the primary vision becomes the well-being and enhancement of the king per se and not the role of advocate for the marginal

Second, this period obviously features the emergence of messianism, that is, the presentation of the Davidic king not only as an important historical accident but also as a necessary agent of God's ultimate purposes. Positively, the David king is understood as an advocate for the marginal ones and so potentially figures as an agent of the Mosaic vision. Negatively and more realistically, as the king takes on increasing significance and power and is assigned an enduring role in the purposes of God, the primary vision becomes the well-being and enhancement of the king per se and not the role of advocate for the marginal. The meaning of kingship could have gone in either direction, but in practice it became not an office of advocacy for the powerless but an agent of greater exploitation by the powerful. Prophetic consciousness thereby is put on notice against every historical agent that assigns to itself enduring, even ontological, significance.

I am going to only give you this paragraph today because I am pressed for time and because it's more than enough to expand into a huge study of the danger of attributing divine commission to human kings and how things go to hell when the king starts either believing that, himself, or, more realistically, using the presumed belief in it on the part of the population to his own ends. That is, I have ever confidence far more of a presence in human history and far more danger. A monarch or despot or even honestly elected president who believes they are to be God's agent in the world at least has something bigger than himself to live up to and to be answerable to. Their danger might be real but it knows bounds. A monarch who cynically and opportunistically uses such a dangerous cultural belief and who pretends to believe it will not be restrained by any form of conventional morality or, even more so, the kind of morality that is exemplified in the Mosaic vision, so vilified in such ignorance, with such bigotry and with such self-interested dismissal in modernism. The scientific regimes of the 20th century, uniform in being led by the kind of person who doesn't believe they are answerable to God or morality, have been marked by their stupendously huge death tolls, matched or even exceeded by only a few ancient figures such as Genghis Kahn, his army and his descendants. I don't know how his body count figures into his religious profession of faith. I wonder if anyone ever questioned that within his own culture, though generally if you do question something like that, you might not live to ask it twice. Trump aspires to make that the law here.

It is one of the troubling aspects of the New Testament that Jesus was so identified with the Davidic kingship in it when he plainly rejected such an association with a kingdom of this world. I never could understand that though this tradition within the culture helps to understand how those troubling aspects might not have been so noticed. Even from what I recall getting from the stories of the Kings of Israel from the "children's bible" I read as a young child, those guys were anything but convincingly moral. 

 

It has to be wondered that, as in creation theology, there may have been an older strain of messianic theology that was turned to this use by the royal establishment in the period when the scriptures were written down, codified and organized, the ones who did that certainly had a sense of what inclinations to bend it into were likely to end up with them in a better place than would be found in the experiences of the class that the romanticized view of that would claim the king advocates for.  I wonder if there may not have been such an earlier, non-imperial concept of a messiah.