Kingship and the State

In the modern world, democracy is generally regarded as by far the best form of governance (if less than perfect) because it’s the fairest for all concerned and is closely linked to the modern ideal of individual rights. In the ancient world (including in the Book of Mormon, as discussed previously), monarchy was widely considered superior—not simply because it was the most efficient (as a dictator might argue today in favor of autocracy) but because it was conferred on humankind by the gods and was directly related to the goal of maintaining moral order in the world.

Monarchy was far and away the most common form of polity in antiquity, and ancient kingship was nearly always some form of sacral kingship. The king simultaneously represented both humankind before the gods and the gods to humankind.[1] For the Egyptians, the king (pharaoh) himself was frequently denominated a god, but this term should be understood mythically and metaphorically, not literally. It is difficult to describe precisely how the Egyptians viewed their kings. From one perspective, he was “a human mortal with a divine role in an ‘everlasting’ office and institution.” The pharaoh was never considered fully the equal of the other gods.[2] At the same time,

while the king is human, it is “impossible to distinguish” him from the gods, as we read on one of the shrines of Tutankhamun. The formerly popular designation “god king” is too simplistic and therefore misleading. . . . Divine and human elements are joined in his parentage; he resembles the gods without being one; he is the earthly, visible image of a god and assumes a divine role on earth.[3]

The key to understanding Egyptian kingship is sacral ritual. As we have discussed, the performance of a ritual led to the constitution of a new reality; for example, the “opening of the mouth” ritual transformed, for the Egyptians, an inanimate statue into a god. That does not mean they believed the statue in the temple was the very god or goddess who had come down from heaven to dwell in their temple. Rather, the deity was said to unite with the image, or to indwell it. The verbs fraternize or embrace were also used to describe this relationship.[4]

In a very similar way, the royal accession and coronation rites transformed a king from a man into a god. Everyone was fully aware that the man holding the office was still mortal and would die in short order. Nevertheless, the words and acts prescribed by the ritual actually created a new reality, so that the new king, in some sense, became amalgamated with the divine office, thereby becoming a god.[5]

Mesopotamian kings, in contrast, were only exceptionally identified as deities. More generally they were considered as the chosen servants of the gods, and indeed as the sons of gods but not themselves divine. But the difference between godhood and divine sonship, while significant, can be easily overdrawn.[6] The pharaohs were also frequently referred to as the sons of Re or of some other deity, while in Mesopotamia the kings stood in the same relation to their people as the king of the gods stood in relation to the pantheon of deities. According to one Babylonian myth, the king was made separately from the mass of humankind, designed as a superior man, gifted with special capacities and duties.[7]

The Assyrian king Assurbanipal was able to make this claim in an inscription:

I knew no [human] father and mother; I grew up on the knees of my goddesses [Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela]. The great gods brought me up like a baby. The Lady of Nineveh, the mother who bore me, granted me kingship without equal. The Lady of Arbela, who created me, ordered [for me] everlasting life.[8]

As in Egypt, the kings of Mesopotamia, especially Assyria, “participated in rituals that imbued them with a divine aura.” At the same time, they could be considered “the very image of Shamash” or another god, because they ruled over humankind in a manner analogous to the rule of the sun in the cosmos.[9]

For the Israelites, the idea of divine kingship was sometimes denounced as a blasphemous sign of human pride (Ezekiel 28:2). At the same time, it’s clear that some characteristics of sacral kings attached to the Hebrew kings themselves: the Davidic king was considered a son of Yahweh, and quite possibly this status was conferred by the rite of coronation, which included anointing with oil (2 Samuel 7:14; Psalm 2:7).[10] The Israelites had a complex attitude toward their kings, in great part because they viewed God as their true king and the human king as merely his representative.

We can also see clear signs of sacral kingship among the Nephites. Benjamin alludes to the strong tendency among his people to view him as semidivine when he enjoins them not to think of him as “more than a mortal man” (Mosiah 2:10); he is, rather, “like as yourselves, subject to all manner of infirmities in body and mind” (v. 11). He is fundamentally no different from them, being made from the dust of the earth and already old and about to return to the dust (vv. 25–26). Indeed, at the very moment of addressing them, the king admits, “My whole frame doth tremble exceedingly” (v. 30). Instead of having his people view him as a demigod, he encouraged them to consider God as their true king (vv. 19–24).

