So we're still trucking away with all the laws, etc, but there remain those merciful gems of interest scattered here and there.
Take, for instance, the stuff about setting up a king, talked about in chapter 17. Having spent a lot of time reading Judges over the years, I always had the impression that the whole "Israel wants to have a king" thing was a fairly new phenomenon - something that had arisen at around the time that the events in Judges were taking place.
Seems that (and for the record I'm not surprised by this) God saw it all coming. He outlined for Israel what type of king they should have, and the details are fascinating:
15 you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses, one from among your countrymen you shall set as king over yourselves; you may not put a foreigner over yourselves who is not your countryman. 16 "Moreover, he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor shall he cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, since the LORD has said to you, 'You shall never again return that way.' 17 "He shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away ; nor shall he greatly increase silver and gold for himself.
Right, so the king's got to be an Israelite. No real surprise there. However, reading on...
"nor shall he greatly increase silver and gold for himself..."
Wow. Now, it's clear from the material ways which God blessed Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and the rest that He's not really got a problem with wealth per se. Abraham was unquestionably a part of the 1%.
However, a king having excessive wealth, or even being allowed to accumulate it much at all - that poses a problem. Why? Well, since this edict is lumped together with the restraint in the wife department section, it seems fair to attribute the same rationale to it. "...or else his heart will turn away."
Wealth is not a problem for God, nor - under the right circumstances - for people under God, at least according to the Old Testament bits that we're in. Power invested in a single person over an entire country is not a problem for God - again, under the right circumstances. Money and power coming together, on the other hand, was evidently as troubling thousands of years ago as it is now.
Why is it that those who are fighting hardest against disentangling massive wealth from massive power are the same who claim to be standing up for Biblical values?
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