He Will Take

The pretext was genuine.

Samuel’s sons took bribes. Everyone knew it.

Ramah, near the end of the age of the judges. Samuel is old now. For years he has ridden the circuit of Israel, Bethel to Gilgal to Mizpah and home again, judging the people in the old manner, close enough to see faces and far enough from the palace to have no use for one. He has poured out his life in the work. Then, in the twilight of an extraordinary career, he commits the most ordinary administrative error available to a good man.

He appoints his sons.

Joel and Abijah are installed as judges in Beersheba, and Scripture files its report with three clipped charges: they turned aside after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice. Set that beside the specification Jethro dictated in the wilderness. Choose able men who fear God, men of truth, men who hate dishonest gain. Joel and Abijah do not merely fall below the standard. They work through it backward. The men appointed to keep money out of judgment have discovered that judgment is an excellent place to make money.

The irony reaches further into Samuel’s own history. Israel has seen this failure before, in the same office, one generation earlier. Samuel’s predecessor, Eli, grew old at Shiloh while his sons ran the sanctuary as a concession stand. Hophni and Phinehas took the best of the offerings by force. The procedure survives in Scripture down to the cutlery: a servant arrived with a three-pronged fork, plunged it into the pot, and whatever came up belonged, by the theology of the fork, to the priests. If the worshiper objected that the fat must first be burned to God, the meat was taken anyway.

Before Israel had a king, the verb was already practising on the priesthood.

Eli knew what his sons were doing. He grieved, protested, and did not stop them. The child Samuel, sleeping in that sanctuary, received his first word from God as a sentence upon Eli’s house: judgment was coming because Eli knew the evil and failed to restrain it.

Samuel heard the message as a boy. He delivered it trembling. He watched it come true.

Then he grew old and appointed his own sons.

Good men do not usually repeat the mistakes of strangers. They repeat the mistakes of their fathers, teachers, and heroes, the ones whose failures arrived wrapped in explanations they had learned to accept. The elders of Israel have now watched two consecutive administrations rot in their sons. Eli’s boys corrupted worship. Samuel’s boys corrupted justice. Once may be a scandal. Twice begins to feel like a theory.

Nothing fertilizes the appetite for centralization quite like a scandal.

The elders come to Ramah together, which means the meeting has already happened somewhere else. They have compared grievances, agreed upon language, and selected the old prophet’s least defensible weakness. Nobody is criticizing Samuel’s years of service. This is about sustainability. About continuity of governance. About aligning Israel’s judicial framework with regional best practice. Somewhere in the hills that meeting happened, and the minutes would show that the word “crown” arose organically. Their speech belongs to the permanent political genre that begins with a complaint no honest man can deny and ends with a solution nobody was discussing ten minutes earlier.

“You have grown old,” they tell Samuel, “and your sons do not walk in your ways.”

True.

“Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.”

There is the leap. Samuel is old. His sons are crooked. Therefore every household from Dan to Beersheba requires a throne above it.

The elders do not ask for Joel and Abijah to be removed. They do not demand restitution for the men whose cases were sold. They do not cite Jethro and insist upon replacements who fear God, speak truth, and cannot be bought. The building has a rotten beam; they propose a tower.

The failure of the near becomes the mandate of the far.

This argument will recur with extraordinary durability. A family fails, therefore the state must parent. A local court fails, therefore judgment must migrate to the capital. A school fails, therefore instruction must be standardized. The wounded institution is not repaired. Its task is transferred upward, where failure will be more distant, more expensive, and admirably uniform.

The strong center is nearly always built from the rubble of smaller things, sometimes things it neglected, sometimes things it weakened, sometimes things it merely caught failing in public. The grievance is genuine. The anger is deserved. The wave gathers force from real wounds. Yet when it breaks and recedes, what remains on the ground is seldom the repaired family, court, or town.

It is a larger throne.

But the phrase carrying the deepest charge is not “appoint us a king.”

It is “like all the nations.”

Israel has been looking across the fence.

And there, on the greener grass, stand the royal compounds: chariots, banners, permanent armies, monumental staircases, and kings who appear at festivals twenty feet above everyone else. The nations have courts that do not travel dusty circuits. Their rulers do not sit beneath trees listening to farmers reconstruct the movements of an ox. Their authority does not taper away through judges, elders, clans, and fathers’ houses until some ordinary man is left with the dangerous idea that part of life belongs to him.

