A King As Father

EXEGESIS · AUTHORITY AND THE HOUSEHOLD

Paternal authority and royal rule in the Septuagint

Christians who defend kingship often rest the case on a handful of verses where a ruler is called “father.” That case is weak, because the word is elastic and most of those verses describe officials rather than kings. Scripture makes a stronger case, and a different one. It defines the king as the firstborn son of the divine Father, set over the Father’s house, and it lays on him the duties of a father toward a people who are also his brethren. This paper reads that case in the Septuagint, marks where it holds and where it does not, and answers Locke’s objections to it.

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01

Thesis and method

Scripture grounds royal authority in the authority of the father’s house. The king is the firstborn son of the divine Father, set over the Father’s household, and in that office he stands toward the people as a father: he judges, protects, provides, instructs, and redeems.

The claim has limits the text itself sets, and an argument that ignores them will not survive a competent reader. The king remains a brother among brethren and a son under the rod. Succession runs through a house but not by strict primogeniture. The people’s covenant with the king is real, even where it recognizes authority rather than creating it. And the prophets measure every king against the paternal norm and condemn the one who takes rather than gives.

The evidence falls into three kinds, and they are not equally strong. The weakest is lexical, the places where a ruler is called “father,” because πατήρ is an elastic word and a title of respect proves little by itself. Stronger is structural evidence, the father’s house (οἶκος πατριᾶς) as the unit from which Israel’s families, tribes, and eventually its monarchy are built. Strongest is covenantal evidence, the covenant with David, where God defines the royal office in father–son terms and binds throne, house, and inheritance together.

The debate this paper enters is the seventeenth-century argument between Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha derived royal power from Adam’s fatherhood, and John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government denied that paternal power could ever become political power. The texts show that both men went wrong in different places. Filmer leaned on descent from Adam, which Scripture never uses to justify any throne, and Locke leaned on a nuclear, temporary model of the family that Scripture does not share.

We read the Old Testament in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament the apostles most often quoted. Hebrews 1:5 reproduces the Septuagint’s wording of 2 Kingdoms 7:14 exactly, and Hebrews 2:13 does the same with Isaiah 8:18. The Greek also carries links between texts that an English reader cannot see, and several of them bear directly on this argument. Quotations follow Brenton’s 1844 translation. The books English Bibles call 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings appear under their Septuagint names, 1–4 Kingdoms, and where the Septuagint’s numbering differs from an English Bible, the English reference follows in brackets.

02

The household before the state

Genesis gives the household before it gives any political order, and when political order does appear outside the household, Genesis presents it with suspicion. The positive institution of rule in Genesis is the father’s house. Kingship arrives later as the promised fruit of that house.

Dominion is given to “them”

The dominion mandate is spoken in the plural: “let them have dominion” (Gen. 1:26), and “God blessed them” (1:28). Locke made exactly this point against Filmer in the First Treatise, and he was right. Genesis 1 cannot be read as a grant of monarchy to Adam alone, and an argument that cites Genesis 1:26 for that purpose hands the opponent his first rebuttal.

What Genesis 1 does establish is the channel through which dominion is exercised. The command to rule the earth is joined to the command to “increase and multiply” (1:28). Rule over creation is delivered as a mandate to build families. Order runs through generation before it runs through any office.

Genesis 2–3 adds headship within the household. “The Lord God gave a charge to Adam” before the woman was made (2:16). After the transgression God calls Adam first, by name: “Adam, where art thou?” (3:9). The judgment on him rests on his having “hearkened to the voice of thy wife” (3:17). Paul reads this order as meaningful (1 Cor. 11:8–9; 1 Tim. 2:13; Rom. 5:12–19). These texts establish representative headship in a household. They do not yet say anything about kings, and the argument should not claim they do.

The first city and the first kingdom

The first city in Scripture is built by Cain, the murderer, and named for his son (Gen. 4:17). Nimrod is the first called a giant on the earth, and “the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon” (10:8–10). The builders at Babel want “a name” before they are scattered (11:4). Genesis is not neutral about these beginnings. Power detached from the fathers’ order, founded on violence or self-assertion, is the problem the narrative sets up.

God’s answer is a household. “Go forth out of thy land and out of thy kindred, and out of the house of thy father,” and then, “I will make thee a great nation” (12:1–2). The nation will come out of one man’s house. That is the structural claim of the whole patriarchal narrative.

The patriarchal household as a polity

Abraham’s house does everything a state later does. It fields an army: Abraham “numbered his own home-born servants three hundred and eighteen” and defeated four kings with them (14:14–16). It makes treaties as a peer of kings, with Abimelech of Gerar and “Phichol the chief captain of his host” (21:22–32), and Isaac does the same (26:26–31). In the Greek, the Hittites of Hebron go further and address Abraham as “a king from God” (βασιλεὺς παρὰ Θεοῦ, 23:6).

The house has a religion administered by its head. Abraham circumcises “all his home-born servants, and all those bought with money” (17:23). Jacob orders his house to remove the strange gods (35:2). The house also has a court. Jacob pronounces death on whoever took Laban’s gods: “he shall not live” (31:32). Judah sentences his daughter-in-law without appeal: “Bring her out, and let her be burnt” (38:24).

The same charge as the king’s

Genesis 18:19 is the key verse, and the argument usually cites it for the wrong reason. The point is not only that Abraham “will order his sons, and his house after him.” It is what he orders them to do: “to do justice and judgment” (ποιεῖν δικαιοσύνην καὶ κρίσιν).

That pair of words is the Septuagint’s standard description of royal rule. “David wrought judgment and justice over all his people” (2 Kgdms 8:15). Jeremiah commands Judah’s king, “Execute ye judgment and justice” (Jer. 22:3), and promises a king who “shall execute judgment and righteousness on the earth” (23:5). The psalm for Solomon prays, “give thy judgment to the king, and thy righteousness to the king’s son” (Ps. 71:1 [72:1]). The patriarch’s charge and the king’s charge are the same charge in the same words. The king does at the scale of the nation what the father was commanded to do at the scale of the house.

