The Bible on, “No Kings!” (Part 1)
Photo by Robin Johnathan Deutsch on Unsplash
“One has…to ask how far the heroic is a Christian category.”1
As we move inexorably towards the semiquincentennial of our nation’s founding, one suspects that we would appear remarkably strange to our revolutionary political ancestors—or, perhaps more accurately and tragically, how familiar our world might appear to them. Today street protests regularly include signs with “No Kings!”—a catchphrase that rings with the weight of history. Indeed, one might call “No Kings!” America’s oldest political slogan, made famous by Thomas Paine in his popular tract Common Sense, published in 1776 (where it was phrased “No King! No Tyranny!”).2 America’s revolutionary rejection of oppressive rulers is no doubt why “No Kings!” has been applied to many a political leader ever since the 18th century. But whatever one thinks of this slogan—its aptness or inaptness with reference to politicians, whether current or long gone—those of us who care about Scripture should think immediately, first, and foremost of the Bible when we hear it, because the Bible contains quite a bit of “No Kings!” sentiment.3
…the same Lord who warned of the way and the ways, the justice, or, rather, injustice, of power-hungry despots and their cronies, all of which added up to a simple and straightforward political position: No Kings!
No Kings from the Start: 1 Samuel 8
The first text that should come to mind is 1 Samuel 8, which recounts the story of Israel’s initial request for a monarch. It is obvious that this account lies beneath and behind the Bible’s “No Kings!” slogan, funding it in several important ways.
Recall the story: the prophet Samuel is now old, and his sons had proven ill-suited to succeed him because they have chased success, accepted bribes, and perverted justice—things that, nowadays, can ironically win you a large campaign purse and a huge social media following…but I digress. In face of these disappointing sons and Samuel’s imminent demise, Israel’s leaders come and ask the wizened prophet for a king “like all the other nations” (1 Sam 8:5). Samuel doesn’t like this request very much, and neither does God, who points out that it isn’t an insult to ole’ Sam at all but to God: “It’s not you they’ve rejected,” the Lord says, “No, they’ve rejected me as king over them” (v. 7).4 So God sends the people a message through Samuel, giving them a clear sense of what kings will get you. Or, more accurately, God’s message offers a clear sense of what kings will take from you, which is pretty much everything: your children for military service and other types of forced labor, domestic or governmental; your livelihood, too, will be taken for the king’s administration; ultimately, the king will take your very own lives. And, God observes, this is not unusual, some sort of aberrant exception. No, these are “the ways of the king who will reign over you” (v. 9, repeated in v. 11). In Hebrew this statement is even more ominous than it already sounds because the “ways of the king” is mišpaṭ hammelek, “the judgment of the king,” or even—and more worrisome still—“the justice of the king” because the word mišpāṭ often refers to justice. Here, its use is highly ironic. The divine message relays that there is, in fact, no justice when it comes to kings—and that is according to God’s own mouth in 1 Samuel 8 and in response to the very first request for monarchs! Their kind of justice—royal justice—is perverse, perverted justice. It is not justice. That is God’s answer in reply to Israel’s initial request. There could hardly be a stronger articulation of “No Kings!” than 1 Samuel 8. But the people persist, and so God, sadly accustomed to rejection, acquiesces. But not without first being crystal clear that the end result of kingship will be nothing but a new Pharaoh, this one in Israelite robes (v. 18). Only this time, when the people cry out because of their own, self-chosen monarchic oppressor, God will not listen (v. 18)!
