Treadmill politics

The Beginning of Politics by Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes (Princeton, 2017) is a brilliant analysis of two brilliant books, 1 and 2 Samuel. The authors rightly praise “the way in which the beautifully crafted narratives cut to the core of human politics.” They are unlike what other countries in the ancient Near East produced, where “the king was either a God, an incarnation of a God, or a semi-mythic human king. … Rather than declaring that ‘the king is a God,’ the new theology postulated instead that ‘God is the king.’”

The three main characters in the saga—Samuel, Saul, and David—are all humans and sinners, rather than pillars of the cosmic order. This also makes 1 and 2 Samuel different from anything else of its time: “The narrative notoriously lacks the celebratory features that usually accompany any coronation or heroic founding of a new political regime.” That honesty makes the history “the first of its kind in world literature” and an act of journalistic witnessing—in essence, “Beware of what I saw and have told you”—rather than a piece of propaganda.

We might expect from Princeton a “higher criticism” view that 1 and 2 Samuel came from multiple writers, but the two authors, both NYU professors, say that “fails to do justice, we believe, to the unity and brilliance of the authorial voice. … The author was not a scribal courtier either. No court would allow the composition of such an unflattering official history of its beginnings.” The author also knew how to show rather than tell, even when he quoted people telling: After Samuel tells the Israelites that a king will grab from his people their time and their money to use for his purposes, the people still fool themselves sufficiently to use the first-person plural, believing the king will fight “our battles.”

The familial stories within the overall arc also ring true. Samuel is sad that his sons will not succeed him. David’s adultery leaves him without moral authority in dealing with the sexual and power-seeking lusts of his prodigal sons. Even when David and his prodigal Absalom officially reconcile in 2 Samuel 14, warmth like that in Luke 15’s telling of the prodigal son story is missing. David’s deceit with Ahimelech to save his own skin is another superb journalistic account: It ends with Saul using Doeg, a foreigner, to execute 86 priests.

Such ground-level observation helps 1 and 2 Samuel to attain universal validity. Halbertal and Holmes write, “At the heart of politics lies an existential urge for physical security, and the people proved willing and even eager to relinquish whatever unsupervised freedom and entitlements they enjoyed … and to surrender to a political sovereign who will freely tax and conscript them so long as he can also safeguard them from their pitiless enemies.” When Russians submit to Vladimir Putin and Chinese to Xi Jinping, they are like Israelites who “did not accept and celebrate worldly monarchy in a bout of absentmindedness, naively unaware of its toilsome burdens and trade-offs.”

That’s easy for me to write about people thousands of miles away, but I suspect this realism also relates to the choice of many evangelicals concerned about Donald Trump’s character but willing to support him: “They reasoned that subordination to a king was better than conquest by an enemy.”

Bookmarks

Thomas Robinson’s Who Were the First Christians? (Oxford, 2017) is true to its subtitle: Dismantling the Urban Thesis. Robinson shows how we have only guestimates about the overall population of the Roman Empire as well as how many Christians and Jews there were. He does show that Christianity may not have been primarily an urban movement, and that rural growth was also important. That’s relevant today: People in cities need Christ, but so do people in suburbs and rural areas, and it’s not necessarily true that urban influence will move outward. —M.O.