Moreover, Benjamin refers to having been consecrated by his father Mosiah and subsequently consecrates his own son as his successor (2:11; 6:3). The word consecrate means literally to “make sacred,” and throughout the Book of Mormon only kings and priests are consecrated. Judges (including the chief judge) are never consecrated but always appointed. Although we cannot say much about how the consecration took place, it seems clear that it included the key act of anointing with oil, which represented the descent of God’s spirit on the new king. It appears that Nephi was never consecrated as king, owing to his opposition to the idea of monarchy, but toward the end of his life he conceded the need for a king and “anointed a man to be a king and a ruler over his people” (Jacob 1:9).[11] Royal anointing was also very common among the Jaredites (Ether 6:22, 27; 9:14–15, 21–22; 10:10, 16).[12]

In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, the kingship itself was a divine gift handed down to humankind by the gods as part of the primordial world order, and the king a divinely appointed shepherd who cared for his flock. The Sumerian King List declares that the kingship was “lowered from heaven” at the beginning and again after the great flood. For the Egyptians, the gods themselves were the first kings, beginning with the Sun god Re, who was succeeded by others including Geb, Osiris, and Horus. Re established his daughter, Maat, in the land, and thereafter the principal goal of all pharaohs was to restore the state of the world “as it had been at the time of the All-Lord,” a kind of golden age.[13]

Throughout the ancient Near East, the sacral kingship was entrusted with the fundamental task of maintaining a state of harmony between the people and their gods or God. For the Egyptian pharaohs, this duty could be summarized as preserving maat. One must keep in mind that the Egyptians did not conceive of maat as simply a static order decreed by the gods and meant to endure forever without any effort. Rather, it represented the original purity, the pristine state of the world established under the original divine kingship of Re, but which has not always been maintained by humankind. It is the “perfect order of things . . . which is in harmony with the creator god’s intentions” and which humankind should be striving to regain.[14]

Even though the creator god had overcome the chaos of Nun at the time of the mythical “First Occasion,” chaos was not eliminated from the cosmos but continued to exist in the form of isfet, evil, outside the cosmic (ordered) realm, always threatening the cosmos with disorder and destruction. But the king was specially tasked with the job of (re-)establishing and maintaining maat. Frequently this obligation was stated in unconditional terms in Egyptian texts, as though maat were automatically restored upon the accession of a new king.

But in reality, the king bore a tremendous responsibility, in theological terms, to ward off chaos on a daily basis. In the sacral regimes of the ancient Near East, the welfare of the nation was almost entirely dependent on the piety and righteousness of the king. A significant portion of those responsibilities were cultic, particularly in the case of the pharaoh. The Egyptian king also had a fundamental duty to maintain maat by establishing justice, including social justice for the poor, widows, and orphans; defeating enemies in war; and maintaining prosperity for the nation as a whole. As mentioned above, the purpose in maintaining good relationships with the gods often had a very pragmatic goal—the desire for prosperity. Kingship was often linked directly to fertility of the land.

A piece of correspondence to the king Assurbanipal of Assyria brings this out:

Ashur [king of the gods] nominated my lord [the king] to kingship over Assyria, and Shamash and Adad by their reliable extispicy have confirmed the king my lord as king of the world. There is a fine reign: days of security, years of justice, very heavy rains, massive floods, low prices. The gods are propitious, religion abounds, temples are well provided for, the great gods of heaven and netherworld are exalted in the time of the king my lord. Old men dance, young men sing. Women and girls are happy and rejoice. Women are married and provided with (ear)rings. Sons and daughters are born, procreation flourishes. The king my lord pardons him whose crimes condemned to death. You have released the prisoner sentenced to many years. Those who have been ill for many days have recovered. The hungry have been satisfied, parched ones have been anointed with oil, the naked have been clothed with garments.[15]

An excerpt from a hymn drafted for the coronation of Pharaoh Merneptah declared:

Be glad of heart, the entire land! The goodly times are come! A lord—life, prosperity, health!—is given in all lands, and normality has come down again into its place. . . . All ye righteous, come that ye may see! Right has banished wrong. Evildoers have fallen upon their faces. All the rapacious are ignored. The water stands and is not dried up; the Nile lifts high. Days are long, nights have hours, and the moon comes normally. The gods are satisfied and content of heart. One lives in laughter and wonder.[16]