Kings as the fruit of the house

The promises make the connection explicit. “Kings shall come out of thee” (Gen. 17:6). Of Sarah’s son, “kings of nations shall be of him” (17:16). To Jacob, “kings shall come out of thy loins” (35:11). Of Judah, “a ruler shall not fail from Judah, nor a prince from his loins” (49:10). Kingship in Genesis is not a rival institution imposed on the family. It is what the patriarchal house is promised to become.

03

The father’s house in Israel

Israel is constituted as nested households. The basic unit of land, inheritance, worship, and law is the father’s house, and every larger unit is built from it. This is the structural evidence, and it is the part of the argument least open to dispute.

The nesting

Joshua 7 shows the structure working. To find the man who took the devoted things, the tribe is brought forward “by families,” the family “by households,” and the household “man by man” (Josh. 7:14–18). Saul is found the same way when Israel first chooses a king (1 Kgdms 10:20–21). The census counts Israel “according to their kindreds, according to the houses of their fathers’ families” (Num. 1:2), and the leaders who assist Moses are “heads of the tribes according to their families” (1:16).

The Septuagint’s phrase for the father’s house is οἶκος πατριᾶς, and its word for the family unit is πατριά, built from πατήρ. That word matters later. It is the word Paul uses when he says every family in heaven and earth is named from the Father (Eph. 3:15).

Land and inheritance belong to the house

The land is divided as inheritance (κληρονομία) by the number of names (Num. 26:53–54). The daughters of Zelophehad petition, “Let not the name of our father be blotted out of the midst of his people… give us an inheritance in the midst of our father’s brethren” (27:3). Numbers 36 restricts their marriages so the inheritance stays in their father’s tribe. At the jubilee “each one shall depart to his possession, and ye shall go each to his family” (Lev. 25:10). Property in Israel is patrimony, held by a house across generations, not the holding of an individual.

This matters for kingship later. A king who governs a people whose land is patrimony cannot treat that land as his own. Naboth’s refusal to Ahab turns on exactly this point, and section 07 returns to it.

Government by the fathers, together

Above the single household, authority before the monarchy is collegial. The elders are the heads of houses acting together, and the Septuagint often calls them a γερουσία, a council of elders. Moses is sent to gather “the elders of the children of Israel” (Exod. 3:16), and they represent the people at the Passover (12:21) and at Sinai (24:1). The disobedient son is brought by “his father and his mother… to the elders of his city, and to the gate” (Deut. 21:19). Boaz settles the redemption of Elimelech’s land before “ten men of the elders of the city” (Ruth 4:2).

Deuteronomy 21:18–21 shows the continuity between the two levels. The household has jurisdiction over the son, and when it reaches its limit the case passes to the fathers of the town sitting as a court. The civil order is the household order enlarged, not a different kind of thing.

The usual chain, father to household to family to tribe to nation to king, is right in shape but needs one correction. The steps above the household run through councils of fathers before they run through a king. When David is made king over all Israel, it is “all the elders of Israel” who come to Hebron, and the covenant is made with them (2 Kgdms 5:3). Section 08 returns to what that means.

The historical reconstruction agrees

This is not a theological reading imposed on the text. Lawrence Stager’s work on Iron Age village architecture identified the compound of pillared houses as the physical father’s house, a household of several generations under one head. J. David Schloen’s The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol argues that the whole social order of the Late Bronze and Iron Age Levant, from the village to the kingdom to the gods, was conceived as a hierarchy of nested households. Schloen borrows Max Weber’s term for it, a patrimonial order. The patrimonial model of kingship is the standard reconstruction of the world Israel lived in.

04

“Father” as a title of rule

In the Septuagint, πατήρ names anyone who stands over others for their good: the begetter, the ancestor, the founder of a way of life (“the father of those that dwell in tents,” Gen. 4:20), the priest, the prophet, the elder at the gate. The lexical evidence proves that fatherhood was ordinary vocabulary for governing office. It does not by itself prove the king held that office, and the texts usually cited need to be read more carefully than they usually are.

Joseph: as a father of Pharaoh

“He hath made me as a father of Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and ruler of all the land of Egypt” (Gen. 45:8). The three titles are deliberately stacked: fatherhood, lordship over the royal house, rule over the land. Commentators commonly connect the first with an Egyptian honorific for the highest officials of the court.

The Greek phrasing is ὡς πατέρα, “as a father,” a comparison rather than a title. And the direction runs the wrong way for a simple king-as-father argument. Joseph is father to the king. What the verse proves is that the office governing a king’s house and land was spoken of as fatherhood.

Eliakim: as a father to Jerusalem

Isaiah 22 concerns Shebna, whom the Greek calls “the treasurer” (22:15), and Eliakim, who replaces him. Elsewhere the Greek calls Eliakim “the steward” (οἰκονόμος, 4 Kgdms 18:18), the manager of the royal household. God says, “I will put on him thy robe, and I will grant him thy crown with power, and I will give thy stewardship into his hands: and he shall be as a father to them that dwell in Jerusalem, and to them that dwell in Judah” (Isa. 22:21). He receives “the glory of David” and “the key of the house of David upon his shoulder” (22:22).

The order matters. Stewardship (οἰκονομία) is committed, and the relationship to the people that results is fatherhood. Again this is a royal official, not the king himself. But it is the official who manages the king’s house, and his management is described as fatherhood toward the whole population.

The passage ends with a warning the argument should not skip. Eliakim becomes “a glorious throne of his father’s house,” and “every one that is glorious in the house of his father” hangs on him (22:23–24). Then: “The man that is fastened in the sure place shall be removed and be taken away, and shall fall” (22:25). The fatherhood belongs to the office, and the text sets the man’s fall directly after his relatives hang their weight on him.

