine Right of Kings, if it does exist, sure does pick ‘em. Jesus said that even Pontius Pilate’s authority was given to him by God, so I think there’s a case for divine right of all legitimate rulers and judges, even if they’re the callous hands of a police state. Divine right is not divine approval.

Royalty is like gender in that it goes on and on and on for years and it honestly causes a whole heap of bother and opression on a grand scale, we’re taught from infancy that it is what it is, but the closer you look at it the more it seems a messy pudding.

The king of Sheffield is dead, the Queen of the UK is ailing, and the royal lines of Israel and Judea were curtailed. Thankfully there is one king in whom we can trust not to divide us from God. There is one king in all the world, and always will be. One who is for us, and not over and against us....