Thy Brethren
Deuteronomy 17:14 says that:
"When you come to the land which the Lord your God is
giving you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say, 'I will set a
king over me like all the nations that are around me,' you shall
surely set a king over you who the Lord your God chooses; one from
among your brethren you shall set as king over you; you may not set
a foreigner over you, who is not our brother."
(Deuteronomy
17:14-15).
Notice that God did not say, 'when you come into the land, you
are to set a king over you;' nor did He say, 'the amphictyony is to
endure forever.' It's at their option, apparently, whether they want
monarchy or not. It is neither forbidden nor mandated. The reason
why they did eventually want it is stated objectively: they wanted
to be like other nations. Their king, however, if that is the route
they choose to go, cannot be a foreigner. Incidentally, both in the
histories and here, the monarchy never seems to lose its character
as a elective rather than a hereditary monarchy. The king is twice
chosen, once by God through anointing by a recognized prophet, and
once again by the tribes through election.
At any rate, God leaves them the option of adopting monarchy or
not. What becomes of the divine right of kings if God leaves it up
to them? If they, like the Athenians or the Romans, decide they
would rather govern themselves, then it's a republic, not a
monarchy. God has no objection.
Philo Judaeus
The Roman empire of the first century A.D. was, at the top level,
an autocracy, nothing resembling a democracy. Rome itself had
never been a pure democracy, rather an amalgam of different
elements, some bits and pieces of oligarchy mixed in with a limited amount of
popular rule. But the Republic had fallen, and under the empire,
Caesar ruled supreme. Still people remembered it had not always been
that way, and a surviving remnant of democratic self-rule persisted at the local
level.
How could there have been any democracy in the ancient world,
when that world was so backwards in so many ways and the economy so
inefficient, based on slavery? Marx, alas, has conditioned us to
thinking that politics follows downstream from the means of
production. If they had been able to cast off the yoke of slavery,
that would have been the best thing they could have done to promote
economic progress. Was democracy even possible without widespread
literacy? Literacy rates in that world were higher than most
people today think. While antiquity is not like our period in that
universal literacy was nowhere near to being achieved, those people
who did know how to read and write mostly learned at school.
There were sizeable schools; here is one which made it to the pages
of history only because of a terrible accident, where the roof caved
in, killing 119 children:
“Likewise, about the same time, and very shortly before the sea-fight, the roof of a school-house had fallen in upon a number of their boys, who were at lessons; and out of a hundred and twenty children there was but one left alive.”
(Herodotus, Histories, Book VI, 27.2).
The enrollment in this school had been 120 children before the
disaster. Plainly the roof should have been inspected by some
knowledgeable person, but that did not happen. What you will hear
from certain quarters is that home schooling was all but universal before
the nineteenth century, at which time the Marxists invented the idea
of public education. That's entirely fanciful. Children in
antiquity, like children today, marched off to school to learn
how to read and write:
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