The Hebrew Republic

Eric Nelson

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780674056749
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

According to a commonplace narrative, the rise of modern political thought in the West resulted from secularization—the exclusion of religious arguments from political discourse. But in this pathbreaking work, Eric Nelson argues that this familiar story is wrong. Instead, he contends, political thought in early-modern Europe became less, not more, secular with time, and it was the Christian encounter with Hebrew sources that provoked this radical transformation.During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars began to regard the Hebrew Bible as a political constitution designed by God for the children of Israel. Newly available rabbinic materials became authoritative guides to the institutions and practices of the perfect republic. This thinking resulted in a sweeping reorientation of political commitments. In the book's central chapters, Nelson identifies three transformative claims introduced into European political theory by the Hebrew revival: the argument that republics are the only legitimate regimes; the idea that the state should coercively maintain an egalitarian distribution of property; and the belief that a godly republic would tolerate religious diversity. One major consequence of Nelson's work is that the revolutionary politics of John Milton, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes appear in a brand-new light.Nelson demonstrates that central features of modern political thought emerged from an attempt to emulate a constitution designed by God. This paradox, a reminder that while we may live in a secular age, we owe our politics to an age of religious fervor, in turn illuminates fault lines in contemporary political discourse.

CHAPTER 1

“Talmudical Commonwealthsmen” and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism

THE DEVELOPMENT OF republican political theory in the West presents something of a puzzle. In late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, republicanism was always a relative position. That is, it was characterized by the claim that republics are better than monarchies. Republicans could, of course, disagree sharply among themselves as to whether republics were always better, how much better they were, and why exactly they were better. But none had any interest in arguing that republics were the only legitimate or acceptable regimes. Even the most strident republican text of the period, Leonardo Bruni's oration in praise of Nanni Strozzi (1428), concedes that monarchy is “lawful” (legitimus), one of the “correct” constitutions identified by Aristotle in Book III of the Politics.¹ This commitment reflects the fundamental pluralism and modesty of the humanist persuasion; it follows from a deep skepticism concerning the ability of any principle to take sufficient account of all possible circumstances and situations, and from the conviction that there are always good arguments on both sides of any important question.² By the end of the seventeenth century, however, we see for the first time the appearance of what we might call republican exclusivism, the claim that republics are the only legitimate regimes. This transformation is largely responsible for the shape of political life and thought in the modern world, so we have good reason to ask why it took place. Our question quickly turns into a puzzle, however, once we recognize that the most obvious traditions of thought to which we might initially turn for an answer simply cannot provide one. There is nothing in the surviving sources from Greek or Roman antiquity that defends such a view (early-modern authors were quite aware of this fact),³ nor is it explained by anything in the “social contract” tradition passing from Grotius through Pufendorf and Locke. Indeed, authors in what became known as the “modern school” of natural right were at pains to insist that there is nothing in the contractarian position that precludes monarchical government—most were, after all, monarchists of some stripe. So where should we look for the origins of republican exclusivism?

A valuable clue is to be found in a most improbable place: chapter 35 of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), entitled “Of the Signification of the Kingdom of God.” Hobbes's aim in this chapter is to refute the suggestion that the phrase “the kingdom of God” refers to a spiritual realm to which we are dispatched “after this life.” His motivation is straightforward. As he had already explained in chapter 29, if belief in such a spiritual kingdom “moveth the Members of a Common-wealth, by the terrour of punishments, and hope of rewards” to disobey the orders of their civil sovereign, the state will be thrust “into the Fire of a Civill warre.”⁴ Hobbes therefore attempts to show that the phrase “kingdom of God” refers in the Bible, not to the world to come, but rather to the ancient commonwealth of the Hebrews, “wherein God was king.”⁵ He defends this claim with a three-paragraph discussion of a famous passage in I Samuel, chapter 8: “when the Elders of Israel…demanded a King, Samuel displeased therewith, prayed unto the Lord; and the Lord answering said unto him, Hearken unto the voice of the People, for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. Out of which it is evident that God himself was then their King.”⁶ Later, Hobbes adds that the prophets foretold the restoration of God's kingdom. He characterizes God's promise as follows: “I will reign over you, and make you to stand to that Covenant which you made with me by Moses, and brake in your rebellion against me in the days of Samuel, and in your election of another King.” In short, Hobbes defends his claim that “the kingdom of God” refers to God's civil sovereignty over Israel by reading I Sam. 8:7 to mean that, when the Israelites asked for a mortal king, they were in fact deposing God as their temporal ruler.

Two striking facts about this passage explain why it ought to be regarded as an important clue for our purposes. The first is the hostility with which it was greeted by Hobbes's contemporaries. Indeed, there are few passages in Leviathan that received as much direct criticism as this one in the first two decades of the book's reception. Robert Filmer, for example, attacked Hobbes by name on precisely this point in his 1652 Observations Concerning the Originall of Government: “I do not find,” he observed, “that the desiring of a king was a breach of their contract or covenant, or disobedience to the voice of God. There is no such law extant.”⁷ Clarendon was even more insistent in his review of the English Leviathan: “We are not oblig'd,” he wrote, “nor indeed have any reason to believe, that God was offended with the Children of Israel for desiring a King, which was a Government himself had instituted over them.”⁸ Hobbes's analysis had clearly touched a nerve. The second striking fact is that, when Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin over a decade later (for inclusion in his 1668 Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia), he excised this entire discussion.⁹ It might initially seem as if the first fact is a sufficient explanation of the second: Hobbes responded to his critics by removing the offending passage. There is presumably an element of truth in this, but it is important to recall that Clarendon's Brief View was not published until 1676, and although Hobbes was certainly familiar with Filmer's polemic, this is, so far as I can tell, the only instance in which he actually removed an argument that offended his patriarchal antagonist.

