The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition

By Yoram Hazony

Civil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law.

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The point is that the ruler, blinded by his habit of being obeyed, may at times be unable to see that his course is suicidally misguided, even when this fact is readily apparent to any jackass. In such a case it is the right and duty of even the humblest of servants to disobey and do what is right, saving the ruler from the consequences of his own policies.

This suspicion of ruling authority pervades the thought of the Jews even once they have entered Canaan and have no choice but to wield political power themselves. The first effort on the part of the Jews to erect a centralized state fails because Gideon, whom they have chosen to be king, refuses to take part, declaring: “I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you. The Eternal will rule over you.”⁶⁰ Only after further generations of civil war and humiliation on the battlefield does the determination of the Jews to establish a strong centralized state such as those of other nations reach an irresistible pitch, and even then the people find themselves opposed by the prophet Samuel, who objects to the state on account of the oppression that will inevitably follow such an accumulation of power:

And Samuel told all the words of the Eternal to the people who asked him for a king. And he said: “This will be the custom of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and post them for himself on his chariots. And he will appoint officers over battalions and officers over platoons, and he will set them to plowing his ground and reaping his harvest, and to making his instruments of war. And he will take your daughters for perfumers and cooks and bakers. And he will take your fields and your vineyards and your best orchards and give them to his servants. And he will take a tenth of your seed and of your vineyards to give to his officers and to his servants. And he will take your male and female servants and your best young men and your asses and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep, and you will be his servants. And you will cry out on that day because of the king that you have placed over you; and the Eternal will not hear you on that day.” But the people refused to heed Samuel’s warning, and they said: “No, we will have a king over us so we may be like other nations: That our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”⁶¹

The book of Samuel’s account of the founding of the first Jewish state amounts to a “social contract” theory like that of Hobbes or Locke, but one which posits that government, an institution inevitably built on expropriation and coercion, is inherently flawed: Samuel warns that despite the benefits that the state may offer in the form of law enforcement and victory on the battlefield, it is perforce an instrument of coercion whose aggrandizement and success will be at the people’s expense—just as was the case under the imperial states they had fled.

Although the Jews ignore Samuel’s warning, crowning Saul as the first king of Israel, and even securing divine acquiescence for the erection of a Jewish kingdom, the spirit of Samuel’s critique is accepted nonetheless. From the outset, the Jewish tradition had insisted that the ruler is no god, and that his absolute rule is unacceptable. The books of Moses themselves had laid down laws specific to the Jewish king, limiting his right to amass wealth and luxury, and insisting that the duration of his rule was dependent on his adherence to God’s law:

But he should not acquire many horses for himself.... Neither should he acquire many wives that his heart not turn away, nor should he acquire great quantities of silver and gold. And when he has ascended to the throne of the kingdom, he should make a copy of this Teaching in a book, from that before the Levite priests. It should be with him, and he should read from it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Eternal, his God, to keep all the words of this Teaching and observe these statutes, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, and that he not turn away from the commandments, to the right or to the left, in order that he may prolong his days over his kingdom, he and his children in Israel.⁶²

And in subsequent accounts, the narrative repeatedly emphasizes the Jews’ rejection of the laws of their own kings when they deem them unjust. In one case, Saul orders his men to fast in preparation for battle with the Philistines and threatens death should anyone disobey. When his son Jonathan is found to have violated his decree, Saul orders him executed for transgressing his law, but the king’s men reject his authority to issue such an order:

And Jonathan told him, saying: “I tasted some honey with the end of the staff that was in my hand; therefore I must die.” And Saul said: “So will God do and more. For you will surely die, Jonathan.” And the people said to Saul: “Is Jonathan to die who has brought this great victory to Israel? Absolutely not. As God lives, no hair will fall from his head, for he has done God’s work today.” So the people rescued Jonathan, and he was not killed.⁶³

Similarly, when Saul determines to have David killed, it is Jonathan and his sister Mihal who resist the dictates of their father in order to save his life.⁶⁴ Thus Saul may have been king, but it was in a very different sense from the kings of other nations: The lives of his subjects were never his playthings, and if his laws were not just, he would quickly find his own people lined up to oppose him.

Indeed in the biblical histories, it is precisely the inability of the Jewish kings to accept the limits of their own authority which is recorded as the cause of the downfall of the Jewish state. When Solomon succeeds David, it is once again “the people,” led by the prophet Nathan, who are recorded as accepting Solomon’s rule over that of his rivals;⁶⁵ a Jewish king cannot hope for greater legitimacy than to begin his rule with the support of the prophet and the people. Yet Solomon’s worldliness and wisdom translate into a fluency in the ways of the despotic ancient world: He wins diplomatic success by keeping a harem of a thousand women, might through accumulating tens of thousands of horses, prestige by drinking from gold and being seated on gold, and becomes a great builder at the expense of imposing a labor tax on his subjects as did other oriental kings⁶⁶—in short, violating nearly every constraint on Jewish kingship brought down in the books of Moses. In the end he succumbs to the political temptation to honor foreign gods as well, and right gives way to corruption in the Jewish kingdom as everywhere else.⁶⁷ And when the people come to Solomon’s son, Rehav’am, to implore him to ease the burden that the state has imposed on them, he answers with the distorted voice of the terror state: “My father burdened you with a heavy yoke, and I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”⁶⁸ At this rejection of the Jewish concept of limited kingship, the narrative reports how the people kill the king’s tax collector and reject his reign, creating a breach in Solomon’s state which robs it forever of the splendor and power it has attained.

But disobedience before unjust authority was not just a fact of the early Jewish kings’ relations with their people. It was an institution of Jewish life throughout the period of the Jewish kings: The institution of prophecy, whose role was to declare the message of the deity in opposition to the actions of the king, his officers and the official priesthood. In this way, by publicly denouncing that which other nations endured in silence, the prophets sought to maintain—despite the establishment of a Jewish state—that freedom of unintimidated conscience, and that heritage of moral resistance, which had been bequeathed to the Jews by their shepherd forefathers.

Thus Isaiah speaks of a time when the devastation of the land will reduce the people once again to the “butter and honey” of life as a herdsman, and similar images are used by Jeremiah and Hosea—sometimes as longings and sometimes as threats.⁶⁹ Yet far from advocating an actual return to a life in tents, what the prophets sought was to inclucate an understanding of the truth in Samuel’s teaching concerning the state: That the power of the state draws its legitimacy only from the good that it does; if its outcome is evil, men can and should live without it.

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