Isfet, the antithesis of maat, was what could happen in the absence of a king:

And the land will live in turmoil.
They will make arrows from copper,
They will seek blood as food.
They will laugh gleefully over suffering,
And none will weep at death.
None will lie awake fasting at the time of death,
For each man’s heart cares for himself alone.
None will make mourning today,
For hearts have completely turned from it.
A man will sit and turn his back,
While one murders another.
I shall show you a son who has become foe,
A brother who has become an enemy,
And a son who kills his father.
Every mouth is full of “Take pity on me,”
But all goodness has been driven away.[17]

The same, broadly speaking, was true for the Israelites as well as for their pagan neighbors, although much greater emphasis was placed on the king’s moral responsibilities. Yahweh and his prophets repeatedly emphasize the need for the king to be righteous and condemn him for his failure to keep the covenant with God. Wickedness on the part of the king caused the people to sin and could lead to a loss of prosperity.

In 2 Kings 21:11–12 we are told, “Because King Manasseh of Judah . . . has done things more wicked than all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and has caused Judah also to sin with his idols; therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.”

As mentioned above, the righteousness not only of the people in general but of the king in particular could have a direct impact on the fertility and prosperity of the land:

Give the king your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to a king’s son.
May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice.
May the mountains yield prosperity for the people,
and the hills, in righteousness. (Psalm 72:1–3)

The position of the king has been summarized as follows:

[Under the Davidic covenant] the king becomes the trustee of Yahweh’s chosen people. Henceforth it is his responsibility to defend the nation from internal corruption and external attack; and success in the latter connexion is conditioned by his success in the former. In other words, it is the king’s function to ensure the “righteousness” or right relationship within the borders of his territory which will ensure the economic well-being of his people and at the same time will safeguard them from foreign interference. There can be no prosperity and no assurance of continuity for the nation without righteousness; and there can be no righteousness without the fidelity to Yahweh and His laws to which the tribal brotherhood of Israel was pledged under the terms of the Sinaitic covenant. In the ultimate, therefore, the righteousness of the nation is dependent upon the righteousness of the king.[18]

According to the late Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the Egyptians “commonly blamed” their kings if they were unsuccessful in war or if “the earth has denied sufficient crops.”[19] The Burgundians, he added, even deposed their king under such circumstances “according to an ancient custom.” The Greek poet Homer refers to a blameless and god-fearing king who rules “as lord over many powerful people, upholds the way of good government, and the black earth yields him barley and wheat, his trees are heavy with fruit, his sheepflocks continue to bear young, the sea gives him fish, because of his good leadership, and his people prosper under him.”[20]

This same view of the sacral responsibility of kings is found in Mormon’s record and is, in my view, probably the clearest evidence for the book’s sacral worldview. When Mosiah introduced his restructuring of the government into a judgeship, he declared to the people:

I command you to do these things, and that ye have no king; that if these people commit sins and iniquities they shall be answered upon their own heads. For behold I say unto you, the sins of many people have been caused by the iniquities of their kings; therefore their iniquities are answered upon the heads of their kings. And now I desire that this inequality should be no more in this land, especially among this my people; but I desire that this land be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike, so long as the Lord sees fit that we may live and inherit the land. . . . And he told them that . . . the burden should come upon all the people, that every man might bear his part. (Mosiah 29:30–32, 34)

When the Nephite people heard this, they clearly understood Mosiah’s reasoning:

And now it came to pass, after king Mosiah had sent these things forth among the people they were convinced of the truth of his words. Therefore they relinquished their desires for a king, and became exceedingly anxious that every man should have an equal chance throughout all the land; yea, and every man expressed a willingness to answer for his own sins. (vv. 37–38)

What exactly does relinquishing the desire for a king have to do with answering for one’s own sins? In the context of the sacral kingship, it was

because the king was both the representative of God to the people, and of the people before God, [that] he was typically held responsible for the acts of the people, and effectively got the principal “credit” for both the good and bad that happened in his kingdom and to his people. . . . In contrast, under Mosiah’s judgeship, because there would be no royal intercessor, each person would be held responsible by God for his own sins. Thus, whatever evil was committed by the people would be “answered upon their own heads” (Mosiah 29:30) rather than upon the head of the king (v. 31).[21]