The nations have scale, polish, cavalry.

They have someone to look up at.

Israel wants one.

Samuel is grieved and takes the matter to God. The answer resets the whole scene. “They have not rejected you,” God says. “They have rejected Me from being king over them.”

The proposal is not merely administrative.

It is an abdication with minutes attached.

Israel already has a King. He broke Pharaoh, divided the sea, gave the law, allotted the land, guarded the boundary stones, and distributed authority through households, elders, judges, tribes, and priests. The throne is not empty. The people are asking to exchange an invisible King who limits power for a visible one who displays it.

They want something with a sword.

God adds that this is what Israel has done since Egypt. The material changes, but the instinct remains. Once it was a calf plated in gold. Now it is a tall man plated in armor. Idolatry does not always kneel before a statue. Sometimes it forms a delegation, identifies an administrative deficiency, and requests improved national coordination.

The argument must slow here, because the easy reading is wrong. The sin was not simply that Israel wanted a king.

Israel needed a king.

The book of Judges had been making the case for generations. Its darkest episodes conclude with the same exhausted line: there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes. The refrain lies beneath idolatry, sexual atrocity, tribal vengeance, and civil war like a coroner’s verdict copied once too often to require fresh wording.

Judges is not a travel brochure for the kingless idyll. It is a record of distributed authority losing its moral roof. Household, clan, tribe, judge: the structures remain, but without covenant faithfulness they curve inward and begin feeding upon one another. Localism does not baptize the local. A village may be wicked at village scale. A father who tyrannizes five people is still a tyrant, merely one with lower overhead.

Anarchy is not subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity requires both real lower authority and a real law above every authority. Remove the lower institutions and the center consumes them. Remove the higher law and the lower institutions consume one another. Biblical order is not a heap of small sovereignties, each congratulating itself for being close to the ground. It is an ordered plurality under God.

The architecture was never intended to remain headless. The proof had been sitting in Israel’s law for centuries.

God had anticipated Ramah almost word for word.

“When you enter the land,” Deuteronomy says, “and you say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations who are around me’…”

There it is. The elders’ phrase, waiting for them in the Torah. God hears the future request long before it is spoken, as a father sees a proposal taking shape on the face of a child who believes he has concealed the entire operation.

God is not surprised by monarchy.

He writes its constitution.

The king must be one whom the Lord chooses. He must come from among his countrymen, a brother within the covenant rather than a foreign specimen imported for his advanced theories of command. Then come three prohibitions aimed directly at the three appetites by which ancient kings became something larger than kings.

He must not multiply horses.

He must not multiply wives.

He must not greatly multiply silver and gold.

Army. Harem. Treasury.

The ancient state in three departments.

The prohibition on horses is not divine hostility toward equestrian elegance. The horse was the engine of imperial scale. Chariots needed horses; horses needed stables, grooms, breeders, imported stock, roads, grain, taxation, officers, repair shops, and an administrative population dedicated to keeping the wheels attached. The war machine did not remain picturesquely in the royal courtyard. It reached backward through the kingdom, found the households, and began eating sons.

Nor may the king send the people back to Egypt for horses. Egypt is not merely a country on the map. It is the political system Israel escaped: concentrated power, permanent labor demands, state-directed production, the human household converted into inventory. The king may not rebuild Pharaoh’s machinery one imported stallion at a time.

He must not multiply wives, lest his heart turn away. Royal marriage in the ancient world was diplomacy conducted through bedrooms. Every princess arrived with a treaty, a commercial interest, a god, a priesthood, and a domestic establishment permanently unimpressed by local standards. The king who collected women collected nations inside his own house and then discovered, with astonishment, that the nations had begun redecorating the sanctuary.

Nor may he greatly multiply silver and gold. Wealth itself is not condemned; concentration is feared. A treasury large enough to solve every crisis eventually becomes large enough to require crises worthy of it. Gold supplies officers, creditors, monuments, clients, armies, and the useful royal intuition that any activity beyond the palace’s control is being conducted inefficiently.

Treasure also develops an appetite independent of purpose. The first levy pays for a danger. The second maintains the office created to meet the danger. The third pays the officials who calculate why the levy must continue after the danger has passed.

God places the fences exactly where kings grow.

