ABSTRACT
The evils that God says the kings of Israel will commit against the people are basically twofold, those to do with war and those to do with luxury, and people may well suppose that God, like Socrates, sees the two as causally connected. Luxury will require fighting, and fighting will require luxury. It is the settled teaching of reason that peace and prosperity are the results of virtue and not of vice. It is also the settled teaching of the Bible that the children of Israel were the chosen people of God only because they were supposed to be, through their obedience to God's law, an example and source of virtue for all men. The skepticism is unjustified. Some tribes still today live without any state apparatus, and while they lack the trappings of modern civilized life, they also lack the threat of irresistible tyranny.