Surprisingly enough, this view of the place of the king in the cosmos, society, and nature can be found as late as the nineteenth century in China. In a Chinese newspaper in 1899, the emperor lamented his own sins as the probable cause of the current drought![22]

Justice

“If a king does not heed justice, his people will be thrown into chaos and his land will be devastated.” Thus declares a tablet in the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal.[23]

Apart from ritual responsibilities and general obligations to maintain the moral law, the two principal royal obligations were to establish justice and to defend the people in war and establish peace.[24] The first of these is made dramatically clear in the epilogue to the famous Code of Hammurabi, where the king of Babylon attempts to justify himself before Shamash, the god of justice.

I, Hammurabi, the perfect king, was not careless or neglectful of the black-headed people, whom Enlil had presented to me, and whose shepherding Marduk had committed charged me. I sought out peaceful regions for them. I overcame grievous difficulties; I caused light to rise on them. With the mighty weapon which Zababa and Inanna entrusted to me, with the insight which Enki allotted to me, with the ability that Marduk gave me, I rooted out the enemy above and below; I made an end of war; I promoted the welfare of the land; I made the peoples rest in friendly habitations; I did not let them have anyone to terrorize them. The great gods called me, so I became the beneficent shepherd whose scepter is righteous; my benign shadow is spread over my city. In my bosom I carried the peoples of the land of Sumer and Akkad; they prospered under my protection; I always governed them in peace; I sheltered them in my wisdom. In order that the strong might not oppress the weak, that justice might be dealt the orphan and the widow. . . . I wrote my precious words on my stele.[25]

This approach to royal justice focusing on the weak, the orphan, and the widow is nearly identical to what we find in Egypt. Following the analysis of Jan Assmann, one of the king’s fundamental duties was “to establish justice,” which primarily meant not judging between good and bad men, the criminal and the innocent, but specifically “between the miserable and the powerful. . . . Judgment is always between the weak and the strong, the miserable and the powerful, the poor and the rich.” The creator god had “made everyman equal to his fellow and I forbade them to do Isfet. But their hearts disobeyed what I had said.” Thus, the proper state of things (maat) was a basic equality among humankind, and only the human refusal to accept such a state caused the inequality typical of the world. “The charge of the king is to counteract this unjust state of inegality by rescuing the weak from the hand of the strong and by setting Maat in the place of Isfet.”[26]

In Israel, too, the king’s righteousness consisted not so much in his personal morality as in the justice of his treatment of the needy. Isaiah declared: “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth” (Isaiah 11:3–4).[27] Old Testament scholar Moshe Weinfeld has shown in detail that the king had a special obligation to establish and maintain what today we would call social justice, the needs of the less fortunate in society. He points out the frequent pairing of the words justice and righteousness (Heb. mishpat and tsedaqah), as though they were intended to represent a single concept: “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son. May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice” (Psalm 72:1–2). The Isaiah passage cited above displays a similar pairing: “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity (Heb. meshar) for the meek of the earth.”[28]

In his law code, Hammurabi describes himself as “the just king” who carried out the principles of justice established by the god Shamash.[29] In Mormon’s record, King Mosiah declares that if it were possible always to have “just men to be your kings, who would establish the laws of God, and judge this people according to his commandments,” it would be preferable to always be ruled by kings (Mosiah 29:13).[30] Mosiah’s ideal model king was his father, Benjamin, who embodied the role of “just king,” declaring to his people in no uncertain terms the need to “succor those that stand in need of your succor; . . . administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and . . . not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish” (Mosiah 4:16; see vv. 17–26).[31] Furthermore, “I would that ye should impart of your substance to the poor, every man according to that which he hath, such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and administering to their relief, both spiritually and temporally, according to their wants” (v. 26).[32]

War and Peace

In the Hebrew Bible, when the people demand that the prophet Samuel appoint a king to rule them, the two desires they express are to have someone to administer justice and to lead them in war: “Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:19–20, King James Version).[33] The role of a monarch in warfare was as much a part of the sacral kingship as the ritual aspect of kingship or any other role we have discussed. Indeed, warfare could be seen at least in part as a kind of ritual. Nevertheless, the desire of the people for a king of Israel did not merely have a practical intent but was very much connected to the ancient idea of sacral kingship.