Then comes the king’s crowning obligation, perhaps the strangest inauguration requirement ever written. When he sits upon the throne, he must make for himself a copy of the law in the presence of the priests. He must keep it beside him and read it all the days of his life, so that he learns to fear the Lord and so that his heart will not be lifted above his countrymen.

The king’s first official act is homework.

No conquest. No census. No commemorative coin bearing the royal profile in a morally improving pose. No procession while palace artists produce authorized impressions of the crowd’s enthusiasm.

No. He copies.

Line after line, command after command, boundary after boundary. Every statute that governs the farmer passes beneath the king’s hand, followed by every statute that restrains the king. Before he administers the law, he must feel its length. Before he demands obedience, he must practise it. Then he must read his own handwriting, every day, until he dies.

A king who copies the law sits beneath it.

The law even names the occupational disease it is designed to prevent: his heart must not be lifted above his countrymen. The crown produces an optical illusion. It raises one man physically, surrounds him with ceremony, sends everyone else backward out of the room, and presently convinces him that vertical distance is a special moral category.

Deuteronomy punctures the illusion. The king remains a brother. His office is distinct. His burden is heavier. His sword is real. But the farmer before him is still a countryman, not raw material wearing sandals.

The title Deuteronomy itself preserves the oddity. The Greek rendering of “a copy of this law” supplied the name by which the fifth book of Moses came to be known.

An entire book of Scripture carries the memory of the king’s handwriting assignment.

So the design existed: a ruler chosen under God, taken from among the people, fenced off from military, marital, and financial accumulation, required to copy a law he did not write, and warned each morning not to imagine himself superior to Naboth.

That king was available at Ramah.

The elders never mention him.

They do not ask for the Deuteronomy king. They order from the catalogue. They want visible height, permanent force, national resemblance. They want someone who will judge them, march before them, and fight their battles in a manner recognizable to visiting dignitaries.

God diagnoses the request and does something more frightening than refusing it.

He grants it.

There are few judgments in Scripture more unnerving than God saying yes.

Samuel first reads the warning into the record. What follows is unlike any other founding charter in political history. It is an inaugural address written as a warning label, a constitution delivered entirely in the future tense of repossession.

“This will be the procedure of the king who will reign over you.”

Then the invoice begins, every line hanging from one verb.

Take.

He will take your sons and place them in his chariots and among his horsemen. He will appoint commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties. Some will plow his ground and reap his harvest. Others will manufacture his weapons and the equipment of his chariots.

Thousands and fifties.

The king does not invent a new org chart.

He confiscates the old one.

Jethro’s chart distributed judgment downward so men could be served near the level of faces. The monarchy reverses the current. Thousands and fifties no longer describe layers of responsibility through which hard cases rise while ordinary life remains below. They describe units of manpower available to the palace.

The chart remains. The suction changes direction.

The judge of fifty stood among his people and carried their difficulties upward when necessary. The commander of fifty stands above conscripted sons and carries royal purposes downward. The old structure was a filter. The new one is a pump.

Samuel continues. The king will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. The skills of the household migrate to the royal establishment. The daughters who would have strengthened families, marriages, and local economies will now scent the palace, glaze its pastries, prepare its banquets, and enlarge the radius within which the king experiences comfort.

Then he will take your fields, vineyards, and olive groves, the best of them, and give them to his servants.

The best of them.

The state rarely begins by coveting the scrubland.

At Ramah the vineyard is one clause in the tariff. At Jezreel, generations later, it will become a palace view, a sulking king, a forged letter, two purchased witnesses, and Naboth beneath a pile of stones. Nobody who heard Samuel could later say that the monarchy had exceeded the quotation. The vineyard was listed from the beginning.

The king will take a tenth of the seed and vineyards and give it to his officers and servants. A tenth. The first royal assessment arrives at apparent parity with God, as though sanctuary and palace have submitted rival claims upon the same harvest.

But the similarity is cosmetic. God’s tithe sustains worship, priesthood, feasting, and the vulnerable within covenant law. The king’s tenth sustains the machinery that takes the tenth. It pays officers who administer fields taken from one household and transferred to officers from another.

The arrangement develops a certain circular elegance.

The taking pays for the takers.

He will take servants, the best young men, the donkeys, and a tenth of the flocks. Sons, daughters, fields, vineyards, grain, labor, animals. Each item moves in the same direction, away from the household and toward the palace.

