Once every seven years, on the night after the first day of Sukkot in the year following the sabbatical release, carpenters raised a wooden platform in the Temple courtyard in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hakhel (the covenant assembly commanded in Deuteronomy 31, at which the whole nation, men, women, and children, hears the Torah read aloud), and the reader was the king.
The Mishnah preserves the choreography in Sotah 7:8. The scroll climbed through four pairs of hands: the attendant of the assembly passed it to the head of the assembly, the head to the deputy High Priest, the deputy to the High Priest, the High Priest to the king. The law permitted the king to receive it standing and read sitting. Agrippa, a king of the Herodian line, grandson of Herod, a dynasty descended from Edomite converts, stood to receive it and stood to read, and the sages praised him for standing. Reading on into the law of the king, he reached the verse that rules on who may hold his office - a passage we read in this week’s parasha, Shoftim.
לֹא תוּכַל לָתֵת עָלֶיךָ אִישׁ נָכְרִי אֲשֶׁר לֹא־אָחִיךָ הוּא, “you may not set over yourself a foreigner, who is not your brother” (Deuteronomy 17:15).
His eyes ran with tears. And the crowd called up to the platform: אַל תִּתְיָרֵא אַגְרִיפָּס, אָחִינוּ אַתָּה אָחִינוּ אַתָּה אָחִינוּ אַתָּה, “Do not fear, Agrippa. You are our brother, you are our brother, you are our brother” (Mishnah Sotah 7:8).
This is what made him weep:
רַק לֹא־יַרְבֶּה־לּוֹ סוּסִים וְלֹא־יָשִׁיב אֶת־הָעָם מִצְרַיְמָה לְמַעַן הַרְבּוֹת סוּס... וְלֹא יַרְבֶּה־לּוֹ נָשִׁים וְלֹא יָסוּר לְבָבוֹ וְכֶסֶף וְזָהָב לֹא יַרְבֶּה־לּוֹ מְאֹד. “Only he shall not multiply horses for himself, and he shall not return the people to Egypt in order to multiply horses... And he shall not multiply wives for himself, that his heart not turn away; and silver and gold he shall not multiply for himself excessively” (Deuteronomy 17:16–17).
וְהָיָה כְשִׁבְתּוֹ עַל כִּסֵּא מַמְלַכְתּוֹ וְכָתַב לוֹ אֶת־מִשְׁנֵה הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת עַל־סֵפֶר... וְהָיְתָה עִמּוֹ וְקָרָא בוֹ כָּל־יְמֵי חַיָּיו. “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this Torah on a scroll... And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life” (Deuteronomy 17:18–19).
The word לוֹ, “for himself,” appears four times. Three times it is forbidden: horses for himself, wives for himself, silver and gold for himself. The fourth time it is commanded: he shall write a Torah scroll for himself.
The Torah frames its rationale deliberately. It opens by requiring that the king come מִקֶּרֶב אַחֶיךָ, “from among your brothers” (17:15), and it closes with the purpose of all that daily reading: לְבִלְתִּי רוּם־לְבָבוֹ מֵאֶחָיו, “that his heart not rise above his brothers” (17:20).
The people may elevate a man; the verse even doubles the verb, שׂוֹם תָּשִׂים, “you shall surely place” him over you. But the King may not elevate himself aboe those who appoint him. The mechanism holding the two apart is a Torah he copies out by hand.
Why horses becomes clear from the clause attached to them: the king must not return הָעָם, the people, to Egypt to multiply them. Egypt is a political condition, the regime of mobilized bodies, monumental wealth, and a ruler who stands to his subjects as an owner to his stock. The law of the king is the Torah’s admission that the Exodus is reversible, and that the agent of the reversal would be Israel’s own throne. Every clause in the passage is a de-Pharaohization measure. The nations’ kings accumulate; this king copies. Their word is law; his law is a word he did not write and may only transcribe.
In the town of Ramah, late in the eleventh century BCE, the elders of Israel come to an old judge whose sons take bribes, and they make their demand in Deuteronomy’s own vocabulary: שִׂימָה־לָּנוּ מֶלֶךְ לְשָׁפְטֵנוּ כְּכָל־הַגּוֹיִם, “place for us a king to judge us, like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5). The phrase “like all the nations” is rare in Tanakh, and here it lands where Deuteronomy predicted it would, in the mouth of a people asking for a throne. Samuel’s answer: He will take your sons for his chariots and his horsemen; he will take your daughters as perfumers and cooks and bakers; he will take your fields and your vineyards; he will take a tenth of your seed and your flocks (I Samuel 8:11–17). The law said the king must not multiply “for himself”; Samuel itemizes where the multiplied things come from.