Saul and David: “child David”

In 1 Kingdoms 24 David spares Saul in the cave and calls after him, “My lord, O king!” (24:9). He will not lift his hand against “my lord, for he is the Lord’s anointed” (24:11). Saul answers, “Is this thy voice, child David?” (τέκνον Δαυίδ, 24:17 [24:16]). The king addresses his subject as a child. David was also Saul’s son-in-law (18:27), so the address has a family basis alongside the political one. Reverence for the anointed runs upward and a father’s address runs downward, in the same scene.

Moses: the nurse of the people

The clearest text for the ruler of Israel as a father is Moses’ complaint. “Have I conceived all this people, or have I born them? that thou sayest to me, Take them into thy bosom, as a nurse would take her suckling” (Num. 11:12). Moses objects to the weight, not the premise. To govern this people is to carry them as a nurse carries an infant. God’s answer is to share the burden with seventy of “the elders of Israel” (11:16), the council of fathers from section 03.

The word for the nurse is τιθηνός, and Isaiah uses it of kings: “kings shall be thy nursing-fathers, and their princesses thy nurses” (Isa. 49:23). Deborah, who judged Israel, “arose a mother in Israel” (Judg. 5:7). The familial language of rule is parental, not only paternal. That point matters when Locke appears in section 10.

Other governing fathers

The title follows authority exercised in God’s name, wherever it sits. A Levite is hired to be “a father and a priest,” first to one household and then to a tribe (Judg. 17:10; 18:19). Elisha cries “Father, father” as Elijah is taken (4 Kgdms 2:12). Two kings of Israel address Elisha as father (6:21; 13:14), so the title runs from the throne to the prophet as well as toward the throne. Job, describing his rule as an elder at the gate, says, “I was the father of the helpless” (Job 29:16).

The royal idiom of the neighbors

Royal inscriptions from Israel’s neighbors use the image outright. Kilamuwa of Samʾal, in the ninth century BC, boasts that he was a father to some of his subjects, a mother to others, and a brother to others. Azatiwada, in the eighth-century inscription at Karatepe, says Baal made him “a father and a mother” to his people. The king as father of his people was standard royal self-presentation in the Levant.

Israel’s restraint

Against that background, the Old Testament is noticeably restrained. It calls God the Father of Israel: “did not he himself thy father purchase thee?” (Deut. 32:6), “thou art our Father” (Isa. 63:16), “if then I am a father, where is mine honour?” (Mal. 1:6), “Have ye not all one father?” (Mal. 2:10). It gives the paternal title freely to prophets, priests, stewards, and elders. The texts surveyed here never plainly call a reigning Israelite king the father of the people, and the one candidate, the royal child of Isaiah 9, carries the title only in part of the Greek tradition (section 06).

That restraint is not evidence against the thesis. It points to where the thesis is actually decided. In Israel the king’s relation to God is defined first, and his fatherhood toward the people is derived from it.

05

The firstborn over the Father’s house

In the covenant that establishes David’s line, the king is not called father. He is called son. Any argument that moves from 2 Kingdoms 7:14 to “the king is father of the people” has to supply the middle step, and most versions of the argument skip it. The middle step is Israel’s own sonship, and once it is in place the royal office becomes the office of a firstborn son governing his Father’s house.

House, throne, and son

David proposes to build God a house, and God refuses: “Thou shalt not build me a house for me to dwell in” (2 Kgdms 7:5). Instead, “I will raise up thy seed after thee… He shall build for me a house to my name, and I will set up his throne even for ever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son” (7:12–14). Then: “his house shall be made sure, and his kingdom for ever before me” (7:16). The word οἶκος carries the whole passage, temple and dynasty and household at once. The son builds the Father’s house, and the Father makes the son’s house sure.

The Chronicler repeats the father–son formula three times (1 Chron. 17:13; 22:10; 28:6). The Psalms give it liturgical form: “Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten thee” (Ps. 2:7), and “He shall call upon me, saying, Thou art my Father” (Ps. 88:27 [89:26]).

The middle step: Israel is already God’s son

Before there is a king, Israel as a whole is God’s son. “Israel is my first-born” (Exod. 4:22), in Greek υἱὸς πρωτότοκός, “my firstborn son.” “Ye are the children of the Lord your God” (Deut. 14:1). “Did not he himself thy father purchase thee?” (Deut. 32:6). The nation is God’s household before it is anyone’s kingdom.

Israel is also God’s inheritance, his patrimony. When Samuel anoints Saul, the Greek has him say, “the Lord has anointed thee for a ruler over his inheritance” (κληρονομία, 1 Kgdms 10:1). God chose David “to be the shepherd of Jacob his servant, and Israel his inheritance” (Ps. 77:71 [78:71]). The king is set over an estate that belongs to his Father.

So the king of David’s line is not made a son where there were none. He is made the firstborn among sons. “I will make him my first-born, higher than the kings of the earth” (Ps. 88:28 [89:27]). The word is πρωτότοκος, the same word God used of Israel in Exodus 4:22. The king is the firstborn of a firstborn people.

What the firstborn is

In Israel’s family law the firstborn receives “double of all things,” and “to him belongs the birthright” (πρωτοτοκεῖα, Deut. 21:17). Isaac’s blessing of the firstborn is a blessing of rule over brothers: “be thou lord of thy brother, and the sons of thy father shall do thee reverence” (Gen. 27:29). The firstborn stands in the father’s place among his brothers. He governs the house for the father and, after him, as its father.

That is the structure of Israel’s kingship. God is the Father. Israel is the household, the inheritance, and the Father’s sons. The king is the firstborn set over his brothers, governing the Father’s house in the Father’s name. His fatherhood toward the people is real, and it is derived. Because the Father does not die, the firstborn never becomes the house’s final head. He always governs as a steward-son, which is why the steward of Isaiah 22 is so easily called “a father to them that dwell in Jerusalem.”