Then comes the terminal line: “You yourselves will become his servants.”

The list has been travelling toward that sentence all along. First the king takes what the household produces. Then he takes the means of production. Then the people who perform the work. At last the distinction between what you possess and what you are collapses.

You yourselves.

Samuel is not complaining about an excessive tax rate. He is describing a transfer of agency. The household does not merely surrender produce. It ceases to stand as an acting institution and becomes a feeder mechanism for another man’s house.

Place Samuel beside Deuteronomy and the design appears in negative. Deuteronomy says the king must not multiply horses; Samuel says your sons will run before his chariots. Deuteronomy says he must not greatly multiply wealth; Samuel lists fields, harvests, flocks, servants, and the best of everything. Deuteronomy says his heart must not rise above his countrymen; Samuel says his countrymen will become his servants.

Every “take” crosses a fence already standing in the law.

The warning is not new information. It is the photographic negative of a constitution Israel already owns, held up before a nation that has grown tired of looking at the picture.

Samuel then seals the warning. A day will come when the people cry out because of the king they have chosen, but the Lord will not answer them.

The Jubilee had a trumpet.

This arrangement has none.

That sentence does not mean God will never again show mercy to Israel. He will hear repentance, send deliverers, grant good kings, and preserve the people despite the monarchy. Samuel is establishing something more severe: political choices build structures that outlive the emotion in which they were made.

The people are not children placing a paper crown on a harmless figure. They are agents transferring authority.

Adults purchase things.

The elders hear the tariff: sons, daughters, fields, vineyards, tenths, servitude. They hear that the final door locks from the inside. Scripture records their answer with one word fit to be carved over every parliament, revolutionary council, emergency committee, and late-night cabinet meeting in human history.

Nevertheless.

“No,” the people say, “but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

Three wants, each already supplied.

They want a king to judge them. Israel has judges throughout the land. The failure at Beersheba is real, but the law contains the repair. Remove the corrupt men. Demand restitution. Appoint truthful replacements. Instead, the elders treat the corruption of two sons as proof that judgment should be gathered permanently into one family.

They want a king to go before them and fight their battles. Israel’s national memory is a museum of wars won by Someone they could not see. Egypt broken without a Hebrew army. The sea opened. Jericho collapsed. Midian scattered. Again and again God used small forces, frightened men, left-handed assassins, pitchers, torches, tent pegs, and the occasional woman dropping a millstone from a wall, as if determined to leave military analysts with nothing presentable for the symposium.

Israel does not lack a Warrior.

Her Warrior simply refuses to pose.

Providence is difficult to parade. It does not sit well for portraits, and one cannot reliably arrange it at the head of a procession while foreign ambassadors are watching.

Then comes the true desire: “that we also may be like all the nations.”

There it is, the want beneath the wants.

Israel is tired of peculiarity. Tired of the invisible throne, the distributed judges, the military forces assembled only when needed, the embarrassing dependence upon faithfulness rather than robust political structures. The nations have capitals. Their kings do not wait upon prophets. Their policies are not interrupted by jubilees, family deeds, boundary stones, and farmers who believe the word “no” survives contact with a crown.

Israel wants to become normal.

The price of becoming like the nations is that one receives what the nations have.

All of it.

God tells Samuel to listen to their voice and appoint a king. Judgment sometimes arrives not as fire, famine, or invasion, but as the delivery of the thing requested.

The first shipment is exquisitely to specification.

Saul, son of Kish, a wealthy Benjamite. Handsome. Impressive. Taller than every other man in Israel from the shoulders upward.

The text reports this with a straight face, which makes the comedy merciless. Israel ordered the kind of king admired by nations, and the first requirement of national kingship is that the king resemble one from a distance.

Saul photographs beautifully from below.

There he stands, the catalogue item: lineage, wealth, face, stature, presence. A king visible across the crowd. No need to ask whether the Lord is among them. Everyone can see Saul’s head.

Inside the magnificent container is a man afflicted by the ordinary contents of men: impatience, appetite, insecurity, vanity, fear. Nothing demonic. That is the point. The office is occupied by a sinner, not a monster, and Deuteronomy had fenced the office precisely because ordinary sinners become extraordinary dangers when given concentrated reach.

