Explainer

Culture

Royalty

26 April 2023

4 min read

Why we make kings

As the new King's coronation approaches, Ian Bradley explores the deep roots of kingship as an answer to anarchy and disorder.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

A medieval illustration of King David being anointed by Samuel

Samuel anoints David king. An early 14th century illumination from the Vaux Psalter.

Lambeth Palace Library.

At the most solemn moment of King Charles III’s coronation on 6 May, the Westminster Abbey choir will sing Handel’s thrilling setting of words from the first chapter of the first Book of Kings:

Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king.

It provides a reminder that the anointing of the monarch with holy oil is carried out in direct imitation of a practice described in the Bible in connection with the inauguration of the kings of ancient Israel.

This is not the only link which the coronation will make with stories found in the Bible. Legend has it that the Stone of Destiny, on which Charles will be seated when he is crowned, started life as the pillow on which Jacob slept when he had a dream of the ladder leading up to heaven as described in Genesis. Jacob set the stone up as a pillar to commemorate the place where God had talked to him. Later stories identify it as the pillar beside which Abimelech was crowned king of Israel and King Josiah made his covenant with the Lord to keep his commandments and statutes.

The theme of monarchy looms large in the collection of books making up the Hebrew Bible which tells of God’s dealing with the chosen people of Israel and forms the Christian Old Testament. The word ‘king’ occurs 565 times and ‘kingdom’ 163 times. Six of the so-called historical books have the monarchy as their main subject matter, including the aptly named first and second books of Kings. The life of one particular king, David, occupies more space than that of any other figure, including the great patriarchs, Abraham and Moses.

By popular request

Kingship is presented in the early books of the Old Testament as both the popularly requested and the divinely appointed answer to the anarchy and disorder prevailing under the judges who ruled the people of Israel for the first two hundred and fifty years or so after their arrival in the promised land of Canaan around 1250 BCE. The Book of Judges emphasizes the corruption and lawlessness under this form of government, noting: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: everyone did what was right in his eyes.’

The inauguration of the Israelite monarchy, which took place around 1020 BCE, is described in the Book of Samuel. A crucial role is played by Samuel, the last of the great judges who becomes the first king-maker and presides over the coronations of both Saul and David, the first two Israelite kings. Samuel is portrayed as prophet, seer and intermediary between Yahweh/God and the people, to whom the elders of Israel come asking for ‘a king to govern us like all the nations’. Samuel puts this request to Yahweh who is initially reluctant to accede to it and tells him to spell out to the people the dangers of kingship in terms of the accretion of private wealth and military might. These warnings are ignored, however, and the people continue to insist that they must have a king ‘to govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’. When Samuel reports this to God, he is told, ‘Hearken to their voice and make them a king’.

On king making

If there is a certain initial unease in God’s mind about the desirability of kingship, the institution is subsequently given divine blessing, with the king been seen as God’s chosen one – Messiah in Hebrew, or Christos in Greek. There is a sense of partnership between Yahweh and the chosen people of Israel in the making of kings. The emphasis is on a three way covenant between God, king and people. This concept of covenant is one of the most distinctive and central features of Israelite kingship, as is the idea that the monarch mediates and represents divine rule and stands for justice, fairness and truth.

During and after the long period of exile that followed the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of Israel in 597 BCE, Jews increasingly pinned their hopes on the future coming of a new Messiah, a king from the house of David, raised up by God to deliver Jerusalem from where he would reign, restoring and re-uniting Israel and bringing about a new world order of justice and righteousness, as looked forward to and promised in the Psalms and the writings of the prophets.

The theme of kingship, so fully explored in the Old Testament, continues to figure prominently in the New Testament, although its central focus is on the kingdom of God, inaugurated and proclaimed by Jesus, with its dethroning of the rich and powerful and exaltation of the humble and meek. All four of the Gospel writers use royal titles and monarchical allusions in their descriptions of Jesus. He is identified as the anointed king, the Messiah or Christos, leading his followers to be known as Christians. From his birth in Bethlehem in the house and family of King David, and his baptism where he is identified by God as his beloved Son, to his trial and crucifixion for being ‘King of the Jews’, the royal theme runs as a clear thread through his life and death.