This also explains why Deuteronomy insists the ruler come from among the brethren: “of thy brethren thou shalt set over thee a ruler; thou shalt not have power to set over thee a stranger, because he is not thy brother” (Deut. 17:15). He must read the law “that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren” (17:20). When Samuel anoints David, he anoints him “in the midst of his brethren” (1 Kgdms 16:13). The king is not a father over another kind of being. He is the eldest brother holding his Father’s house.

The throne is the Lord’s

David says God chose Solomon “to set him on the throne of the kingdom of the Lord over Israel” (1 Chron. 28:5). Abijah calls it “the kingdom of the Lord in the hand of the sons of David” (2 Chron. 13:8). At Solomon’s accession the assembly “anointed him king before the Lord” (1 Chron. 29:22), and he “sat upon the throne of his father David” (29:23). The same seat is David’s throne, Solomon’s inheritance from his father, and the Lord’s throne. Human and divine fatherhood are stacked, and the divine one is the owner.

The son under the rod

The covenant builds a father’s discipline into the office. “When he happens to transgress, then will I chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the sons of men. But my mercy I will not take from him” (2 Kgdms 7:14–15; cf. Ps. 88:31–34 [89:30–33]). This is a father correcting a son: “as if any man should chasten his son, so the Lord thy God will chasten thee” (Deut. 8:5). The verb there is παιδεύω, the ordinary word for a father’s training and correction. Proverbs gives the same rule, that the Lord “scourges every son whom he receives” (Prov. 3:12), and Hebrews quotes it in the Septuagint’s words (Heb. 12:6).

The covenant also distinguishes the house from the individual son. The house is secured without condition: “his house shall be made sure” (2 Kgdms 7:16), and “His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before me” (Ps. 88:37 [89:36]). Each son’s tenure has a condition: “If thy children will keep my covenant… their children also shall sit upon thy throne for ever” (Ps. 131:12 [132:12]). The first limit on royal power in Scripture is a father’s limit. The king answers to his Father.

Adoption, not divinization

Royal sonship to the gods was common in the ancient Near East, and in Egypt Pharaoh was the son of the sun god by nature. Israel’s version is covenantal and adoptive. “Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten thee” is introduced as “the ordinance of the Lord” (Ps. 2:7), a decree spoken on the day of enthronement. The king is made a son by the Father’s word, which is why he can be chastened, and why a particular son can be set aside while the house stands.

06

The royal office as paternal duty

What Scripture requires of the king is, item by item, what it requires of a father, applied to a nation. The duties line up closely enough that the parallel is better shown than described.

The law in the ruler’s hand

Deuteronomy’s law of the ruler (the Greek calls him ἄρχων) gives him one positive duty before any other. “When he shall be established in his government, then shall he write for himself this repetition of the law into a book” (17:18). The phrase is τὸ δευτερονόμιον τοῦτο, and it is where the book of Deuteronomy gets its Greek name. He is to keep it with him and “read in it all the days of his life” (17:19), “that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren… that he and his sons may reign long in his dominion” (17:20).

That is the father’s duty moved up a level. The father is to keep God’s words “in thy heart and in thy soul” and “teach them to thy children” (Deut. 6:6–7), and to answer when his son asks what the testimonies and ordinances mean (6:20–25). Even the reward in Deuteronomy 17 is a household’s reward: a long reign for the ruler and his sons.

The prohibitions just before are as telling. He shall not multiply horses, or wives, or silver and gold (17:16–17). Each one targets a way a ruler enriches his own house at the expense of the people’s.

The king as kinsman-redeemer

Psalm 71 [72] is headed “For Solomon” and prays for “the king’s son” (71:1). It describes his rule as protection of those who have no protector. “He shall judge the poor of the people in righteousness, and save the children of the needy” (71:4). “He has delivered the poor from the oppressor; and the needy who had no helper” (71:12).

Then: “He shall redeem their souls from usury and injustice: and their name shall be precious before him” (71:14). The verb is λυτρόω, the verb Leviticus uses for the kinsman who buys back a relative’s land or freedom: “his kinsman who is nigh to him… shall redeem the possession which his brother has sold” (Lev. 25:25), and “one of his brethren shall redeem him” (25:48). The king acts as next of kin to the helpless. A family office is extended to the whole nation.

Father of the orphans

God is “the father of the orphans, and judge of the widows” (Ps. 67:6 [68:5]). Fatherhood and judgeship stand side by side as two names for one work. The king’s commission is to do that work on God’s behalf: “Execute ye judgment and justice… oppress not the stranger, and orphan, and widow” (Jer. 22:3). Jeremiah tells a failing king that “it is better for thee to execute judgment and justice,” and then: “They understood not, they judged not the cause of the afflicted, nor the cause of the poor: is not this thy not knowing me? saith the Lord” (22:15–16). A king who will not be a father to the helpless does not know God. And “when a king judges the poor in truth, his throne shall be established for a testimony” (Prov. 29:14).

Isaiah 9 in the Greek

Isaiah 9 is the text most often cited for a king called Father, and in the Greek it needs care. Every Greek witness has the royal child and the throne: “a child is born to us, and a son is given to us, whose government is upon his shoulder” (Isa. 9:5 [9:6]), and his rule is “upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it, and to support it with judgment and with righteousness, from henceforth and for ever” (9:6 [9:7]).

The names are another matter. Codex Vaticanus, the text Brenton translated, gives the child one name: “the Messenger of great counsel.” Other Greek manuscripts add a longer list that ends with “Father of the age to come” (πατὴρ τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰῶνος). The argument cannot rest on a title that stands in only part of the tradition.

