The Beginning of Politics Quotes

“book’s central themes: the essential ambiguity of political motivation and political action, the inherent pettiness of the power game, the tendency for political power, once attained, to be redirected toward retaining political power, the ruler’s need to manipulate his public image, the centrality of blame-avoidance and blame-shifting to the exercise of sovereignty, how the possession of great power affects the ends that power wielders pursue, and the way power tends to imprison those who most ardently seek it.”
― Moshe Halbertal, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel

“Whether attained by craft or by chance, great power has a way of defining the person who wields it. Finding themselves venerated by those around them, the supremely powerful almost inevitably begin to worship themselves.”
― Moshe Halbertal, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel

“When trying to convey God’s perspective on the establishment of human sovereignty in the form of dynastic monarchy, the author employed the following tone: I did not recommend that decision. It wasn’t the initial plan I had for you. Human kingship was your choice, which you insisted upon even after being warned. You wanted it and I couldn’t refuse you. So let us see how it unfolds, and what it means. And what will be my place in it. God’s ambivalence toward the political realm permeates the book with its nuanced and exploratory yet smolderingly critical force. Precisely because of its uncomfortable ambivalence, therefore, the Book of Samuel sets forth the proper attitude that should be assumed toward the political project as a whole. Illuminated from this systematically ambivalent stance, politics is seen as an overpowering human necessity that can never fully escape a potentially self-defeating betrayal at its very core.”
― Moshe Halbertal, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel

“At the heart of politics lies an existential urge for physical security, and the people proved willing and even eager to relinquish whatever unsupervised freedom and entitlements they enjoyed in the state of divine anarchy, and to surrender to a political sovereign who will freely tax and conscript them so long as he can also safeguard them from their pitiless enemies.”
― Moshe Halbertal, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel

“Between the collapse of the utopian ideology of God’s kingship on the one hand and the refusal to deify the king on the other, a semiautonomous sphere of human politics was born. God is not the king, and the king will be accepted only so long as he renounces all claims to be a god.”
― Moshe Halbertal, The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel