Can We Make A Biblical Case for Limited Government?

….for limited government can be found in Deuteronomy 17:16-17, where kings of Israel were prohibited from gathering horses, wives, silver, and gold for himself. One might think this is just a restriction on “bling” a la Solomon, but horses pulled chariots for offensive warfare, wives were won by advantageous treaties with often subjugated nations, and gold and silver were both pillaged from subjugated nations, and paid for those offensive expeditions. Collecting a lot of wives also meant that the men who ordinarily would have married those women would be castrated as harem attendants (you need someone to keep the wives from killing one another, but who won’t have sex with them), or would be made into soldiers who would steal/rape women from other nations.

So we often don’t understand it now, but more or less, the trappings of empire were not granted to the kings of Israel. Our Constitution honors this by limiting the duration of time for funding for the army.