What God threatens in 1 Samuel comes to pass later, especially in Solomon’s rule, which, as one reads about it in 1 Kings, looks less and less wise and more and more foolish. But it’s also found in the rule of his father, the famous but famously ambiguous David, known as a man of inordinate bloodshed (1 Sam 18:7; 21:11; 29:5), who was prevented from building God’s temple for that very reason (1 Chr 28:3), and who was cursed roundly—and rightly—for the same by Shimei during the coup attempt by Absalom (2 Sam 16:5-13). To his credit, David, chockfull of wrongdoing, occasionally gets it right, perhaps most of all when he confesses his sinful affair and murderous coverup after being confronted by Nathan (2 Sam 12:13). David would be succeeded by his son Solomon, who, unlike his wily father, was born to the purple. Contrary to what common knowledge would have us believe, the Bible remembers Solomon as much for his building projects, achieved by severe taxation and forced labor, as it does for his legendary wisdom. Indeed, Scripture is quite clear that Solomon’s extractive politics and acquisitive policies earned him a number of enemies—both divine and human—and thus a not-so-loyal opposition.5
A More Excellent Way: Deuteronomy 17 (An Interlude)
We should pause for a moment to observe that it needn’t have been this way with David, Solomon, and the other kings and queens of Israel and Judah. We know this because of Deut 17:14-20, which is the only law about kingship in the entire Torah with its numerous regulations and vast legislation.6 This one and only law about Israelite monarchy is remarkably straightforward: the king is only required to do one thing—to write a copy of the Torah and read it every day. If the king does that, a long rule is guaranteed. The king is also required to not do some things: he is not to amass a lot of gold and silver, for example—bitcoin would no doubt qualify today—and he is not to have numerous wives. Well! It’s almost as if the author of Deuteronomy 17 had Solomon in mind because Solomon fails on all these accounts and does so rather miserably. First Kings tells us Solomon received a downright diabolical number of 666 talents of gold every year (1 Kgs 10:14).7 He also had 700 wives and 300 concubines (1 Kgs 11:3), but who’s counting? And those wives turned his heart away from God to other loves (1 Kgs 11:4, 9-10): other paramours, other gods—the ones of money and bitcoin and sex and power, no doubt. And that leads to God’s anger and God’s support of enemies who will oppose Solomon, including Jeroboam (1 Kgs 11:11). Deuteronomy explains why David, Solomon, and so many others fail. It’s simple: the monarchs have failed to listen to the Torah—to write it, to read it, to live it and by so doing avoid all the pitfalls of power that accrue, by definition, to monarchy, which is the rule (archon) of just one (mono-) over all others.
No Kings, Especially Davidic Ones: 1 Kings 12
When Solomon dies, the situation facing his own son and successor, Rehoboam, is a fraught one. This is especially true because the larger, northern part of Israel, with its majority of tribes, had borne the greater burden of work and taxation within Solomon’s administration and under his building programs without, as it were, adequate representation.
Unfortunately, Rehoboam plays things poorly in 1 Kings 12. At the first ever “G2, North-South/Israel-Judah Summit,” the new king sits in state to hear the complaints of the northern tribes and their hopes for the next four years (or so!). He then asks for a three-day reprieve to ponder the situation—presumably to come up with something more acceptable to his beleaguered subjects. He first takes counsel with his father’s old cabinet. These individuals are said to be “elders,” and thus belong to a stage of life associated with greater wisdom and experience; as such, maybe this group deserves some credit for Solomon’s wiser moments. This suspicion is confirmed since these wise elders counsel a wise course of action marked by humility and public service—something that, today, is almost unimaginable among our elected officials! “Be a servant to this people,” they advise Rehoboam, “serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them”—again, unheard of these days! If you do that, the advisors continue, “this people…will be your servants forever” (v. 7).
Rehoboam doesn’t give this advice a moment’s thought, however. The chapter reports that he “disregarded” it immediately, turning instead to his own peers, a group of “young men who had grown up with him” (v. 8). These young bucks, who likely weren’t that young (at least in terms of age),8 but who were definitely novices when it came to their fresh access to power and privilege, care only for the latter. They advise, not Rehoboam’s public service to the people, but the public’s service to him. They commend harsh rule: a load far heavier than Solomon had demanded, and, failing that, disciplinary action with scorpions, which is much worse than Solomon’s already-awful whips (vv. 10-11). We shouldn’t miss what is sometimes lost in translation in their speech—namely, that these politicos are foul-mouthed and vulgar, using language that contrasts Solomon’s private parts with that of his son, with Rehoboam the obvious winner by a long shot (v. 10b).9 Gone is all political acumen and concern for the greater good, couched in careful rhetoric, as represented by the elder statesmen. Now there is only raw power and crass language—shocking, sensationalist “tweets”— that care nothing for other people, especially “little people,” or their needs or their pain. “Pile on the work,” they tell Rehoboam, “Punish the plebs more painfully.”
Rehoboam, like so many politicians before him and ever since, chose the path of raw power. But—also like so many politicians before him and ever since—Rehoboam learns that his threats are surprisingly ineffective, his power quite thin, in fact, in the face of “we the people.” The chapter reports that Rehoboam did not listen to “we the people,” then adds a shocking note. This “turn of events [sibbâ] came from the LORD” (v. 15; CEB),10 the text says, in order to fulfill a divine promise to Solomon’s archenemy, Jeroboam—an enemy God had appointed precisely because of Solomon’s sins (1 Kgs 11:33).