What stands in every witness is enough for the thesis. The government rests on his shoulder, the same image Isaiah uses for the steward who carries the key of David’s house (22:22). The throne is David’s. And the rule is defined by the same pair, judgment and righteousness, that God laid on Abraham in Genesis 18:19.

The shepherd over another’s flock

The shepherd image runs beside the father image and has the same structure. The tribes remind David that God said, “Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be for a leader to my people Israel” (2 Kgdms 5:2). God took him “to be the shepherd of Jacob his servant, and Israel his inheritance” (Ps. 77:71 [78:71]). Ezekiel asks, “do shepherds feed themselves? do not the shepherds feed the sheep?” (Ezek. 34:2), and promises “my servant David, and he shall be their shepherd” (34:23). The flock is God’s. The shepherd, like the steward and the firstborn, governs what belongs to another for the good of those in his care.

07

The king who takes

The Old Testament contains a strand that is openly hostile to kingship, and a paternal reading has to face it at full strength. Treating 1 Kingdoms 8 as a mild warning about abuse understates what the text says. The better answer is that the hostile texts condemn three specific things, and all three are measured against the paternal norm rather than against some alternative to it.

The hostile texts

When Israel offers Gideon hereditary rule, “Rule, my lord, over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son,” he refuses: “I will not rule, and my son shall not rule among you; the Lord shall rule over you” (Judg. 8:22–23). What Gideon refuses is dynastic rule, a ruling house. His son Abimelech then makes himself king by killing his seventy brothers “upon one stone” in his father’s house (9:5–6). He destroys his father’s house to seize a throne. Jotham’s fable follows, in which the fruitful trees decline to reign and only the bramble accepts (9:8–15).

In 1 Kingdoms the request for a king is called sin in so many words. God tells Samuel, “they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me from reigning over them” (1 Kgdms 8:7). Samuel reminds the people that they asked for a king “whereas the Lord our God is our king” (12:12), calls the request great wickedness (12:17), and the people confess, “we have added to all our sins this iniquity, in asking for us a king” (12:19). Hosea says, “They have made kings for themselves, but not by me” (Hos. 8:4), and “I gave thee a king in mine anger” (13:11).

Against these stand the promises of kings in Genesis (17:6; 35:11; 49:10), Deuteronomy’s law of the ruler (17:14–20), the refrain that closes Judges, “in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6; 21:25), and the covenant with David itself. Critical scholarship usually explains the tension as sources for and against kingship combined in 1 Kingdoms 8–12. A reading of the whole book has to hold both, and the texts themselves say what is condemned.

Three faults, not one

The first fault is a king on the model of the nations: “set over us a king to judge us, as also the other nations have” (1 Kgdms 8:5), and “we also will be like all the nations” (8:20). Deuteronomy had anticipated that request in almost the same words, “I will set a ruler over me, as also the other nations round about me” (Deut. 17:14), and answered it with the law of the ruler. Israel asks for kingship on a foreign model rather than on the one God had already given.

The second is a king who displaces God: “they have rejected me from reigning over them” (8:7). In the terms of section 05, this is the son claiming the Father’s place, kingship held as original rather than derived.

The third is a king who takes. Samuel’s description of “the manner of the king” (τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ βασιλέως) is built on one verb, λήψεται, “he will take.” He will take your sons, your daughters, your fields, your vineyards, your good oliveyards, your servants, your handmaids, your herds, and your asses, and tithe your seed and your flocks, “and ye shall be his servants” (8:11–17). The list is an inventory of a father’s house: children, land, produce, workers, livestock. The king like the nations is a rival father who consumes the houses beneath him. A father gives an inheritance to his sons. This king takes the sons.

Gideon’s refusal fits the same pattern. The offer of a dynasty comes from the men of Israel (Judg. 8:22). The dynasty of David is God’s own promise (2 Kgdms 7:12–16). The difference between the two is the source of the designation, not the form of rule.

Naboth’s vineyard

Naboth refuses to sell his vineyard to Ahab on one ground: “My God forbid me that I should give thee the inheritance of my fathers” (3 Kgdms 20:3 [1 Kgs 21:3]). The patrimony of a father’s house is not the king’s to buy, let alone seize. Jezebel mocks her husband, “Dost thou now thus act the king over Israel?” (20:7 [21:7]), and arranges a judicial murder. Elijah’s sentence falls on Ahab’s own house: “I will make thy house as the house of Jeroboam” (20:22 [21:22]). The king who takes another father’s inheritance loses his own house.

Rehoboam’s scorpions

When the tribes ask Rehoboam to lighten the “heavy yoke” his father laid on them (3 Kgdms 12:4), the elders counsel him, “If thou wilt this day be a servant to this people, and wilt serve them… then will they be thy servants continually” (12:7). The young men counsel the opposite: “my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (12:11). The verb is παιδεύω, the father’s word for correcting a son in Deuteronomy 8:5. Rehoboam claims a father’s discipline and practices cruelty.

The northern tribes answer in the language of inheritance: “What portion have we in David? neither have we any inheritance in the son of Jesse… now feed thine own house, David” (12:16). They renounce the royal house as a house in which they have no share. Then the text says something a divine-right argument has to reckon with honestly. God forbids Judah to fight the seceding tribes, “for this thing is from me” (12:24). The division was announced beforehand as judgment on Solomon’s house (11:11–13, 31). Scripture presents it as God’s act of judgment, not as a general license for subjects to depose kings, but it does not present the breach as mere rebellion either.

The prince who gives

Ezekiel’s vision of the restored order answers 1 Kingdoms 8 point for point. The prince receives his own portion of land, “and the princes of Israel shall no more oppress my people; but the house of Israel shall inherit the land according to their tribes” (Ezek. 45:8). “Let it suffice you, ye princes of Israel: remove injustice and misery, execute judgment and justice; take away oppression from my people” (45:9).

Then the law of inheritance: “the prince shall by no means take of the inheritance of the people, to oppress them: he shall give an inheritance to his sons out of his own possession: that my people be not scattered, every one from his possession” (46:18). In the Greek, “shall by no means take” (οὐ μὴ λάβῃ) answers Samuel’s “he will take” (λήψεται) with the same verb. The ideal prince is a father who provides for his own sons from his own estate and leaves every other father’s inheritance intact. Samuel described the king who takes. Ezekiel describes the king who gives. The standard in both is the father’s house.

08

Succession without primogeniture

The throne of David passes as an inheritance within a house, and that is strongly paternal. It does not pass by strict primogeniture, and the people’s covenant with the king is real. Both facts cut against the two simplest versions of the argument: Filmer’s, where the eldest son inherits by right, and the popular version, where the people have no role at all.

A house, not an election

The formula for Judah’s kings repeats from Solomon to the exile: the king “slept with his fathers,” and his son “reigned in his stead” (3 Kgdms 11:43; 14:31; 15:8). “Solomon sat on the throne of his father David” (2:12). One dynasty holds Judah from David to the exile. The northern kingdom passes through a series of coups, Jeroboam, Baasha, Omri, Jehu, and Hosea’s verdict on it is “They have made kings for themselves, but not by me” (Hos. 8:4). The text treats the stable house as blessing and the churn of usurpers as judgment.

Birth order overturned

Scripture overturns birth order so often that it reads as a theme. “The elder shall serve the younger” is spoken of Esau and Jacob (Gen. 25:23). Jacob crosses his hands to put Ephraim, “the younger,” before Manasseh (48:14). David is the “little one” still tending the flock when Samuel comes (1 Kgdms 16:11).

The Chronicler says outright that rule and the rights of the firstborn can be separated. Reuben was the firstborn, but “his father gave his blessing to his son Joseph… and he was not reckoned as first-born; for Judah was very mighty even among his brethren, and one was to be a ruler out of him: but the blessing was Joseph’s” (1 Chron. 5:1–2). The blessing went one way and the rule another. The law protects the firstborn’s double portion against a father’s favoritism (Deut. 21:15–17). Rule is treated as a different matter.

Solomon over Adonijah

Adonijah, the eldest surviving son, “exalted himself, saying, I will be king,” and Joab and Abiathar the priest followed him (3 Kgdms 1:5–7). The succession is settled by David’s word: “he shall sit upon my throne, and reign in my stead: and I have given charge that he should be for a prince over Israel and Judah” (1:35). Adonijah later concedes the point in theological terms: “the kingdom was mine… but the kingdom was turned from me and became my brother’s: for it was appointed to him from the Lord” (2:15). David says that “of all my sons… he has chosen Solomon my son” (1 Chron. 28:5).

This is paternal in a stronger sense than primogeniture. The father of the house, under God, designates the heir, as Jacob did in blessing his sons (Gen. 48–49). Filmer’s rule of automatic primogeniture takes the choice out of the father’s hands. The biblical pattern keeps it there, and places the father’s choice under God’s.

The people’s covenant

The people are not passive. Deuteronomy commands, “thou shalt surely set over thee the ruler whom the Lord God shall choose” (Deut. 17:15). The people set, and God chooses. Saul is anointed privately (1 Kgdms 10:1), taken by lot before the assembly, tribe by family by man (10:20–21), and acclaimed: “Let the king live!” (10:24). Then “all the people went to Gilgal, and Samuel anointed Saul there to be king before the Lord” (11:15). Samuel “told to the people the manner of the king, and wrote it in a book, and set it before the Lord” (10:25).

David is anointed by Samuel (16:13), then by “the men of Judea… to reign over the house of Judah” (2 Kgdms 2:4). Finally “all the tribes of Israel” come to Hebron saying, “we are thy bone and thy flesh,” and “all the elders of Israel come to the king to Hebron; and king David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord; and they anoint David king over all Israel” (5:1–3). The assembly makes Solomon king “a second time” (1 Chron. 29:22). Jehoiada “made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people” at Joash’s accession (4 Kgdms 11:17). “The people of the land” make Josiah king and anoint Jehoahaz (21:24; 23:30). All Israel goes to Shechem “to make him king” when Rehoboam succeeds, and the failure of that assembly splits the kingdom (3 Kgdms 12:1, 16).

What kind of consent this is

It is often said that Solomon did not become king by a political election. That is true of elections and false if it implies the people had no part. The accurate claim is narrower, and it holds up better against Locke.

First, the people’s act recognizes a choice God has already made. At Hebron the tribes cite the divine word as their reason: “the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel” (2 Kgdms 5:2). Second, the parties are houses acting through their heads, the elders, not individuals contracting out of a state of nature. Third, the covenant is made “before the Lord,” and its terms are God’s law, not terms the people negotiate. Authority comes from God through a house, and the people’s covenant receives it and binds it.

One detail in the Greek complicates the third point. What Samuel writes in the book is “the manner of the king,” τὸ δικαίωμα τοῦ βασιλέως (10:25), the same phrase he used for the king who takes (8:9, 11). The text does not say whether that book recorded the king’s claims on the people or set limits to them.

This is also where the exegesis stops being one-sided. Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644) built its case that the people make the king on these same passages: Deuteronomy 17:15, Samuel’s book, the covenant at Hebron, and Jehoiada’s covenant. The dispute between the paternal and the covenantal reading is not over which texts count. It is over whether the people’s act creates the king’s authority or recognizes it. The texts’ own emphasis, God’s choice first, the Spirit coming on David (1 Kgdms 16:13), the elders citing God’s word, favors recognition. What the texts do not settle is what a people may do when a king breaks the covenant, beyond what the prophets pronounce against him.

