Kings appointed by gods: how legitimacy was manufactured

Series: How minds are moved · Belief and power · 1 of 3

In the Louvre stands a black stone 2.25 metres tall, carved about 3,750 years ago. At the top, King Hammurabi of Babylon stands before Shamash, the god of justice. Below them run the laws, 282 of them by the usual count. Before the first law, the prologue says the gods gave Hammurabi his rule “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak”. It is one of the oldest pieces of persuasion we have, and it still works on the eye: the king and the god, at the same height, talking.

This is the first post in a family about belief and power, and it starts with the oldest question any ruler must answer: why obey me?

Contents · 11 sections

TL;DR #

• The earliest states answered “why obey?” with the gods: the ruler as the god’s servant (Mesopotamia), as a god himself (Egypt), or as the holder of a mandate the gods could take back (China).
• Hammurabi’s stele puts the laws under a god, but the laws themselves contain almost no religion. The god is in the frame, not in the content.
• The European “divine right of kings” is late, mostly 16th and 17th century, and it was argued in books and speeches like any other political doctrine.
• Sacred legitimacy had limits. Kings lost wars, dynasties fell, and the stele itself was carried off as loot.
• The pattern survives in softer words: leaders described as sent, chosen or blessed. Notice it, whoever it is said about.

What it is: a borrowed authority #

Every government rests on some answer to the question of legitimacy. Today the usual answer is consent: elections, a constitution, courts. For most of recorded history the answer was the sacred order of the world.

My book Religions, Cults and Power, which I wrote with AI agents from my own library, traces this thread through all its seventeen parts. Its last chapters put it plainly: religion and kingship are bound together from the earliest written record. The Sumerian King List opens with the word for “kingship” coming down from heaven, and the reference shelf in my library describes the list as a composition “likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims to power” of rival cities. The document that tells you who the rightful kings were was itself an argument for some of them.

The technique is simple to state. Take an authority nobody can question, the gods, the cosmos, the order of seasons, and place the ruler inside it. Disobeying the king then stops being a political act. It becomes a crime against the world.

Three models from the ancient world #

The book sets out three models that were already in place before 1500 BC.

The servant king. In early Assyria the title “king” belonged to the god Ashur, and the human ruler was his “steward”. The later Assyrian king was “not a god” but “the chief servant of the chief god”. Hammurabi follows this model: chosen by the gods, but not one of them. There were exceptions. Naram-Sin of Akkad was “named god of the city”, and his people built him a temple.

The god-king. In Egypt the pharaoh was “Son of Ra” and judged “like the sun-god”. In my library, Roberts and Westad’s Penguin History of the World links this to politics: “there was something of a consolidation of cults under the god Amon-Re which reflected political consolidation”. When the kingdoms merged, so did the gods, and the king became the incarnation of the merged god.

The conditional mandate. In China, Heaven gave its mandate to a virtuous ruler, the “Son of Heaven”, and could take it back. Floods and famines were read as signs that a dynasty had lost it, and a successful rebellion proved it. The reference shelf notes that the classical statement of a right to rebel against an unjust ruler, in the Mencius, “was often edited out”. Even a doctrine that limited kings could be trimmed to suit them.

A fourth variant comes from Persia. At Behistun, Darius I credits his nineteen battles against rivals who “falsely proclaimed” themselves king to “the grace of Ahura Mazda”. The inscription does two jobs at once. It says the god chose Darius, and it labels every rival a liar. Delegitimising the other side is as old as legitimising your own.

The god is in the frame, not the content #

Here is the detail I find most instructive. Read Hammurabi’s laws and you will find fines, penalties graded by social class, and the famous “eye for an eye”. You will find almost no theology. One scholar, quoted on my reference shelf, remarked on “an astonishing absence… of all theological or even ceremonial law” in it. Assyriologists still disagree about what the text even is: real legislation, a record of royal verdicts, or a scholarly list.

So the persuasion sits in the picture at the top and in the prologue, not in the rules. The god does not tell you how much a broken bone costs. The god tells you that whatever the king decides about broken bones is just. That is a pattern worth remembering: the sacred, or today the scientific, the democratic or the patriotic, is often used to frame decisions whose content has nothing to do with it.

Divine right: a late, argued doctrine #

People often imagine the “divine right of kings” as medieval and ancient. In the documented record it is mostly early modern. Medieval kings ruled inside a Christian order where the Church could judge them and excommunication could void a reign. The Reformation and the wars that followed, in the reference shelf’s words, “developed the idea of kings as rulers under the authority of God alone”.

It was argued like any other political position. James VI of Scotland wrote its textbooks in 1598 and 1599. As James I of England he told Parliament in 1610 that “kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself, they are called gods”. In France, Bossuet preached the same before Louis XIV. In England, Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (published 1680) defended it, and John Locke’s Two Treatises were written against Filmer.

Within forty years of James’s speech, his son Charles I was tried and executed by his own Parliament. The doctrine was loud precisely because it was contested.

What it feels like from the inside #

If you live inside a sacred order, you do not experience it as propaganda. You experience it as the way things are. The harvest, the river, the calendar and the king belong to one system. Egyptian kings “inherited the duty to ensure Maat remained in place”, and an impious king could bring famine. If that is what you believe, questioning the king feels like questioning whether the sun will rise. Obedience feels like piety, and dissent feels like danger to everyone, not only to yourself.

That is why this is the oldest persuasion technology. It does not argue for the ruler. It removes the ruler from the space where arguments happen.

What it could and could not do #

It is easy to overrate this. The book records the limits as carefully as the claims.

• Aspiration, not always reality. My book cites Collins’s The Sumerians, which reports that the old picture of all-powerful “temple-states” was overturned by later scholars, and that royal claims “may have been as much an aspiration as a reality”.
• Divine favour was judged by results. The Chinese mandate was confirmed by success and lost by disaster. A king who lost a war could lose his gods with it.
• Even the stele was not protected. Hammurabi’s monument was found at Susa, in Iran, in 1901. It had been carried there as plunder by an Elamite king in the 12th century BC. The god of justice did not keep it in Babylon.

Sacred legitimacy made rule cheaper. It did not make rule secure.

The echo today #

The language survives, sometimes in law and sometimes in softer words. Thailand’s 2017 constitution states that “the King shall be enthroned in a position of revered worship and shall not be violated”, and its lèse-majesté law has produced prison sentences that, counted across multiple charges, have reached decades. In a very different system, in November 2019, the then US Energy Secretary Rick Perry told Fox News that Donald Trump was “the chosen one”, sent by God; in the same interview he said he believed Barack Obama had also been sent by God for his time. I put these side by side not to equate them but because the move is related: a ruler placed beyond ordinary criticism, by law in one case and by providence in the other.

Believers in every tradition hold that God acts in history, and saying so is not manipulation. The question to ask is narrower: is the sacred claim being used to place a person beyond criticism?

How to notice it #

• The leader is described as chosen, sent, destined or providential, rather than elected or appointed.
• Criticism of the leader is described as an attack on the faith, the nation or the natural order.
• The sacred or “objective” frame carries decisions that have nothing to do with it. Ask what the rules say, not what the picture says.
• Rivals are labelled usurpers, liars or traitors before any argument about what they propose.
• Disasters are blamed on insufficient loyalty, and successes are credited to the ruler’s favour.
• The same claim is denied to the other side. If “chosen by God” is fine for your leader and absurd for theirs, you are reading the frame, not the facts.

Frequently asked questions #

What is the divine right of kings? #

It is the doctrine that a monarch receives authority directly from God and answers to no earthly court. In its full form it belongs mainly to 16th and 17th century Europe, argued by James VI and I, Bossuet and Filmer, and answered by Locke.

Was Hammurabi’s code religious law? #

Not in its content. The stele shows Hammurabi before the sun god Shamash and the prologue says the gods gave him rule, but the laws themselves contain almost no religious or ceremonial law. Scholars still debate whether it was legislation, a record of verdicts or a scholarly list.

Did the Egyptians believe the pharaoh was a god? #

The pharaoh was “Son of Ra” and was seen as the incarnation of Horus and later of Amon-Re. Historians such as Roberts and Westad link that status to the political merger of cults; others hold that his divinity was understood as innate.

Is the Mandate of Heaven the same as divine right? #

No. The Mandate of Heaven was conditional: Heaven could withdraw it from an unjust ruler, and rebellion and disaster were signs that it had. Stuart and Bourbon divine right placed the king beyond every earthly judge.

Do modern politicians still claim divine appointment? #

Some supporters describe leaders in those terms: Rick Perry called Trump “the chosen one” in 2019, and said Obama had been sent by God too. Some constitutions go further, such as Thailand’s, which places the king “in a position of revered worship”. These are documented texts and statements; what they mean to believers is for each reader to judge.

The lesson #

The oldest persuasion technology does not try to convince you that the ruler is right. It tries to put the ruler somewhere arguments do not reach. Hammurabi did it with a god at the top of a stone; later kings did it with sermons and treatises; today it is done with softer words like “chosen” and “destined”. The defence is the same in every century: read the laws, not the picture, and apply the same test to the leaders you like as to the ones you don’t.