The sermons rarely ask what became of the royal homework. Deuteronomy’s scroll waited for its first student, yet the narrative contains no trace of Saul copying a line. The word of God reaches him as weather reaches a man indoors: through reports, at intervals, usually when it has become inconvenient.

For an entire reign, the throne and the scroll inhabit the same small country and never appear to meet.

At Gilgal, Saul cannot wait for Samuel. Seven days prove too long while soldiers scatter and the king’s standing in the polls evaporates by the hour. He enters the priestly office and offers the sacrifice himself. His sin is not mere impatience. He cannot endure a boundary when obedience makes him appear weak.

At Amalek, the best livestock proves too valuable to destroy. Saul later admits that he feared the people and listened to their voice. The tallest man in Israel is governed by the crowd below his shoulders.

Near the end, after Samuel has died and God no longer answers him, Saul disguises himself, rides at night to Endor, and pays a medium, practitioner of a trade the king himself had outlawed, to summon the prophet from the dead.

The king who would not copy the scroll hires a séance to hear it one last time.

Samuel, disturbed from his rest, gives him the word of God again, free of charge. It is the same word as before: the kingdom is torn from you.

Some men will accept revelation only after it becomes a ghost story.

The alternative had been standing in a sheepfold near Bethlehem.

When God rejects Saul, He speaks of a man after His own heart. Then He sends Samuel to Jesse’s house and arranges the selection as a comedy at the expense of human sight.

Samuel is a seer. Seeing is his profession, title, and trade. Eliab enters, tall and imposing, and the seer takes one look at him and sees Ramah all over again. Surely the Lord’s anointed stands here. Broad shoulders. Commanding presence. The official portrait has begun painting itself.

God interrupts: do not look at his appearance or the height of his stature. Man looks at the outward appearance. The Lord looks at the heart.

The professional seer has just been informed that he cannot see.

Seven sons pass. Seven refusals. Finally Samuel asks whether these are all the children. Jesse remembers the youngest, outside with the sheep. The elders, sacrifice, family, and prophet wait while someone goes to fetch the boy nobody thought worth inviting.

The future of the monarchy is in a field smelling of sheep, and the feast cannot begin without him.

Waiting would have brought David.

Refusing to wait purchased Saul first, at full tariff.

David comes to the throne already carrying the law in his mouth. He sings the statutes. He calls the law perfect, sweeter than honey, more desirable than gold. Israel’s second king is her first great songwriter, and the songs are about the constitution. For one reign, the crown sits beneath the word and is glad to be there.

It still does not make the heart safe.

David takes another man’s wife.

The verb returns.

The shepherd who once refused Saul’s armor now employs royal sight, royal messengers, royal secrecy, and royal command to reach into Uriah’s home. He sees Bathsheba, summons her, attempts concealment, arranges her husband’s death, and absorbs the widow into the palace.

The machinery differs from Jezebel’s.

The appetite recognizes it.

Nathan comes with a story about a rich man with many flocks who takes the poor man’s single beloved lamb. David burns with anger until the prophet turns the parable upon him.

“You are the man.”

The king who loved the law still required someone brave enough to read it back to him. This is the crucial difference between David and Saul, not that one sinned and the other did not. When the word came, one tore his heart.

The other consulted a ghost.

After David, stop narrating reigns and open Samuel’s invoice. The monarchy begins to read like a set of receipts.

He will take your sons.

Paid.

Solomon conscripts thirty thousand Israelites for the timber gangs of Lebanon, one month away, two months home, the rotation of household life adjusted to feed the glory of the capital. Before Solomon, Saul’s own account had been settled on Mount Gilboa, where three of his sons died beside him in one afternoon.

He will take your fields and vineyards, the best of them.

Paid.

At Jezreel, with forged letters, purchased witnesses, and a farmer beneath stones.

He will take tenths, servants, livestock, the best of everything.

Paid with interest.

Solomon multiplies horses, and the historian mentions Egypt, the one supplier Deuteronomy specifically prohibited. The trade becomes regular enough to acquire a price list: so many shekels for a chariot, so many for a horse. The royal violation has progressed from temptation to procurement schedule.

Ships return with gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. Once a treasury has secured everything necessary, it begins collecting the unnecessary. Silver becomes so common in Jerusalem that the chronicler compares it with stones, which is precisely the kind of economic report produced by a capital whose labor gangs are working somewhere beyond the view.