We have just seen Hammurabi’s claim to have “rooted out the enemy above and below,” “made an end of war,” and “not let . . . anyone . . . terrorize” the people. Despite Hammurabi’s apparent claim to have done these things himself, it is clear from the context that these accomplishments are sacral in nature and not achieved without the help of the gods. According to the sacral worldview, military victories were not purely human achievements but were granted by the gods. As a general matter, all military conflicts in the ancient Near East were directed by the gods or by God.[34] In a victory hymn of Pharaoh Thutmose III, the god Amon-Re declares:

I have given to thee might and victory against all countries, I have set thy fame (even) the fear of thee in all lands. Thy terror as far as the four pillars of heaven. . . . I have come, causing thee to smite the uttermost ends of the lands, the circuit of the Great Circle (Okeanos) is enclosed in thy grasp.[35]

In an Assyrian royal inscription, the same idea of divine help and support in war is evident:

With the strong weapons of the god Ashur, my lord; with the support of the gods An, Enlil, and Ea, Sin, Shamash, Adad, Ishtar, and Nergal, most powerful among the gods, the awesome gods, my lords; I captured by conquest the city Taidu, his great royal city.[36]

Often the god not only supported the king in his decision to attack, or provided consent, but actually commissioned him:

At that time, by the exalted might of Ashur, my lord, with the authoritative consent of Shamash [obtained by divination], the warrior, with the support of the great gods by which I have just authority in the four quarters and have neither competitor in battle nor rival in combat, Ashur, my lord, commissioned me to march to the Nairi lands, whose distant kings on the Upper Sea coast in the west, have not known submission.[37]

War was frequently framed as being the responsibility of the gods rather than the king—that is, the king was expected to rely entirely on the gods for his success.

I raised my hands (in prayer) to Ashtur, Sin, Shamash, Bel, Nabu and Nergal, Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela, And they agreed with what I had said. In (token of) their firm “Yes!” they repeatedly sent me a reliable omen (signifying): Go! Hold not back! We shall go at your side and slay your foes! I did not tarry one, (much less) two days, waited not for my troops, did not look to the rearguard, did not see to the assigning of teams of horses or battle implements, did not stock campaign provisions; the snow and the cold of the month of Shabat, the hardships of winter, I feared not, like a flying eagle I spread my wings bent on the overthrow of my enemies, arduously I pressed on along the road to Nineveh—when, in front of me, in the region of Hanigalbat, all of their tall warriors, blocking my path, were wetting their weapons.

Fear of the great gods, my Lords, overwhelmed them, they saw my powerful storm troops and became crazed (with fright). Ishtar, queen of attack and hand-to-hand fighting, who loves my priesthood, stepped to my side, broke their bows, and dissolved their battle formations so that they all said: “This is our king!” that her exalted command they came over, one after the other, to my side and took up positions behind me, gamboled like lambs, and invoked me as lord.[38]

The most extreme example of this attitude is found in the in the book of Judges. When Gideon musters an army of thirty-two thousand soldiers to fight the Midianites, even though his army is outnumbered by the enemy, the Lord instructs him repeatedly to cull his forces until he is reduced to three hundred troops. Thus compelled to rely entirely on the Lord, Gideon nevertheless achieved victory because the Lord from the beginning had promised him, “I will deliver you, and give the Midianites into your hand” (see Judges 7:1–23). Indeed, it was not so much that God fought Israel’s battles as that Israel fought God’s (1 Samuel 18:17). There was even an entire written historical work known as “The Book of the Wars of the Lord” (Numbers 21:14).

Before a battle, approval of the gods was crucial for success. Priestly diviners would first be consulted to ensure that the gods were favorably disposed toward the planned military action. Diviners had various means of determining the divine will: extispicy (reading the entrails of animals, especially livers) was the most common form in the ancient Near East; other methods included augury (examining the flight patterns of birds), dreams, and casting of lots.[39] If the priests declared that the result of the divination was negative, the king would nearly always delay the campaign until a positive result could be obtained. In the Syrian city of Mari, the god Adad instructed the king Zimri-Lim through a prophet that he should always seek an oracle before battle. “If you go off to the war, never do so without consulting an oracle. When I become manifest in my oracle, go to the war. If it does not happen, do not go out of the city gate.”[40] Even if the king himself were inclined to ignore the priests, many of his soldiers might be anxious at the prospect of going to battle without the approval of the gods, thus decreasing his chance of victory: “When an omen appears favorable 150 soldiers go out and 150 return.”[41]

In Israel, similarly, the king had the duty to seek the will of the Lord before going out to war. Once the will of God had been obtained and Yahweh had promised to “give the enemy into their hands,” the people could be entirely confident of victory. The king consulted diviners and, later in Israel’s history, prophets to know the will of God.[42] Sacrifice might also be carried out before the battle (1 Samuel 7:9; 13:9, 12).