Jesus himself redefines the concept of kingship. This is signalled most dramatically by his choice of a donkey on which to make his entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. He deliberately opts for an animal associated with humility, humiliation even, rather than a proud charger or stallion more fitting for a king on a triumphal progress. In washing his disciples’ feet on the first Maundy Thursday, he further shows that he is, in Graham Kendrick’s memorable words The Servant King displaying meekness as well as majesty. When Pontius Pilate repeatedly asks him whether he is indeed the King of the Jews, he gives the cryptic answer 'You have said so'. Jesus never repudiates the idea of kingship but gives it a wholly new meaning of humble servanthood which has been the inspiration for Christian monarchy ever since.

Article

Attention

Culture

Digital

Easter

5 March 2025

4 min read

Let your mind wander if you want to make the most of Lent

How to escape the cold and bitter tunnels of digital distraction.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A montage image places a woman, with eyes shut and hands on hip, at the centre of blurred circle of ground and tree branches.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

According to Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French polymath: all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And now, four hundred years later, we have proof of how hard we find this.

Researchers carried out an experiment, putting several people in a room on their own with nothing else to do but sit there for fifteen minutes. A majority admitted feeling uncomfortable with little but their thoughts to console them. The experiment was repeated, only this time an instrument was placed in the room that could administer an unpleasant electric shock. In the fifteen-minute period, one in four women self-administered the shock to relieve the boredom. Two in three men did.

There is a chance we draw the wrong conclusions from social experiments because it is hard to get into the minds of others, but we can make a good guess here. Our lives are over-stimulated. To be alone in a room with our thoughts for any length of time is unusual to the point of weird. We don’t need to live like this. Our smartphones are the ‘rod and staff which comfort us’. Any spare moment can be spent using TikTok, Instagram or Spotify.

As people age, they tend to think the world is losing its attention span without realising that focus declines as we grow older. But something seems to have changed in the last two decades. A whole new digital architecture has been designed that wasn’t there. It creates the buzz of the city but has gone up around us like skyscrapers, creating cold shadows and bitter wind tunnels of anger and distraction that block out the warmth.

This new online city is intentionally designed to keep our attention; to prevent us from doing anything offline. And it is working. Between 2010 and 2020, globally, we consumed twenty times more information. This is a colossal increase for our brains to cope with in the blink of an evolutionary eye. Our minds have become less like the cool, white minimalist interior design people aspire to in life and more like the junk garage where broken and pointless stuff is tipped.

According to Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, we tend to blame ourselves for this state of affairs. After all, if we tell others our smartphone is distracting us, the answer we get back is to turn it off. While we can take steps like this, Hari says it lets tech companies off the hook. As with shopaholics, there is individual responsibility, but there is also the edifice of consumer capitalism designed to make us buy more stuff or absorb more information.

Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When we consider what it means to follow Jesus today, we often do not appreciate what tech is doing to us. The gains are obvious – having the world at our fingertips, being able to talk to family and friends in an instant – but the losses remain obscure. How does digital distraction affect reading of the Bible and a commitment to prayer? There is little research on this, but we may be giving God less devoted attention than before. In flitting from one source to another, like a fly on a hot summer’s day, we do not stay long enough in one place to discover if God is waiting for us there.

Prompts from God frequently emerge outside the thinking of the Church. A cohort of Silicon Valley tech wizards has come up with the idea of the digital Sabbath, where people spend one day a week unplugged. Though describing themselves as not especially religious, their manifesto practically drowns in religious tradition. They advise people to:

Avoid technology
Connect with loved ones
Nurture your health
Get outside
Avoid commerce
Light candles
Drink wine
Eat bread
Find silence
Give back

It is sabbath re-imagined for the digital era.

Johann Hari also lists some practical actions that can be taken, like staying on task and limiting exposure to social media in particular as it is shown to be bad for mental health in large doses. We should also allow our minds to wander. This does not contradict the argument about not losing focus. Mind wandering is, paradoxically, a form of attention. It is the space where we solve the puzzles of our lives, joining dots we had missed, colouring in a picture to bring it alive.

When the prophet Elijah meets with God at Mount Horeb, there is first a strong wind, then a powerful earthquake and lastly a raging fire. But God does not reveal himself in these gripping phenomena. He is to be found in the sheer silence which follows; in the whisper of a voice.

The sheer silence today is broken by the familiar buzz of a news feed or social media update – or the shock of an electric current. The moment we move out of earshot of the faint audio of the divine.

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