Then the wives: seven hundred, with three hundred concubines added as a footnote. They turn Solomon’s heart exactly as the statute said they would. The wisest man on earth ends by constructing shrines to Chemosh and Molech within sight of the temple he built for the Lord, satisfying the religions imported through women the law told him not to collect.

Horses. Wives. Gold.

The fences stood exactly where kings fall, and Israel’s wisest king managed all three.

Then comes the final clause: you yourselves will become his servants.

Paid at Shechem, of all places, the valley where Israel once stood on two mountains and cursed the man who moved a boundary stone. There the people approach Solomon’s son and ask relief from the heavy yoke. Rehoboam consults two groups. The old men advise restraint. The young men, raised inside the court and therefore specialists in the emotional needs of royal power, recommend that he demonstrate strength.

His father used whips.

He will use scorpions.

The kingdom splits in two before the meeting ends.

Samuel’s invoice has been paid in full, with interest, by the grandchildren of the men who said, “Nevertheless.”

The scroll has its own biography, and it may be the saddest one in the monarchy. Assigned at Sinai as the king’s first duty. Absent from Saul’s reign. Sung under David. Ignored beneath Solomon’s abundance.

Then, generations later, the book of the law turns up during repairs to the temple.

Turns up.

Hilkiah the priest is supervising renovations when he finds it, as a man might find an old deed behind a cabinet. He sends word to young King Josiah: “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.”

Israel had lost the constitution inside the church.

The scroll every king was required to copy had vanished in the one building dedicated to remembering it. Its recovery was an accidental benefit of maintenance. The king hears the law, one lifetime’s assignment delivered at once, and rips his robes.

There is the monarchy in one administrative detail: the hand that stops copying begins taking, and the nation that stops reading eventually forgets where it put the law.

Samuel had seen it in outline and read it into the record. Yet his farewell to Israel deserves its own place. The old judge stands before the nation that has traded him for a handsome man in armor and declares that he will continue praying for them. “Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you.”

The era’s most faithful public servant spends retirement interceding for the customers.

The biblical objection, then, is not that civil government possesses no right to command, tax, judge, punish, or wage lawful war. The magistrate has real work and real authority. The problem is that the ruler’s office is bounded while the appetite of rule is not. Power develops a theology of its own. Whatever it can reach, it eventually describes as belonging to its jurisdiction. Whatever remains beyond reach becomes a problem requiring study.

Israel retained one great mercy under the kings it demanded: accountability with a heavenly warrant. Nathan could enter David’s palace. Elijah could stand in Ahab’s vineyard. Neither came with an army, election result, or official summons. They came because the law stood above the crown in the nation’s conscience.

A people whose conscience is marked by heaven always leaves a door through which the man with the parable may enter.

When heaven no longer marks the conscience, the prophet’s office is abolished first.

The audit stops.

Subsidiarity does not deny the crown. It denies the crown the whole head.

The king has work proper to a king: public justice, national defense, judgment against evildoers, protection of the covenant order. He does not become father, priest, teacher, landholder, employer, and master of every household because some fathers, priests, teachers, and landholders fail.

Watch the exchange rate at Ramah. Two sons fail as judges, and the remedy is a king entitled to everybody’s sons. The failure of one office becomes the warrant for an office capable of swallowing all the others.

They seek protection from two bad heirs and receive a dynasty.

They seek relief from bribery and receive taxation.

They seek judgment and receive conscription.

They ask for someone to fight their battles and discover that his first requirement is their children on the front lines.

The appetite does not die with the dynasties. It changes clothes. The throne becomes a committee table. The crown becomes a department. The chariot becomes the registry, the planning bureau, the clinic, the school, the housing block, the agricultural collective. The ancient king claimed blood and divine favor. The modern ruler claims expertise and historical necessity.

The verb survives translation.

Twenty-nine centuries after Ramah, in a city on the Moskva, efficient men would sit beneath electric lights and inherit Samuel’s question in modern form. The king had taken sons, daughters, fields, vineyards, flocks, labor, and tenths. Political appetite had been followed nearly to the threshold of the home.

Nearly.

The men in Moscow would ask why it had stopped there.

Why take the family’s sons when one might take childhood?

Why take the field when one might abolish inheritance?

Why take the household’s produce when one might reorganize the household?

Why tax ancient loyalties when one might manufacture new ones?

Samuel’s king took from the family.

The new state would take the family.