I am reading James Scott's Seeing Like A State thanks to the recommendation of commenter Billy Jack.

The thesis of Seeing Like a State is that governments attempt to rationalize society according to theoretical maps that necessarily distort reality because the map is only concerned with state interests. A state will create monocrop forests in order to secure harvests of trees useful to the timber industry, even though these forests eventually fail because of lack of biodiversity, while hurting the peasant communities that depend on a diverse forest. Or a colonial government will prefer inefficient rubber plantations to productive family operations, because the former is easier to quantify and tax. Governments organize society around taxation and conscription, to the resistance of the people they rule.

It made me think about the Bible. If you read the Old Testament (OT) scriptures from Judges through the major Prophets you will see two schools of thought with regard to the monarchy that later scribes attempt to reconcile. (Note to Protestants: I am about to paraphrase scripture from memory with no citations. Deal with it.)

In Judges, whenever there is an embarrassing account of, say, human sacrifice in YHWH's name, you will find a sheepish scribal gloss that "these things happened because there was no king in Israel at the time, and everyone did what he thought was right in his own mind". There was no king, so there was religious chaos to the point of sacrilege. Obviously, a good Yahwist needs a king.

Later, in Samuel, the people clamor for a king and the prophet Samuel warns them: look, if you want a king, he is going to conscript your sons and tax you. The Israelites said we are sick of getting our asses kicked by our enemies, give us a king anyway. Samuel was sad but God spoke to him and said "they are not rejecting you as Judge, they are rejecting me as King." So YHWH is anti-monarchy.

But the rest of Samuel is about finding a king after YHWH's heart, the tragedy of Saul and the rise of David. David, it seems, recognizes that YHWH is the true king, while he is only a placeholder. Late in his reign David attempts a census, "numbering the people", and YHWH punishes him by sending a plague. David is attempting to "see like a state", put the people on an artificial grid in order to exploit them for security purposes. David was doing exactly what Samuel had warned a king would do. You can imagine the resentment that this sort of intrusion would have caused among the common people.

So is YHWH pro or anti-monarchy? It seems he is grudgingly pro-monarchy under certain conditions. We see this play out in the rest of the OT: kings are wicked and YHWH punishes them, kings are good and YHWH rewards them. Take the example of Ahab who, under the influence of a pagan wife, kills a man in order to appropriate his vineyards. This is considered a foreign, non-Yahwist, practice. All well and good for pagan kings to murder men and steal their land, but that is a violation of the ultimate sovereignty of YHWH over Israel.

We moderns like to dismiss the OT but there is a very real, essential, political dialectic going on. On the one hand Israel cannot survive without a monarch; on the other, the monarch inevitably steps on the rights of YHWH and his people. Secularists: read your Bibles.

The prophetic frustration with the monarchy comes out in Jeremiah and Isaiah. In today's readings Jeremiah condemns the shepherds (aristocracy) of Israel and promises that they will be replaced with new ones. Isaiah promises that the monarchy will be destroyed and that YHWH himself will, once again, become shepherd of Israel. Christians of course see this ultimate shepherd as Christ, but Christ was only with us a few years, and we have since been cursed with Bishops.

We are a fallen race. Perhaps (who knows) a deathless Adam was intended to rule us all in original justice, but we are stuck with provisional governing arrangements that always fall short, replaced with new arrangements that fall even shorter. The final personal rule of YHWH / Christ is left to the end of history.

Fast-forward to John's Apocalypse in which future men will be forced to wear a mark on their foreheads and hands without which they will not be able to buy or sell; excitable people will read into this this or that government intrusion, from social security numbers to Covid-19 vaccines, but it is simply an acknowledgment of the tension between states and civil society. In Greek the "mark" is probably a tattoo. In Seeing Like a State, Scott mentions precolonial Burmese governments forcing people into rice plantations and tattooing them so they would always be associated with that plantation even if they ran away. Revelation's "mark" is a symbol of the state's need for a legible society in tension with the needs of organic society.

States need to be able to read into society for the sake of taxation and manipulation, organic society needs to maintain its relative independence. State demands for a rationalized society will inevitably violate the demands of Christian practice, resulting in Christian marginalization. The tension is only resolved in the end times.

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