Israel Wanted a King Because They Wanted Idols
The request for a king in 1 Samuel has always seemed like a simple political demand. Rabbi Nehorai read it as a confession of something far darker, a yearning to abandon God entirely disguised as a call for national order.
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Most readers of 1 Samuel assume the people wanted a king for practical reasons. They wanted a general. They wanted security. They wanted to look like the surrounding nations. Rabbi Nehorai, a tanna of the second century CE, read the same verse and arrived at a completely different conclusion. He thought they wanted a king so they could worship idols without anyone stopping them.
Sifrei Devarim, the tannaitic midrash on Deuteronomy compiled in Roman Palestine, preserves his reading in its commentary on the laws of kingship. The text in (1 Samuel 8:20) is the people's explicit request: "And we, too, will be like all the nations, and our king will judge us and go out before us, and fight our wars." To a surface reader, this is the vocabulary of governance. Rabbi Nehorai heard the vocabulary of apostasy.
What Does It Mean to Be Like All the Nations?
The phrase "like all the nations" appears throughout the Torah. Almost never is it a compliment. When the prophets accuse Israel of behaving like the nations, they mean one thing: idolatry. The nations worshipped wood and stone. Israel was supposed to be different. When the people told Samuel they wanted to be like all the nations, Rabbi Nehorai heard them saying they wanted what the nations had, not just kings, but the whole package: the military, the court, and the gods that came with it.
This is a devastating reading. It means the request for a king was not primarily political. It was religious. The people were not asking for an institution. They were asking for permission to be ordinary, to shed the burden of covenant, to join the world on its own terms instead of God's.
Samuel's Grief and God's Permission
Samuel was devastated by the request. The text says he took it personally. Throughout his life, Samuel had operated as the last judge in the old theocratic model, the man through whom God ruled directly. To have the people reject that system to his face was a wound. God's response to Samuel is the one that unsettles careful readers: "It is not you they have rejected, it is Me."
God permitted the king anyway. This is the part that requires explanation. If the request was rooted in a desire to abandon God, why did God say yes? The rabbinic tradition gives several answers. The most searching comes from the aggadic tradition: God permitted the king precisely to let the consequences teach what argument could not. Israel would learn, through the weight of taxation and forced labor and war, what it meant to trade divine sovereignty for human kingship. The king would not be a gift. He would be a lesson.
Did Saul Know What He Was Walking Into?
The tragedy of Saul, the first king, runs through the rabbinic literature as a meditation on what happens when a person is placed in a role that was never meant to exist. The tradition preserves Saul as a genuine Torah scholar, a man who knew the law and tried to follow it. His failures, and the rabbis study them carefully, were not failures of ignorance. They were failures of a man caught between a human institution and a divine demand, and unable, in the pressure of the moment, to choose correctly.
Samuel's prophecy to Saul at the end, delivered by the prophet's shade raised from the dead at Ein-Dor, is among the most chilling scenes in the Hebrew Bible. Samuel's final words are not comfort. They are confirmation. The king asked for what he asked for, and it is destroying him.
What the Rabbis Thought the Story Was Really About
The rabbinic reading of the Samuel narrative, preserved across Sifrei Devarim and the broader aggadic tradition of the first through fifth centuries CE, is ultimately about the danger of desire dressed as need. The people did not say they wanted to stop worshipping God. They said they wanted order and security. Rabbi Nehorai looked beneath that language and found something the people may not have fully admitted even to themselves: a yearning for the ordinary, a fatigue with being chosen.
The Torah had warned about exactly this. Deuteronomy's kingship law in chapter 17 permits the king but hedges him with conditions so extensive that he can barely govern. He must keep a Torah scroll beside him at all times and read it every day. He cannot accumulate horses or wealth or wives. He is, in the Torah's vision, a constrained king, a king under God rather than a king instead of God.
The people did not want that king. They wanted the other kind. And Samuel, weeping at the request, already knew how the story ended.