Judges, Samuel, Kings–Principles of Authority for Father’s Day

For Father’s Day, productive and insightful way to read the transition from Judges to Kings, led by Samuel,  is to read it as a change from one mode of authority to another.  This is not a strain on  the text–that is basically what it is about.

My own summary is that the rule of the judges was lighter and looser.  It required Israel to obey without compulsion, which in practice meant going to the  judges to resolve disputes and voluntarily flocking to the judge’s banner when there was an invasion.  Judges were selected by charisma and competence, since following them was a choice.  This worked really well when it worked.

But by Eli and certainly Samuel’s day, the system no longer worked.    Eli and Samuel had lots of prestige but weren’t war leaders or really even leaders at all (not even in their own households).  My personal speculation why is that they didn’t try because they knew they would be ignored.  What isn’t speculation is that the people clamoring for a King gave the shirker problem as their reason for wanting one.  They said  they needed someone to force the hold-outs  and shirkers to go to war, and I think we should believe them.

So the evils of a monarchy that the Lord tells the people through Samuel, were also the goods.  Conscription and taxes allowed for the overbearing tyrannical rulers we see later (and even Saul and David had their lapses) but also meant that Israel was no longer hamstrung by coordination problems and defections in the snake-pit of Middle Eastern state violence.  Notice that this wasn’t just a solution for the shirkers.  Even the people who wanted to rally like in the days of old suffered from a lack of recognized leader–because if you rallied and no one else did, at very best you wasted a bunch of time and effort for nothing, traveling to the gathering place and sitting around and then futilely going back home again–and at worst you would get crushed by the invaders–so likely even the people who wanted to help sat around waiting to see if anyone else would.

Let’s liken this to ourselves.

In a very loose sense, the Church and the Saints are trying to do the reverse transition right now.   We are moving from a system where we have a number of rules and spelled out commitments imposed from above–skirt length, home teaching, three hour block, years’ supply–backed by excommunication and social pressure; to a system where there are much fewer explicit requirements and we are supposed to aspire to higher goodness on our own .  Instead of a rule giving us a mediocre average of morality, and like all rules only clumsily fitting the actual moral principles, we are now free to innovate to go beyond the average.

My impression is that for me personally and the Saints generally are completely failing the transition.  For most of us, ministering hasn’t become more sacred than the old hometeaching was.  My extra hour on Sunday isn’t an extra hour of communion with heaven.  We have treated all these changes as relaxations of rigor instead of as a regime of self-reliance.

And so like ancient Israel we are beset by Philistines and deserve to be.  If we ever take back the ark and restore the sacred places, it will not be our own doing.