My suggestion is that Hobbes's decision to strike this passage from the Latin Leviathan is not so much a capitulation to Filmer as it is an alarmed response to what had become of republican political theory in the 1650s. During that period, republican pamphleteers in England had taken the exclusivist turn and, on their own account, had been convinced to do so by a particular reading of the very same Biblical verses that Hobbes used to make his case in chapter 35. On this reading, God's rebuke in I Sam. 8:7 should be taken to mean that human kingship is inherently a usurpation of the kingdom of God, and that monarchy is therefore an instance of the sin of idolatry. This of course was not Hobbes's position—on his account, the civil kingship of God was unique to Israel, and so asking for a mortal king was only a sin in this one instance¹⁰—but, given the political circumstances of the Restoration, he evidently felt that it was too close for comfort.¹¹ The view from which Hobbes wished to distance himself was unprecedented in Christian Biblical criticism before the mid-seventeenth century (indeed, Hobbes's own less radical reading was itself exceedingly rare before 1600). It turned its back on every standard authority from Augustine to Aquinas, from the glossa ordinaria to Luther and Calvin. It was not contemplated by even the most militant resistance theorists of the late sixteenth century. The reason is simple: the reading in question derives from a tradition of rabbinic commentary on Deuteronomy and I Samuel that became available to the Christian West only during the Hebrew revival of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The English pamphleteers who took up this position were very much aware of its provenance and enthusiastically endorsed what one of them called the tradition of the “Talmudical commonwealthsmen.” In doing so, they transformed the politics of the modern world.

I

The Biblical account of monarchy had always been of immense interest to Christian exegetes, and all agreed that the challenge was to make sense of the relationship between two specific passages from the Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 17 and I Samuel 8. The central section of the Deuteronomy passage contains a set of instructions given by God to the Israelites; it reads as follows in the King James version:

When thou art come unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; 15: Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the LORD thy God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother. 16: But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return no more that way. 17: Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold. (Deut. 17:14-17)

The passage from I Samuel 8 stages the moment anticipated in Deuteronomy:

Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, 5: And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. 6: But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. 7: And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. 8: According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. 9: Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them. (I Sam. 8:4-9)

Samuel then proceeds to tell the Israelites all of the terrible things that kings will do to them.

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. 12: And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. 13: And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. 14: And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. 15: And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. 16: And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. 17: He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. 18: And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

The challenge for interpreters was to reconcile God's apparent acceptance of kingly rule at Deut. 17:14 with his evident anger when the Israelites request a king in I Sam. 8.¹² Medieval and Renaissance exegetes tended to pursue one of two strategies of harmonization. The first was to suggest that the Israelites sinned in selecting kings who did not meet the criteria established by God in the Deuteronomy passage. That is, the kings they wished to institute over them were avaricious and tyrannical, quite unlike the virtuous monarchs described in God's instructions. An influential statement of this view is found in the glossa ordinaria, the standard Biblical commentary compiled in the twelfth century.¹³ It reasons as follows at Deut. 17:14: “It might be asked why the people displeased God when they desired a king [in I Sam, 8], since here we find it permitted? But it should be understood that it was certainly not according to God's will, because he did not command that this should be done, but rather permitted it to the people who desired it.”¹⁴ And why in particular was God angry? Because “the inhabitants of the land constituted a king over themselves in a manner contrary to God's instructions”—namely, kings who, like Solomon, took numerous wives and concubines.¹⁵ Another notable proponent of this reading is John of Salisbury, who argues in the Policraticus (1159) that the Israelites abandoned rule by “the authority of the law” when they asked for kings with tyrannical powers.¹⁶ Aquinas likewise appears to follow this approach in the De regimine principum, ¹⁷ as does Erasmus in the Institutio principis christiani (1516).¹⁸

The second strategy of reconciliation was to argue in a Pauline vein that, in asking for a change of government, the Israelites committed the sin of rebellion against God's established order.¹⁹ All kings rule by divine appointment, and insurrection against them accordingly constitutes a rejection of God's sovereignty. This reading was particularly popular among sixteenth-century Protestants.²⁰ It is, for example, Calvin's position in the Institutes: those who preach disobedience and rebellion “do not reject magistrates, but they reject God, ‘that he should not reign over them’ [I Sam. 8:7]. For if this was truly asserted by the Lord respecting the people of Israel, because they refused the government of Samuel, why shall it not now be affirmed with equal truth of those who take the liberty to outrage all the authorities which God has instituted?”²¹ This Pauline account was not, however, limited to Protestants. Jean Bodin endorsed it strongly in his Six livres de la république (1576). “There is nothing greater on earth, after God,” he argues, “than sovereign princes…. Contempt for one's sovereign prince is contempt toward God, of whom he is the earthly image. That is why God, speaking to Samuel, from whom the people had demanded a different prince, said ‘It is me that they have wronged.’”²² Neither this reading nor its counterpart suggested that kingship itself was the cause of God's displeasure.

One would, of course, expect to find such conservative readings in overtly monarchist works such as Bodin's. What is extraordinary is that even the most radical republican authors and resistance theorists writing before the seventeenth century tended to understand these passages in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. “Talmudical Commonwealthsmen” and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism
• 2. “For the Land is Mine”: The Hebrew Commonwealth and the Rise of Redistribution
• 3. Hebrew Theocracy and the Rise of Toleration
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index