A King Without a Throne, A People Who Called God Forgotten

There is a form of prayer that sounds almost like an argument, and the rabbis were not embarrassed by it. They preserved it in the liturgy and in the midrash. It runs like this: God, if your people are suffering, your kingship is in question. You are the king of a nation in exile. What kind of king is that? If you want to be recognized as a king, you need subjects. Bring us back.

Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 13 preserves one of the most concentrated versions of this argument. The Knesset Yisrael, the collective soul of the Jewish people, is described as standing before God and saying: there is a King without a throne, a King without subjects. How long, O Lord, will you forget us?

The Audacity of the Argument

The argument is theologically aggressive in the best sense. It appeals to God's own interests rather than simply pleading for Israel's relief. The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah collection return to this rhetorical strategy repeatedly: the patriarchs, the prophets, the psalmists, and the midrashic sages all invoke the structure of the covenant as a two-way obligation. Israel suffers not because God is indifferent but because the covenant has fallen into temporary suspension. The argument for restoration appeals not to merit but to the logical requirements of the relationship itself.

A king without a throne is a reduced king. A king without subjects is a king in name only. The rabbis did not worry that this framing was presumptuous. They saw it as inherent in the nature of the covenant: God chose Israel as the covenanted people, and that choice created a mutual involvement in each other's standing. Israel's exile diminishes the visibility of God's kingship. Restoring Israel restores the full expression of divine sovereignty.

Psalm 13 opens with four consecutive questions: how long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Midrash Tehillim reads these four questions as four historical exiles, four periods in which the hiding of the divine face corresponded to a specific historical subjugation. The how long of the Psalm is not a personal cry of an individual; it is a communal cry across multiple centuries.

Samuel at the Dawn of Creation, the Hidden Thread

The Legends of the Jews connects the collective prayer of Knesset Yisrael to a deeper structure in the creation narrative. Before the world was created, according to traditions preserved in the midrashic literature, God consulted the souls of the righteous, including the souls of those who would not be born for centuries. Samuel, the prophet who would anoint Saul and David, is among the souls whose pre-existence is implied in various texts.

The tradition that the righteous were present at creation, or at least in God's plan at creation, gives the collective prayer of Knesset Yisrael a different resonance. This is not a new relationship in which Israel is asking something of a stranger. This is a relationship that was built into the architecture of the world before the world existed. The collective soul is not pleading with a remote deity; it is reminding a partner of an arrangement that predates the stars.

Bereshit Rabbah, the great midrash on Genesis compiled in fifth and sixth-century Palestine, elaborates on this through the image of the Torah as the blueprint of creation (Genesis Rabbah 1:1). The world was created for the sake of the Torah and for the sake of Israel. If Israel is in exile and Torah is inaccessible, the purpose of creation is in abeyance. The petition how long is therefore a petition about the structure of reality, not merely about the political situation of a particular people in a particular century.

The Four How Longs as Four Exile Periods

Midrash Tehillim's reading of the four questions in Psalm 13 as four exiles reflects a well-developed schema in the rabbinic literature. The four kingdoms of (Daniel 7), Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome, correspond to the four successive empires that dominated the land of Israel and the Jewish people from the sixth century BCE onward. Each empire represented a different dimension of the divine face being hidden: Babylonia destroyed the Temple; Persia maintained Jewish life in diaspora but under foreign control; Greece assaulted Jewish religious practice directly; Rome destroyed the Second Temple and exiled the rabbinic leadership.

The Zohar, composed in thirteenth-century Castile, Spain, developed a corresponding kabbalistic map in which the four exiles correspond to the four lower worlds and four levels of the divine name, each exile representing a further withdrawal of divine light until the final redemption restores the full expression of God's unity. Midrash Tehillim operates without this technical framework but with the same sense that the exile is not a single event but a structured sequence with a designed end point.

The Audacious Hope Inside the Petition

Psalm 13 ends with a startling turn from lamentation to praise: but I have trusted in your mercy, my heart shall rejoice in your salvation, I will sing to the Lord because He has dealt bountifully with me. The how long questions are four verses. The final praise is two verses. But the proportion does not represent the weight: the praise at the end is presented as already certain, as something the psalmist affirms in the present tense before the situation has changed.

This is the structure of covenantal confidence. Midrash Tehillim's Knesset Yisrael, standing before God and pointing out that a King without subjects is diminished, is not in despair. The audacity of the argument is itself a form of trust. You argue with someone who can hear you and who has made commitments that the argument can hold them to. You do not argue with an absence.

The collective soul of Israel, making its case about thrones and subjects, is simultaneously accusing and trusting, simultaneously complaining and affirming. The how long is the complaint. The psalm's ending is the affirmation. Both are forms of prayer. Midrash Tehillim preserved both as equally legitimate, equally ancient, equally part of what it means for a people to remain in relationship with a God who sometimes hides and sometimes reveals, but who, the covenant insists, never actually disappears.