09

The Son over the house

The New Testament keeps the structure of David’s covenant and brings it to its conclusion in Christ: the Son, the heir, the firstborn among brethren, set over his Father’s house. It also places every human fatherhood beneath God’s and condemns lordship on the Gentile model. What it does not do is prescribe a form of civil government for the nations.

The throne of his father David

The angel’s announcement is a succession text. “The Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: and he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever” (Luke 1:32–33). Matthew opens with a genealogy, the record of a father’s house, tracing Jesus as “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1).

Hebrews applies the covenant formula directly, in the Septuagint’s words. God has spoken “by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things” (Heb. 1:2), and to him God said, “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son” (1:5, quoting Ps. 2:7 and 2 Kgdms 7:14). When God brings “the firstbegotten” into the world (1:6), the word is πρωτότοκος again. Then the household image: “Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant… But Christ as a son over his own house; whose house are we” (3:5–6).

Firstborn among brethren, father of the children

Christ is “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29), “the firstborn of every creature” and “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:15, 18). He “is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Heb. 2:11–12). In the next verse Hebrews puts Isaiah’s words in his mouth: “Behold I and the children which God hath given me” (Heb. 2:13, quoting Isa. 8:18). The royal Son stands to his people as elder brother and as father in the same passage. That is the double relation of David’s son, brother among brethren and father to the house, carried into Christ.

Where the Greek of Isaiah 9 includes the title “Father of the age to come,” the church has read it as belonging to Christ. In Trinitarian theology the Son is not the Father. The church has read the title as naming the Messiah’s fatherly relation to the people given him, not as merging the persons. A careful reader will catch the difference, and the argument should state it.

Every family named from the Father

“I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:14–15). The word for “family” is πατριά, the Septuagint’s word for the fathers’ houses of Israel (Exod. 6:14; Num. 1:2). Every fatherhood and every house takes its name from God’s fatherhood, not the reverse. This is the ground of the whole analogy. Human fatherly authority, in the household or beyond it, is real because it is derived from the Father.

From the lesser house to the greater

Paul reasons directly from household rule to rule over a larger community. The overseer must be “one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)” (1 Tim. 3:4–5). The church is “the house of God” (3:15). The argument runs from the lesser house to the greater. It is the clearest New Testament instance of the reasoning this paper traces, though Paul applies it to the church and not to the state.

The steward over the household

Jesus uses the same household grammar for authority exercised on another’s behalf. “Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat in due season?” (Luke 12:42). The word is οἰκονόμος, the Septuagint’s title for Eliakim (4 Kgdms 18:18). The servant who instead “shall begin to beat the menservants and maidens, and to eat and drink” is cut off when his lord returns (12:45–46). The steward’s authority is real, it is set over the household for the household’s good, and it answers to the lord who gave it.

The counter-texts

“Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven” (Matt. 23:9). The context is scribes and Pharisees who love titles and the chief seats (23:5–10). The apostles did not read it as a ban on the word. Paul says, “in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel” (1 Cor. 4:15), and Stephen addresses the council as “fathers” (Acts 7:2). The verse places every human fatherhood beneath God’s. It confirms the derived model rather than refuting it.

“The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so” (Luke 22:25–26; cf. Mark 10:42–45). The target is lordship on the Gentile model, the same fault as the king “like all the nations” in 1 Kingdoms 8. Jesus goes on: the Son of Man came “to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). The word is λύτρον, from the verb of the kinsman-redeemer in Psalm 71:14 [72:14]. The king redeems his people at his own cost, as the prince of Ezekiel 46 gives from his own possession.

What the New Testament does not say

When the New Testament instructs believers about the civil rulers they actually lived under, it uses different categories. “There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1). The ruler is “the minister of God” who “beareth not the sword in vain” (13:4). Peter commands submission “to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors” (1 Pet. 2:13–14).

Paternal language is absent from these passages. They ground authority in divine appointment and the sword, and they address a pagan emperor, not a son of David. Peter’s phrase “ordinance of man” (ἀνθρωπίνῃ κτίσει, literally “human creation”) is regularly cited by those who hold that political forms are human arrangements. The paternal thesis therefore rests on the Old Testament’s constitution of Israel’s kingship and its fulfillment in Christ. It cannot rest on Romans 13.

10

Filmer, Locke, and the objections

Locke’s case against Filmer succeeds against Filmer and mostly fails against Scripture. Two of his objections should be conceded outright, one refines the thesis, and two rest on premises Scripture does not share.

The fifth commandment in the Protestant tradition

Filmer’s Patriarcha argued that royal power is Adam’s paternal power, passed down by inheritance, and that the command to honor father and mother is the root of political obedience. The second half of that claim was not a royalist peculiarity. It was common Protestant teaching.

Luther’s Large Catechism teaches under that commandment that all other authority is derived from the authority of parents, and it treats civil rulers as standing in the place of fathers. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), produced by an assembly on which Rutherford himself sat as a Scottish commissioner, says that father and mother in the fifth commandment mean “not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts,” and especially those over us by God’s ordinance “whether in family, church, or commonwealth” (Q. 124).

The commandment’s own promise points the same way: “that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long on the good land, which the Lord thy God gives to thee” (Exod. 20:12; Eph. 6:2–3). The reward for honoring father and mother is long life in the land, a good that belongs to the whole people.

Two concessions

The dominion of Genesis 1 is given to humanity in the plural, as section 02 showed. And Scripture never grounds any king’s title in descent from Adam. Thrones come by God’s choice, a prophet’s anointing, the father’s designation within the house, and covenant with the elders. A biblical account of paternal kingship has to drop the argument from Adam’s heir entirely. It is Filmer’s weakest point, and Locke was right to press it.

A refinement: parental power with a head

Locke argues that because the commandment honors both parents, “paternal power” should be called “parental power,” and a mother would then share the sovereignty. The first half of that is correct. The biblical language of rule is parental: Deborah “arose a mother in Israel” (Judg. 5:7), kings are “nursing-fathers” and princesses “nurses” (Isa. 49:23), and Azatiwada was made “a father and a mother” to his people.