The practice of consulting prophets is also found in the Book of Mormon. After the destruction of the city of Ammonihah, when the chief captain Zoram was about to attack the Lamanites, he consulted with Alma as high priest to know where he should go to rescue those taken captive by the Lamanites. Similarly Captain Moroni, “knowing of the prophecies of Alma, sent certain men unto him, desiring him that he should inquire of the Lord whither the armies of the Nephites should go to defend themselves against the Lamanites” (Alma 43:23–24; see 16:5).[43]

The Greeks and Romans, too, consulted the gods before battle. Greek armies would typically offer sacrifice for the purpose of divination (ta hiera), examining the liver or entrails of the sacrificed beast. They would also make additional supplicatory offerings (ta sphagia) to simply seek additional favor from the gods.[44] The departing Roman commander had the responsibility of taking the auspices and offering sacrifice for divination. The taking of the auspices typically involved the feeding of chickens: if the sacred chickens ate eagerly and some food dropped from their beaks, this constituted a favorable auspice. If they refused to eat at all, this projected a defeat.[45]

Of course, wars were not always won. When a king failed, what was he supposed to do? Where was the blame to be assigned? Failure was typically assigned to abandonment by the gods, but far and away the most common context for such assertions was by way of explaining the defeat of an enemy city—that is, that the losing city had been abandoned by its gods. The Assyrians above all emphasized the doctrine of constant victory on their part. Nonetheless, Sennacherib gave an explanation for the death of his predecessor, Sargon II, based on the idea of divine abandonment; anomalously, he suggested that Sargon’s ignominious death was due to his failure to give adequate respect to the gods of Babylon (rather than those of Assyria).[46] Yet, notably, the “explanation” given is phrased as speculation. The true motives behind the gods’ actions were, in practice, frequently inscrutable. When things went badly, one could confidently assume that it was due to some failure to properly respect one or more of the gods. Yet certainty on this score was unattainable.

The Cuthean Legend is an early Mesopotamian literary piece (there is no evidence that it should be taken seriously as a historical account) in which the king, Naram-Sin, acknowledges a serious mistake in ignoring the will of the gods. Although he had sought the gods’ approval of his military campaign, he rejected the negative response and determined to “follow the counsel of my own heart” and “take responsibility for myself.” The results were disastrous; three campaigns over three years resulted in the death of two hundred seventy thousand troops. The king resolved thereafter to always consult the gods and to follow their will.[47]

It should always be kept in mind that war was not conceived in purely pragmatic terms. It was not entirely about achieving victory or conquest but also about overcoming the forces of chaos. As William Hamblin has said, “For the ancients, war was the means by which the gods restored cosmic order through organized violence undertaken in their name by their divinely ordained kings.” Behind the practice of war was the concept of “theomachy, a ‘war of the gods’. . . [in which] the gods use the humans to fight their divine wars. The cosmic war between good and evil, order and chaos, is ongoing; the gods simply recruit mortals to fight in that war.”[48] This was depicted most clearly on the outer walls of later Egyptian temples. The primary function of these depictions of the king’s military exploits was not to celebrate specific victories nor even the pharaoh’s vigor and valor, but rather was “symbolic and apotropaic, providing visual examples of the defence of the temple against its enemies—the forces of chaos which existed beyond the sacred precinct.”[49]

Thus, the ultimate goal in war of course was the defeat of the enemy and the establishment of peace or order. As Hammurabi asserted, “I rooted out the enemy above and below; I made an end of war.” Mormon tells us that Benjamin, leading the Nephite forces as king, fought numerous wars “with the strength of his own arm” and “in the strength of the Lord.” These wars were not only against the Lamanites but also against many internal dissenters. Benjamin was able to “once more establish peace in the land” by “laboring with all the might of his body and the faculty of his whole soul” (Words of Mormon 1:13–18). In a similar manner, in Mosiah 10 Zeniff emphasizes his victory over the Lamanites in his old age (v. 10), thereby establishing order and peace for his people:

