The Ways of a King: Legal and Political Ideas in the Bible.

• Author: Abramson, Paul R.
• Position: Book review

The Ways of a King: Legal and Political Ideas in the Bible

By Geoffrey P. Miller

Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011.

Pp. 296. $126 hardcover.

The Bible has implications beyond its theological and moral principles. Joining a burgeoning recent literature, Geoffrey P. Miller, the Stuyvesant Comfort Professor of Law at the New York University Law School, turns to analyzing its underlying legal and political ideas.

Miller's analysis of the Hebrew Bible has two basic theses. His first thesis is "both simple and far-reaching: the great history of Israel presented in the books of Genesis through Second Kings contains a systematic, comprehensive, and remarkably astute analysis of political obligation and governmental design--in short, a political philosophy that may have been written earlier than the works of Plato and Aristotle" (p. 7). "The Bible," he argues, "not the Greeks, may be the West's oldest political philosophy" (p. 11).

His second thesis is that after reviewing alternative forms of government--utopia in paradise before the Fall, patriarchal clans, nomadism, nationhood, covenants between God and Noah, Abraham, and Moses, sovereignty under Joshua, and a covenant with Joshua--the children of Israel moved to military rule under the judges. Under the judges, a confederacy was established. But under Samuel, the last judge, the elders demanded a king. '"Look, you yourself have grown old and your sons have not gone in your ways. So now, set us a king to rule us, like all the nations'" (1 Samuel 8:5) (for translations from Genesis through 2 Kings, I use Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary [New York: Norton, 2004] and Ancient Israel: The Former Prophets: Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings: A Translation with Commentary [New York: Norton, 2013]). Miller maintains that of all the forms of government discussed in the first eleven books of the Hebrew Bible, monarchy is viewed as the most favorable.

Despite Miller's erudition, I disagree with his theses. There are many political messages in the Hebrew Bible, but not a sustained political theory. It is filled with too many unrelated incidents to sustain a political theory. Genesis is mainly the story of a dysfunctional family, filled with unrelated stories and some genealogies that sometimes lead nowhere (such as the lineage of Cain). Exodus sheds light on revolutionary theory, as Michael Walzer shows in Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984). But most readers will focus on the story of the liberation from Egypt, and the Decalogue does not advance political principles, although it states that "[y]ou shall...