The household in Scripture still has a head. The father’s word governs a daughter’s vows while she lives “in her father’s house” (Num. 30:4–6 [30:3–5]), and the order of Genesis 2–3 stands. The objection corrects the vocabulary. It does not remove the headship.

Where Locke’s premises fail

Locke’s strongest argument is that paternal power is temporary, ending when the child is grown, while political power is permanent. That depends on a nuclear household in which grown sons leave and set up their own. The biblical father’s house spans generations. Judah passes sentence on his dead son’s widow (Gen. 38:24). Jacob governs sons who are grown men with households of their own (Gen. 42–46). After Jacob dies, the brothers fear Joseph as the new head of the house and tell him, “We… are thy servants” (50:15–18). The disobedient son of Deuteronomy 21, “a reveller and a drunkard,” is plainly no small child.

Locke’s claim that paternal power exists for the child’s good is common ground. Scripture says the same of the king, and sections 06 and 07 depend on it. That point strengthens the prophetic judgment on the king who takes. It does not establish a contract.

Locke’s final move is that political power, the power to make laws with the penalty of death, differs in kind from paternal power and can arise only when individuals hand over their natural power to punish by consent. In Scripture the household already holds a sword. It fields an army (Gen. 14:14), pronounces death (31:32; 38:24), and brings capital cases to the fathers at the gate (Deut. 21:18–21). The difference between the house and the kingdom is scale, not kind. And when power does pass upward, it passes through houses and their heads (2 Kgdms 5:3), not through individuals.

Underneath all of this is a disagreement about the first human situation. Locke begins with individuals in a state of perfect freedom and equality. Scripture begins with a man, a woman, and a household under a head, and every person after Adam is born into a father’s house.

11

What the argument does not establish

The argument that survives the Greek text is not “the Bible calls kings fathers.” It is that the Bible defines kingship as the rule of a firstborn son over his Father’s house. Its limits are as definite as its claim.

It does not establish a monarchy descended from Adam. Genesis 1 gives dominion to “them,” and no biblical throne claims title from Adam.

It does not make primogeniture divine law. Scripture separates rule from the blessing of the firstborn (1 Chron. 5:1–2) and places succession in the father’s designation under God’s choice (3 Kgdms 1:35; 2:15).

It does not make the people’s covenant meaningless. The elders of Israel make David king at Hebron, and the texts treat that act as necessary even where it recognizes rather than creates.

It does not make every king legitimate or immune. The prophets judge kings who take, God gives ten tribes away from Solomon’s son (3 Kgdms 11:31; 12:24), and Ahab’s house falls for Naboth’s vineyard.

It does not rest on Isaiah 9. The title “Father of the age to come” stands in only part of the Greek tradition. The thesis stands without it.

It does not show that the New Testament prescribes monarchy for the nations. Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 ground civil authority in God’s appointment, not in fatherhood, and Peter calls civil order an “ordinance of man.”

It does not make the analogy an identity. The king is not the natural father of his people. His fatherhood belongs to an office, as Eliakim’s did, and it is always derived from the fatherhood of God (Eph. 3:15).

The question it leaves open

If the king’s authority is paternal and derived, the king who becomes a taker has broken the terms of his own office. The Old Testament answers that case with prophetic judgment and with God’s own transfer of the kingdom. It does not say whether lesser fathers, the elders and heads of houses who made the covenant, may act on that breach themselves. That is the question the sixteenth-century Reformers took up, and it is where the paternal reading and the covenantal reading of the same texts finally part.

12

Opposing readings

Four serious readings of the same texts reach different conclusions, and any use of this paper should expect to meet them.

The covenantal resistance reading. Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644), written against John Maxwell’s Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas (1644), holds that the people, through their representatives, make the king, that the king is bound by covenant, and that lesser magistrates may resist a tyrant. The Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) built a double covenant between God, king, and people on Jehoiada’s covenant in 4 Kingdoms 11:17. Calvin, in Institutes 4.20.8, judged a mixture of aristocracy and democracy safer than monarchy because of the vices of kings.

The republican reading. Milton, and later Paine in Common Sense (1776), read Gideon’s refusal and 1 Kingdoms 8 as a condemnation of monarchy as such. Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic traces how seventeenth-century writers, drawing on rabbinic commentary, turned those texts into an argument that kingship is itself a sin.

The egalitarian reading. Joshua Berman’s Created Equal argues that the Pentateuch broke with ancient Near Eastern political thought by treating the whole people as God’s covenant partner and by limiting the king more severely than any neighboring law code did.

The source-critical reading. Much critical scholarship since Wellhausen explains the tension in 1 Kingdoms 8–12 as the combination of sources for and against kingship. On that view the canon contains two positions rather than one position with qualifications, and a harmonizing reading like this one is a later construction.

SOURCES

Texts and editions

SCRIPTURE

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, with an English Translation (London: Samuel Bagster, 1844). Greek text and English translation.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

PRIMARY AND EARLY MODERN

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), 4.20.8.

Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (written 1630s–1640s; printed 1680).

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), First Treatise; Second Treatise, ch. 6.

Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), on the commandment to honor parents.

John Maxwell, Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas (1644).

John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).

Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), “Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession.”

Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (1644).

Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579).

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 124.

INSCRIPTIONS

Kilamuwa inscription, Samʾal, ninth century BC (KAI 24).

Azatiwada inscription, Karatepe, eighth century BC (KAI 26).

MODERN SCHOLARSHIP

Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010).

J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns, 2001).

Lawrence E. Stager, “The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985): 1–35.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament quotations follow Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint (1844), with Septuagint book names and numbering and with proper names in their familiar English forms. Greek follows Brenton’s edition. New Testament quotations follow the King James Version. Luther, Kilamuwa, and Calvin are paraphrased. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com