This divine, not merely socio-economic, turn of affairs leads directly to another, profoundly political turn of affairs: Rehoboam did not listen to “we the people,” and so “we the people” refuse to listen to Rehoboam. The northern tribes won’t accept his terms. They reply to his unreasonable and uncompassionate politics with a brief statement that is poetic in form and shocking in force:
What stock (hēleq) do we have in David?
We have no inheritance (naḥălâ) with Jesse’s son!
To your own tents, Israel!
Look now to your own house, David! (12:16; my translation).
Or, even more colloquially:
Why should we care about David?
We have nothing in common with Jesse’s son!
Israel: Time to tend to what is ours!
You, David, mind your own business from here on out!
And just like that, with two lines of poetry summoned forth by Rehoboam’s foolish following of even more foolish advice, a line is drawn in the sand. God’s people are henceforth forever separated: north and south, Israel and Judah, Samaria and Jerusalem. Two kingdoms not one, under God. Divisible, as it happens, after all. And with liberty and justice—not for all, but only for some. All due to the petulance of the juvenile King Rehoboam. Actually, it’d be best to put “king” in scare quotes because he’s nothing but a tyrant, a despot, a chump. “No Kings!” is what the northern tribes said to Rehoboam and his ilk. And he deserved every bit of it. He incarnated, which is to say, embodied—as did his father—those things spoken about way back when in that foundational text from 1 Samuel 8. Rehoboam was in the wrong and on the wrong side. But don’t take my word for it: this turn of events was “brought about by the LORD” (1 Kgs 12:15; NRSV)—the same Lord who warned of the way and the ways, the justice, or, rather, injustice, of power-hungry despots and their cronies, all of which added up to a simple and straightforward political position: No Kings!
1 Donald MacKinnon, “Tillich, Frege, Kittel: Some Reflections on a Dark Theme,” in Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979), 129-137 (136).
2 See, e.g., https://theconversation.com/no-kings-americas-oldest-political-slogan-is-drawing-millions-out-onto-the-streets-268174 and https://theconversation.com/in-1776-thomas-paine-made-the-best-case-for-fighting-kings-and-for-being-skeptical-266448 (both accessed 5/16/2026).
3 See, among other things, Robert Gnuse, No Tolerance for Tyrants: The Biblical Assault on Kings and Kingship (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2011). See also Walter Brueggemann, David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); idem, David and His Theologian: Literary, Social, and Theological Investigations of the Early Monarchy, ed. K. C. Hanson (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). For a more positive opinion, see J. J. M. Roberts, “In Defense of the Monarchy: The Contribution of Israelite Kingship to Biblical Theology,” in The Bible and the Ancient Near East: Collected Essays (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 358-75.
4 Or perhaps even more accurately: “from being king” or “ruling” over them as the word is a verbal form, an infinitive construct (mimməlōk).
5 See, respectively, 1 Kgs 11:9-11 (divine opposition) and 11:14-22, 23-25, 26-40 (Hadad the Edomite, Rezon, and Jeroboam, as opponents). For a book length study, see Walter Brueggemann, Solomon: Israel’s Ironic Icon of Human Achievement (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).
6 For what follows, see further Brent A. Strawn “Designated Readers: Deuteronomy’s Portrait of the Ideal King—or Is it Preacher?” Journal for Preachers 32 (2008): 35-40; reprinted in Brent A. Strawn, The Incomparable God: Readings in Biblical Theology, eds. Collin Cornell and Justin Walker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023), 367-73.
7 See Keith Bodner and Brent A. Strawn, “Solomon and 666 (Revelation 13:18),” New Testament Studies 66 (2020): 299-312.
8 We learn later, in 1 Kgs 14:21, that Rehoboam was 41 years old when he becomes king, so his collaborators are hardly fresh-out-of-Wharton-Business-School interns.
9 Cf. Marvin A. Sweeney, I & II Kings: A Commentary, OTL (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 163, 164 n. f, 170; and Mordechai Cogan, I Kings: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AYB 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 345, 348-49.
10 See James A. Montgomery and Henry Snyder Gehman, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Kings (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1951), 250, who state that the term sibbâ means “a turn-about of fate… the phrase is predestinarian, without moralizing….[T]he term belongs to ancient fatalism… Rehoboam’s folly effected the divine purpose” (emphasis original). Sweeney, I & II Kings, 163, translates this phrase as: “YHWH took charge of the action.”
