Bible

The Bible in Common Sense is both a source of political argument and a test of who may claim to interpret political authority. Thomas Paine reads its accounts of Gideon and Samuel as a sustained rejection of kingship, using them to challenge monarchy and hereditary succession; elsewhere, he places divine law above any earthly ruler and appeals to religious conscience as a liberty government must protect. The Bible’s force in the pamphlet lies in this combination: its narratives make kingship appear historically chosen and morally culpable, while its principles support a political order in which law, rather than a king, governs.

Biblical Authority Against Monarchy

Paine rejects the idea that elevating one person above others can be justified either by natural equality or by Scripture. He argues that biblical authority expressly disapproves of government by kings, and that monarchies have glossed over its anti-monarchical passages. For countries still forming their governments, he therefore presents those passages as politically urgent rather than as relics of an ancient dispute.

He also disputes the use of the command to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s as support for monarchy. In his account, the Jews at the time were without a king and under Roman vassalage; the passage therefore cannot establish that kingship is divinely sanctioned. His distinction separates obedience within an existing political circumstance from the larger question of whether monarchy is a legitimate form of government.

Paine sketches the earlier Israelite order as a kind of republic, administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes, and says that kingship entered through the custom of the Heathens. He presents the subsequent desire for a king as a departure from that earlier condition and interprets the biblical history as a warning about the political and religious consequences of the change. His criticism turns on the authority of the narrative, but also on its interpretation: the people’s demand is treated not as a neutral constitutional choice but as a rejection of divine rule.

Gideon and the Refusal of Hereditary Rule

The episode of Gideon supplies Paine with his clearest example of a ruler refusing kingship. After the children of Israel are oppressed by the Midianites, Gideon leads a small army to victory, which Paine attributes to divine intervention. The people, however, credit Gideon’s generalship and offer rule not only to him but to his son and grandson. The invitation thus proposes hereditary succession as well as kingship.

Gideon refuses to rule over the people and refuses the same authority for his son, declaring that the Lord will rule over them. Paine treats this answer as a denial of the people’s right to confer the office, not as a modest refusal of personal honor. In his reading, Gideon speaks as a prophet, charging the people with disaffection toward their proper sovereign. The episode consequently answers two arguments at once: it repudiates a human king and rejects the transmission of royal authority through a family.

Samuel’s Warning and the Cost of a King

About 130 years later, the people again demand a king. They cite the misconduct of Samuel’s two sons, who had been entrusted with secular concerns, but Paine emphasizes their stated wish to be like other nations. He regards that imitation of the Heathens as a corrupted motive: Israel’s distinction, in his account, should have been to remain unlike them. The people’s complaint about Samuel’s sons thus becomes the occasion for a more fundamental rejection of divine rule.

Samuel is displeased by the demand and prays to the Lord. The answer, as Paine reproduces it, is that the people have not rejected Samuel but God, who had ruled them since their deliverance from Egypt. Samuel is told to heed their request but to solemnly warn them about the manner of king they will receive. Paine stresses that this is a general description of earthly kings, not merely a forecast about one particular ruler, and argues that its character remains recognizable across time.

The warning is concrete in its account of royal extraction. A king will take sons for his chariots, horsemen, officers, agricultural labor, and instruments of war; he will take daughters as confectioners, cooks, and bakers. He will seize the best fields and olive yards for his servants and take a tenth of seed, vineyards, servants, young men, asses, and sheep. Paine connects these details to military impressment, royal luxury, and the recurring vices of bribery, corruption, and favoritism. The people who wanted a king to judge them and fight their battles are warned that they will become his servants and cry out under the burdens they have chosen.

The people refuse Samuel’s warning. In response, Samuel calls for thunder and rain during the wheat harvest, which Paine identifies as punishment at that time of year. The storm frightens the people, who ask Samuel to pray that they will not die and acknowledge that asking for a king has added evil to their sins. For Paine, the sequence leaves little room for an equivocal reading: the narrative itself, including the people’s fear and confession, constitutes a divine protest against monarchy.

From Scriptural History to Political Judgment

Paine does not regard the existence of good kings as sufficient to sanctify the institution. He says that praise of David concerns him as a man after God’s own heart, not officially as a king. The distinction prevents personal virtue from erasing what Paine presents as the sinful origin of monarchy. Likewise, the Bible’s account of the people persisting in their demand does not make their decision legitimate; it demonstrates that they knowingly chose what Samuel had warned them against.

This interpretation underwrites Paine’s wider indictment of monarchy and hereditary succession. He calls monarchy a form of government against which the word of God bears testimony, and argues that monarchy and succession have laid the world in blood and ashes. Hereditary rule compounds the initial political wrong: if all people are originally equal, no one can rightfully establish a family in perpetual preference to everyone else. The story of Gideon’s refusal and Samuel’s warning gives this objection a scriptural history, while Paine’s appeal to natural equality extends it into a general political principle.

Divine Law, Conscience, and Government

The Bible also figures in Paine’s proposed alternative to kingship. In his imagined ceremony for proclaiming a Continental Charter, the charter is to be placed upon the word of God and crowned. The crown, however, represents law rather than a monarch: in free countries, Paine insists, the law ought to be king, and no other king should rule. At the end of the ceremony, the crown is to be demolished and scattered among the people, whose right it is. The Bible is therefore positioned as a higher standard for political authority, not as a warrant for a sacred earthly ruler.

Paine’s appeal to religious authority also supports a limit on government. He calls it the indispensable duty of government to protect all conscientious professors of religion, while denying that government has any other business with religion. He says he believes diversity of religious opinions to be the will of the Almighty because it provides a larger field for Christian kindness; different denominations are like children of one family with different Christian names. Religious liberty, in this formulation, follows not from religious uniformity but from the obligation to protect conscience amid difference.

In his response to the Quakers’ political testimony, Paine confronts a different scriptural claim: that setting up and putting down kings and governments is God’s peculiar prerogative, and that people should refrain from political intervention and pray for the king. He argues that this principle makes its adherents subjects of every government placed over them and obliges them to accept whatever happens to kings as God’s work. He presses the inconsistency between professing that doctrine and publishing a political testimony at all. For Paine, political change comes through ordinary human means, not miracles; appealing to divine sovereignty cannot by itself excuse political inaction while people act to change their government.

Across these arguments, the Bible does not function as a simple, uncontested endorsement of existing authority. Paine distinguishes the text’s narratives and principles from monarchical readings that, he says, smooth over its objections to kings. He then carries his interpretation from ancient Israel into the constitutional present: against hereditary rulers, for representative government, for law as the highest earthly authority, and for the protection of religious conscience. Its decisive role in Common Sense is thus interpretive as much as doctrinal: the authority invoked to defend kingship is turned into a case against it, and the word of God is placed above the crown and in support of political and religious liberty.