Friday, August 2, 2013

Royal babies, Republicanism and Torah OR why the Bible has a problem with royalty

I’m aware that any whiff of republicanism these days is considered to be outside the bounds of good taste – we all love the royal family now!  I'm going to risk unpopularity and perhaps scandal by relaying these thoughts which recently occurred to me.

Private Eye’s recent front page headline, ‘Woman has baby,’ naturally appealed to me but, although it points out an obvious truth about recent events, it also misses the point.  The new baby is not only a human being; the tremendous fuss around his birth is a reminder that he is part of one of the stranger British institutions – the monarchy.  The monarchy is strange because it exists within a democracy in which, notionally, sovereignty resides with the people.  Accordingly the queen (or king) has no actual political power – just a stack of land and money accumulated over the centuries, a generous taxpayer-funded remuneration package, guaranteed access to the media, and regular one-to-one, confidential meetings with the Prime Minister. 

A few weeks ago, the courts rules that correspondence between Prince Charles and various government departments could not be released under the Freedom of Information Act as publication could damage his position of political neutrality.  The implication was that Charles is not neutral, has clear political opinions and has taken advantage of his position to communicate these to government ministers; keeping his letters secret serves the purpose of maintaining the illusion of political neutrality while allowing him to go about his business influencing government policy.

You’d think that in a democracy people would notice this kind of anomaly, not to mention the clash between their enthusiasm for these symbols of privilege and the values we all supposedly believe in.  The fact that hardly anyone does is less surprising when you consider how shallow our democracy actually is and take into account the centralisation of power, the inequality and the social immobility which have increasingly come to plague us.  (On the same subject, see the excellent book The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone).   Public worship of the monarchy shows how successful the institution is at implicitly legitimising the status quo.

Next week we’ll be reading Parshat Shoftim (Deuteronomy 16:18 - 21:9) which, among other things, gives us the laws relating to the monarchy:

“If, after you have entered the land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, and taken possession of it and settled in it, you decide, "I will set a king over me, as do all the nations about me," you shall be free to set a king over yourself, one chosen by the Lord your God. Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your own people; you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kinsman.  Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses, since the Lord has warned you, "You must not go back that way again." And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess. 

When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the levitical priests.  Let it remain with him and let him read in it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws.  Thus he will not act haughtily toward his fellows or deviate from the Instruction to the right or to the left, to the end that he and his descendants may reign long in the midst of Israel.” (17:14-20).

The important bit is not the Torah’s assumption that a king will be predisposed towards the accumulation of excess wealth, immoral behaviour and idolatry, nor the idea that the king has to be watched by the priests to ensure he keeps to the laws of the Torah.  The most interesting detail is the opening word of the passage – ‘if.’  The Torah’s message is, you can have a king if you want one, but you’ll probably be sorry as this is far from the idea form of government. 

Later (I Samuel chapter 8), we learn how the people rejected the direct rule of God as represented by the Judges, and begged for a king so they could be more like the other nations and have someone to lead them into battle.  The prophet Samuel, while warning the people of the likely outcome, reluctantly agreed.  The rest of the Bible describes how the Israelite monarchy descended into exactly the sort of corruption warned about in the Torah.


I would argue that the Bible is a republican document.  It believes in the direct rule of God and sees monarchy as a pragmatic solution designed to pander to the people, but one which will inevitably lead to bigger problems than the ones it was designed to solve.  In our context, the monarchy has no power to solve our problems, only the capacity to blind us to them.  Yet direct rule by God is also unavailable to us.  In the absence of prophets, when we all have equal potential for understanding God’s will (perhaps alternatively understood as the common good?), is democracy the best available alternative to biblical theocracy?  The fact that the people undeniably still want a king is another matter.

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