ABSTRACT
The Old Testament provides the foundations for a diversity that is not infrequently contradictory, the monarchy but also the fundamental challenge to it; the ruthless establishment of a people in a country claimed at the expense of those also living there and yet general disarmament and peace between the nations. This means that in the field of political ethics too, not everything indeed, but nevertheless a great deal can be legitimated by quotations from the Old Testament. Exilic and post-exilic Israel built up its archetypal Mosaic model for itself of course drawing on existing tradition not least because in this way it possessed an origin to which the monarchy was relative. If post-exilic Judah was a state at all, then to put it in modern terms it was an ecclesiastical one. If we detach the Deuteronomistic editorial additions from the books of Samuel and Kings, the ancient texts manifest a surprising secularity.
