The Israelites requested Samuel to establish a king

The Israelites’ demand for a king is the pivotal scriptural episode through which Thomas Paine argues that monarchy begins in a people’s rejection of divine rule and proceeds by imposing burdens on those who authorize it. Their request is not represented as a response to an unknown political principle: Samuel warns them what kingship will entail, they insist on having a king nonetheless, and a storm makes their wrongdoing unmistakable. In Paine’s reading, the episode is both a religious indictment of monarchy and a concrete account of its human costs.

Background and the demand

Paine places the request within a history in which the Israelites had gone roughly three thousand years, by the scriptural chronology he invokes, without a king. Their government had instead been administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes, except in extraordinary cases of divine intervention. The demand therefore marks a break with an established political and religious order, not simply the appointment of a new ruler.

The immediate occasion was the misconduct of Samuel’s two sons, who had been entrusted with secular responsibilities. The Israelites seized on that failure and approached Samuel abruptly and insistently, demanding a king to judge them like other nations. Paine emphasizes the stated motive: they wanted to resemble the surrounding nations, which he identifies with the heathen customs from which he believes they should have distinguished themselves. Their request is thus framed as an act of imitation, and as a preference for a familiar human institution over their distinctive claim to divine sovereignty.

Samuel was displeased and prayed to the Lord. The answer, as Paine recounts it, distinguished the people’s rejection of Samuel from their deeper rejection of God: in demanding a king, they were refusing the Lord’s reign over them. The request consequently carries a theological meaning beyond dissatisfaction with Samuel’s sons. It is treated as part of a recurring pattern of forsaking God and serving other gods.

Samuel’s warning about kingship

The Lord instructs Samuel to grant the demand but first to warn the people of the general manner of earthly kings. Paine stresses that the warning is not confined to a particular ruler. It describes the customary operation of monarchy, and he argues that its features remain recognizable across the long distance separating the scriptural account from his own time.

The king will take the Israelites’ sons for his chariots and horsemen, and some will be made to run before the chariots. He will appoint military captains and set people to work his ground, reap his harvest, and make instruments of war and chariots. Paine connects the taking of men for royal use to the contemporary practice of impressment, making the ancient warning bear on present political conditions rather than leaving it in the past.

The warning extends to the king’s household and expenditure. Daughters will be taken as confectioners, cooks, and bakers; the king will take the people’s best fields and olive yards for his servants. A tenth of their seed and vineyards will go to his officers and servants. For Paine, these details expose the economic and domestic reach of royal power: the king’s luxury and patronage are sustained by appropriating the people’s work, property, and family members.

The taking does not stop there. The king will claim a tenth of male and female servants, the best young men, asses, and sheep, putting them to his own work, until the people become his servants. Paine reads the distribution of fields and produce to royal dependents as evidence of bribery, corruption, and favoritism. What is presented as a warning about kingship thus becomes a catalogue of extraction: military service, labor, household service, property, and livestock are all brought within the monarch’s reach.

Samuel also warns of the consequence the people will face after choosing: they will cry out because of their king, and the Lord will not hear them on that day. Paine treats this as an account of monarchy’s persistence. The people are forewarned, yet their insistence binds them to the institution and its costs. The warning makes their eventual distress not an unforeseen accident but the consequence attached to a choice they were told they were making.

Refusal, storm, and acknowledgment

The Israelites refuse to obey Samuel’s warning. They repeat that they want a king to judge them, to go before them, and to fight their battles, and that they want to be like all the nations. Samuel reasons with them and sets their ingratitude before them, but they remain bent on their demand. Their stated hopes of judgment, leadership, and military protection stand against the warning that the king will make them his servants.

Samuel then calls on the Lord to send thunder and rain as a sign of the people’s wickedness. The timing matters in Paine’s account: the rain comes during wheat harvest, when it is a punishment. The storm is not merely an atmospheric event but an unmistakable public confirmation of Samuel’s rebuke. The people greatly fear the Lord and Samuel, admit that they have added this evil to their sins by asking for a king, and beg Samuel to pray that they will not die.

Paine presents the episode as direct and decisive testimony against monarchical government. The people’s fear and confession give the narrative its turn: they have insisted on royal rule despite the warning, but the storm forces them to acknowledge the religious meaning of their demand. Their admission does not erase the choice; it makes visible the gap between the security they expected from a king and the sin and danger Samuel had foretold.

Paine’s political and religious use of the episode

Paine makes the Israelites’ demand part of a broader argument that government and society have different origins and purposes. Society arises from human needs and mutual assistance, while government is required because people fail to remain just toward one another. Government is therefore a necessary evil, justified by security; any form that does not best secure people with the least expense and greatest benefit fails its proper test. Against that standard, Samuel’s account supplies a vivid description of monarchy turning protection into appropriation.

The episode also supports Paine’s claim that monarchy has no sound religious warrant. He sets the Israelites’ demand beside the earlier history of a political order administered by judges and elders, and argues that scripture disapproves of kingship rather than sanctifying it. His reading of the Lord’s response makes the people’s request a rejection of divine authority; the catalogue of royal takings then shows what that rejection means in ordinary political life.

Paine closes the argument by insisting that the scriptural passages admit no equivocal construction: either, he says, they record a protest by the Almighty against monarchical government, or scripture is false. He further contends that the account of the Israelites’ confession helps explain why monarchy continues: people may see its abuses and acknowledge its sinful origin, yet still choose it. The episode therefore functions not as an isolated biblical recollection but as Paine’s warning to political communities considering what form of government to establish: a people cannot treat the demand for a king as a harmless change of office when the choice entails a transfer of authority, labor, and property.