And it came to pass that we did drive them again out of our land; and we slew them with a great slaughter, even so many that we did not number them. And it came to pass that we returned again to our own land, and my people again began to tend their flocks, and to till their ground. (vv. 20–21)

But in good sacral fashion he attributed their victory to the fact that they had gone up to battle “in the strength of the Lord” and by “putting their trust in the Lord” (vv. 10, 19). The Lamanites by contrast, lacked that key divine support “because they understood not the dealings of the Lord” (v. 14).[50]

Notes

[1] For good overviews of the subject of sacral kingship, see Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); Francis Oakley, Empty Bottles of Gentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Jean Hani, Sacred Royalty: From the Pharaoh to the Most Christian King (London: Matheson Trust for the Study of Comparative Religion, 2011); Francis Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1966).

[2] See John Baines, “Kingship, Definition of Culture, and Legitimation,” in Ancient Egyptian Kingship, ed. David O’Connor and David P. Silverman (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 9–10; Lanny Bell, “The New Kingdom ‘Divine’ Temple: The Example of Luxor,” in Temples of Ancient Egypt, ed. Byron E. Shafer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 140; Lanny Bell, “Luxor Temple and the Cult of the Royal Ka,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 44, no. 4 (1985): 293–94; and Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 5–7. For similar concepts in English law, see the classic discussion in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

[3] Erik Hornung, Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought, trans. Elizabeth Bredeck (New York: Timken, 1992), 162.

[4] See Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 40–47; see also Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, trans. John Baines (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 135–38.

[5] See Hornung, Conceptions of God, 138–42; and David P. Silverman, “The Nature of Egyptian Kingship,” in Ancient Egyptian Kingship, ed. David. O’Connor and David P. Silverman (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 66.

[6] Unfortunately, the primary focus of Henri Frankfort’s generally excellent and highly influential Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) is to exaggerate the contrast between Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingship. On the other hand, a somewhat overblown view of Mesopotamian kings as gods is found in Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 16–51.

[7] Andrew George, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), xli.

[8] As quoted in Collins and Collins, King and Messiah, 8.

[9] See Eckart Frahm, “Risings Suns and Falling Stars: Assyrian Kings and the Cosmos,” in Experiencing Power, Generating Authority: Cosmos, Politics, and the Ideology of Kingship in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, ed. Jane A. Hill, Philip Jones, and Antonio J. Morales (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2013), 101–2. See also Peter Machinist, “Kingship and Divinity in Imperial Assyria,” in Text, Artifact, and Image: Revealing Ancient Israelite Religion, ed. Gary M. Beckman and Theodore J. Lewis (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2006), 152–88. Several authors have noted the similarity between the ancient doctrine of human kings being ritually invested with the divine office of kingship and the later theory in English law of the “king’s two bodies,” as discussed at great length in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies.

[10] For the scholarship on the so-called royal Psalms and the scholarly support for the idea of sacral Hebrew kingship, see Gregory Steven Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message of the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2017): 14n15.

[11] On Nephi’s attitude toward kingship, see 2 Nephi 5:18, together with the discussion in Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message,” 18. On the practice of anointing kings, see Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message,” 17; and Stephen D. Ricks, “Kingship, Coronation, and Covenant in Mosiah 1–6,” in King Benjamin’s Speech: “That Ye May Learn Wisdom,” ed. John W. Welch and Stephen D. Ricks (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1998), 249–50.

[12] For consecration, see Mosiah 2:11; 6:3; Alma 2:9. Royal anointing, no doubt as part of the ritual of consecration, was practiced by the Nephites and the Jaredites. Note that Nephite judges are never said to be anointed or consecrated, only appointed. See Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message,” 18–22.

[13] Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of Pharaohs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 358.

[14] Hornung, Conceptions of God, 213.

[15] Quoted in W. G. Lambert, “Kingship in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in King and Messiah in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. John Day (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 69–70.

[16] James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 378. For a similar declaration at the accession of Ramses IV, see pp. 378–79.

