In that new consciousness on which the regime was built but which was also created by the regime, the politics of justice and compassion has completely disappeared.

(2) The Solomonic achievement was in part made possible by oppressive social policy. Indeed, this was the foundation of the regime and surely the source of the affluence just mentioned. That affluence was undoubtedly hierarchical and not democratic in its distribution. Obviously some people lived well off the efforts of others, for we are reminded that there were those "who built houses and did not live in them, who planted vineyards, and did not drink their wine." Fundamental to social policy was the practice of forced labor, in which at least to some extent citizens existed to benefit the state or the corporate economy. It is not terribly important or helpful to determine if the forced labor policy included all citizens, as suggested in 1 Kings 5:13-18, or if the people of Israel were exempted from the general levy of empire, as seems likely from 1 Kings 9:22. In any case it was unmistakably the policy of the regime to mobilize and claim the energies of people for the sake of the court and its extravagant needs.

As we know from our own recent past, such an exploitative appetite can develop insatiable momentum so that no matter how much goods or power or security is obtained it is never enough. The rebellion announced in 1 Kings 11:28 and the dispute of 1 Kings 12 concerning the nature of government and the role of people and leaders both show the struggle with a new self-understanding. In that new consciousness on which the regime was built but which was also created by the regime, the politics of justice and compassion has completely disappeared. The order of the state was the overriding agenda, and questions of justice and freedom, the main program of Moses, were necessarily and systematically subordinated. Justice and freedom are inherently promissory but this regime could not tolerate promises, for they question the present oppressive ordering and threaten the very foundations of current self-serving.

The decay of ideals is a common theme in human history, the length of time under which the Mosaic ideals is said to have held in Israel is rather remarkable, though its decay - as warned by Samuel - was all too predictable. 

 

Earliest Christianity was also seriously compromised when Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire in its final centuries. 

 

The  description of Christianity under persecution and without official power contrasts greatly with Christianity with worldly kingdoms. Such as comprises the history of scandal that is so useful to the enemies of Christianity, accurate history or elaboration or, not infrequently, fable that fits in well with that history.

 

And that is played out today in the white "evangelical" support for the vulgar Mammonist fascist, Trump, as it did throughout the American period when some of our worst actions from Puritan genocide of the natives in Massachusetts with the support of some, though not all of the clergy, to the slavery which was present, originally, North as well as South before the Revolution and after. Slavery, including wage slavery under capitalism, is exactly the same violence, the same legalized theft of peoples' labor, the product of their labor and, so, their lives. The the Mosaic Law exists as the most comprehensive preventative measures to prevent that and, no doubt old Moses finding he couldn't break people of all of their bad habits, such as enslaving people, it contained protections of the rights and lives of slaves that never existed in American slavery. And, no doubt, Moses and those who tried to hold true to his insights found out that even making laws against evil is not going to be more than somewhat effective. All government as all religion is conducted by the ever corruptible human species.

And our secular regimes are even faster to find their ideals rotting away. Under the scientistic, materialistic regimes that found modern science and technology so useful - I'd use the career as a weaponeer of Leonardo and Galileo as a useful start to that really taking off - as even the vestiges of regard for God and things such as The Law and The Gospel fell out of fashion as anything more than a conventional means of regulating other peoples' sex lives and national cultural identity, there was little to keep even professed Christians with wealth and power from totally abandoning any ideas of equality and justice.

The Churches have been a more mixed phenomenon, they being many and diverse in ways that even the fifty United States governments are not. And within churches there has certainly been diversity in the extent to which "the overriding agenda, and questions of justice and freedom, the main program of Moses, were necessarily and systematically subordinated." The radicalism of St. Francis, among the most radical of Christian attempts to take the teachings of Jesus, and so, also, too, Moses seriously was certainly not shared by the bishops and the popes with anything like uniformity. In our own time - well my time, some of you were probably not born before she died - Dorothy Day, Saint Dorothy Day, went up against Cardinal Spellman who certainly didn't like what she was doing and even less what she was saying but he is said to have been afraid to move against her for fear that she was the genuine thing, a real saint when he, at his best, could only affect a faint scent of sanctity. I doubt that the bishops and Cardinals and Catholic millionaires who work against Pope Francis as he attempts to be a Christian are as bothered by that as old Fanny Spellman was. I have my doubts that most of them have any belief in the God of Abraham, Issac, . . . Jesus and Paul being wedded to Mammon who they serve. Mammon and the Cannon Law and what they take as "tradition". And the trappings of it all. Trappings are a serious trap when it comes to churches as it is when it comes to stuff like Constitutional Law.

Note:  These are just some of my ideas in reaction to the passages I'm posting, I am certain that other people reading them would have other ideas, probably better and more informed ideas, I am not implying in any way that my ideas are Brueggemann's ideas.  I am certain that he would be among the first to note that his ideas on the texts which are the source of this are not the last and final word on them, either.  I will say that his ideas on them are the best ones I've come across in reading them.  

One thing I think is remarkable is how much of the text reminds the people it addresses of their experience as slaves in Egypt as the reason that they are to behave morally.  That is a rather early thing which I've only come to conclude in the past year or so, how enduring the collective experience of traumatic denial of equality and rights can be in a culture and in the unconscious cultural inclinations of a people.  I wonder, for example, if the reluctance for the Children of Israel to talk much about the afterlife is a reaction against the elaborate cult of the dead so much of the efforts of the common people of Egypt were harnessed to serve.  As Jessica Mitford commented to Molly Ivens when they were watching movie at the Houston Funderal Service Museum that started out talking about the Egyptian body preservation industry 

 
"Now THERE is a culture where the funeral directors REALLY got out of hand!"