Gideon refused the invitation to be king of Israel

Gideon’s refusal of the Israelites’ offer of kingship is a biblical episode that Thomas Paine makes central to his argument against monarchy: after victory over the Midianites, Gideon rejects rule for himself and his descendants, insisting that the Lord should rule. In Paine’s account, the episode establishes not merely a personal act of piety but a principle about political authority, one later contrasted with the Israelites’ renewed demand for a king and their recognition of that demand as an evil.

The Offer and Refusal

The Israelites had been oppressed by the Midianites. Gideon led a small army against them, and victory followed through divine intervention. Elated by the success, the people credited Gideon’s generalship and proposed that he rule over them, extending the offer to his son and grandson. The proposal was therefore for hereditary kingship, not simply temporary leadership.

Gideon answered that neither he nor his son would rule over the people, because the Lord would rule over them. Paine emphasizes the force and directness of this reply: Gideon does not treat kingship as an honor that the people are entitled to bestow, but denies their right to grant it. He also does not soften his refusal with conventional expressions of gratitude; Paine reads it as a prophetic charge that the people are disloyal to their rightful Sovereign.

Paine’s Scriptural Argument

Paine places Gideon’s words within a broader claim that monarchy cannot be justified by either natural equality or scripture. He presents the episode as an explicit rejection of human kingship, and argues that monarchical societies have glossed over scripture hostile to monarchy. For countries still forming their governments, he says, such passages deserve particular attention.

The episode also supplies Paine with an argument against hereditary succession. The people’s offer reaches from Gideon to his son and grandson, making dynastic rule visible in its proposed form. Paine contends that no person, being born among equals, can claim a perpetual right to privilege his family over all others; descendants may also be unworthy of honors their ancestor deserved. Gideon’s refusal thus serves, in Paine’s reading, as both a rejection of monarchy and a refusal to turn leadership into an inherited title.

The Contrast with Israel’s Later Demand

Paine sets Gideon’s answer against a second episode, which he places about 130 years later. The Israelites then asked Samuel for a king, citing the misconduct of his two sons in their secular responsibilities and insisting that they wanted to be like other nations. Paine treats that appeal to likeness—not a principled need for a new form of government—as a return to the customs of the heathens.

In the account Paine quotes, the demand displeases Samuel, and the Lord tells him that the people have rejected not Samuel but the Lord’s rule. Samuel warns them what kingship will entail: their sons will be taken for chariots, military service, and labor; their daughters for royal domestic work; and their fields, produce, servants, young men, and animals for the king and his officers. The warning makes the political cost of the choice concrete: rule by a king means extraction of the people’s labor and property.

The people nevertheless refuse Samuel’s counsel. They want a king to judge them, lead them, and fight their battles. Samuel calls for thunder and rain during the wheat harvest as a sign of their wrongdoing. The people are greatly afraid and ask Samuel to pray that they will not die, acknowledging that they have added the evil of asking for a king to their sins. Paine uses this later episode to sharpen the contrast: Gideon refuses the people’s offer, while the people eventually insist on the very institution his answer had rejected.

Political Significance

For Paine, Gideon’s refusal is evidence within a present political controversy, not an isolated biblical anecdote. He uses it to challenge the assumption that kingship is sanctioned by scripture and to urge attention to biblical accounts when new governments are being formed. Its significance lies in the way the episode links political legitimacy to the refusal of hereditary privilege and to the claim that authority should not be transferred from divine rule to a human king.

Paine also invokes the episode while defending political action against the Quaker principle that setting up or putting down governments belongs exclusively to God. He argues that political changes come about through ordinary human means, and treats the appeal to divine sovereignty as no reason for people to abstain from political judgment. In this context, Gideon’s refusal reinforces Paine’s argument that rejecting kingship can be an act of fidelity to the principle that the Lord alone should rule.