[17] The lines are excerpted somewhat at random from a longer work known as The Prophecies of Neferty, as reproduced in William Kelly Simpson, ed., The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 214–20.

[18] Aubrey R. Johnson, Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967), 136–37; see Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message,” 12–18.

[19] Ammianus Marcellinus, History 27.5.14, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 3:168–69.

[20] Homer, Odyssey 19.109–14, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 285.

[21] Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message,” 55–56.

[22] See Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. H. H. Gerth (Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), 261–62n63.

[23] J. N. Postgate, “Royal Ideology and State Administration in Sumer and Akkad,” in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 1:395–411.

[24] See Keith W. Whitelam, The Just King: Monarchical Judicial Authority in Ancient Israel (Sheffield, UK: JSOT, 1979), 17.

[25] Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 177–78.

[26] Jan Assmann, “State and Religion in the New Kingdom,” in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, ed. W. K. Simpson (New Haven, CT: Yale Egyptological Seminar, 1989), 55–88.

[27] See also Psalm 72:1–4; Proverbs 29:4; 2 Samuel 8:15; 23:3–4; 1 Kings 10:9; and Jeremiah 23:5–6.

[28] Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). In more technical language, Weinfeld argues that the recurring phrase “justice and righteousness” (mishpat and tsedaqah) in the Old Testament was a hendiadys—that is, a figure of speech that expresses a single idea using two words linked with connective and—meaning righteous justice.

[29] Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 178 (xxv.98).

[30] Mosiah appears to be echoing the words declared earlier by Alma in Mosiah 23:8.

[31] See Ricks, “Kingship, Coronation, and Covenants,” 237.

[32] See the discussion in Todd R. Kerr, “Ancient Aspects of Nephite Kingship in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 1, no. 1 (1992): 85–118. On the trial of the prophet Abinadi under the jurisdiction of King Noah, see John W. Welch, The Legal Cases in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2008), 162–66.

[33] The Hebrew word shaphat, here translated as “judge,” could also be translated as “govern” or “rule.” See Dundas, “Kingship, Democracy, and the Message,” 18, 37–41.

[34] See Bustenay Oded, War, Peace and Empire: Justifications for War in Assyrian Royal Inscriptions (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1992), 13–18; and Stephen D. Ricks, “‘Holy War’: The Sacral Ideology of War in the Book of Mormon and in the Ancient Near East,” in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and William J. Hamblin (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1990), 103–17.

[35] James Henry Breasted, trans. and ed., Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 2:263, 265.

[36] Quoted in Sa-Moon Kang, Divine War in the Old Testament and in the Ancient Near East (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 17.

[37] Mark W. Chavalas, ed., The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 157; and Oded, War, Peace and Empire, 9–27.

[38] Quoted in Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 238.

[39] For an overview of divination in the ancient Near East, see A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 206–27; and Stefan M. Maul, The Art of Divination in the Ancient Near East: Reading the Signs of Heaven and Earth, trans. Brian McNeil and Alexander Johannes Edmonds (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).

[40] Charlie Trimm, Fighting for the King and the Gods: A Survey of Warfare in the Ancient Near East (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017), 594.

[41] Inscription from Mari, quoted in Kang, Divine War, 42.

[42] For diviners, see 1 Samuel 23:9–10; 30:7–8. For prophets, see 1 Kings 20:13; 22:5–22. See also the discussion of Hebrew holy war in Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 1:258–65.

[43] See Ricks, “‘Holy War,’” 107–8.

[44] Daniel P. Tompkins, “Greek Rituals of War,” in The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World, ed. Brian Campbell and Lawrence A. Tritle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 529.

[45] John Rich, “Roman Rituals of War,” in Oxford Handbook of Warfare, 547–48.

[46] See Trimm, Fighting for the King and the Gods, 602. For a discussion of the rationale behind this inscription, see Ann M. Weaver, “The ‘Sin of Sargon’ and Esarhaddon’s Reconception of Sennacherib: A Study in Divine Will, Human Politics and Royal Ideology,” Iraq 66 (2004): 61–66.

[47] Chavalas, Ancient Near East, 32–40.

[48] William J. Hamblin, Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC: Holy Warriors at the Dawn of History (London: Routledge, 2006), 12; and Oded, War, Peace and Empire, 101–20.

[49] Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 46.

[50] See Kerr, “Ancient Aspects of Nephite Kingship.”