But the people insist. “No. A king shall be over us” (8:19).
Deuteronomy also supplies the counter-model.
When Joshua takes command at the Jordan, the charge he receives is verbally stitched to the law of the king: אַל־תָּסוּר מִמֶּנּוּ יָמִין וּשְׂמֹאול, “do not turn from it right or left” (Joshua 1:7), the same idiom the king-law uses of the reading king (Deuteronomy 17:20), followed by לֹא־יָמוּשׁ סֵפֶר הַתּוֹרָה הַזֶּה מִפִּיךָ, “this book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth; you shall murmur it day and night” (Joshua 1:8).
Written Torah, continuous recitation, no swerving, success as the consequence: the pattern appears in two job descriptions, the conqueror’s and the king’s. When the Torah needed a template for Israelite power, it did not look at the surrounding thrones. It looked at Moses’ student. The king of Deuteronomy 17 is Joshua with a dynasty, a commander whose authority is legitimate while he remains a disciple of Mosaic Law.
The phrase הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת עַל־סֵפֶר, “this Torah on a scroll,” occurs in the king-law (17:18) and in one other place: וַיְהִי כְּכַלּוֹת מֹשֶׁה לִכְתֹּב אֶת־דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה־הַזֹּאת עַל־סֵפֶר, “when Moses finished writing the words of this Torah on a scroll” (Deuteronomy 31:24). Moses’ scroll is deposited beside the Ark, וְהָיָה־שָׁם בְּךָ לְעֵד, “and it shall be there as a witness against you” (Deuteronomy 31:26). The king’s scroll is that national witness miniaturized and relocated. It moves out of the sanctuary and into the palace, off the Ark’s flank and onto the king’s body. Wherever the throne goes, the testimony against the throne goes with it. The Davidic promise itself is phrased in this passage’s language; God pledges to establish David’s כִּסֵּא מַמְלַכְתּוֹ, “the throne of his kingdom” (II Samuel 7:13), the precise phrase of Deuteronomy 17:18. The throne that is promised forever is the throne defined as a scribal desk.
Then comes King Solomon. The book of Kings first gives the numbers, and gives them as glory: one thousand four hundred chariots and twelve thousand horsemen (I Kings 10:26); silver in Jerusalem “like stones” (10:27); chariots imported from Egypt at six hundred shekels of silver apiece and horses at a hundred and fifty (10:29). Then, having let the reader admire the inventory, the narrative turns the page to the ledger’s other column: seven hundred royal wives, three hundred concubines, and the verdict, נָשָׁיו הִטּוּ אֶת־לְבָבוֹ, “his wives turned his heart” (I Kings 11:3–4), the very swerve of the heart, יָסוּר לְבָבוֹ, that Deuteronomy 17:17 named. Every item is checked off in order: the silver, the horses, the Egyptian supply line, the wives, the deviant heart. Solomon marries Pharaoh’s daughter and buys Pharaoh’s chariots. Egypt has been imported and reassembled in Jerusalem.
The Talmud, in Sanhedrin 21b, went looking for the mechanism of the failure and found it in a single pronoun - “I.” Rabbi Yitzchak asks there why the Torah generally withholds the reasons for its commands, and answers that in the two places a reason was revealed, the greatest man in the world stumbled over it. The Gemara then stages Solomon’s inner reasoning: אֲנִי אַרְבֶּה וְלֹא אָסוּר, “I will multiply, and I will not turn aside,” and again, אֲנִי אַרְבֶּה וְלֹא אָשִׁיב, “I will multiply, and I will not return them” (Sanhedrin 21b). Look at the grammar of the boast. Solomon splits each law into an action and a consequence, and claims the action while personally guaranteeing against the consequence.
Because he understands why the law exists, he concludes it cannot have meant him. Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who later joined the Nazi party, opened his Political Theology in 1922 with the definition that made him infamous: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The law binds, but I - sovereign - decide where it stops binding. Deuteronomy had feared the heart that rises above the brothers. The Talmud shows what the risen heart sounds like from the inside. It sounds like exegesis.
Against that “I” the rabbis set the scroll, and they choreographed it with a precision worth reading slowly. The Mishnah rules:
וְכוֹתֵב לוֹ סֵפֶר תּוֹרָה לִשְׁמוֹ. יוֹצֵא לַמִּלְחָמָה, מוֹצִיאָהּ עִמּוֹ. נִכְנָס, מַכְנִיסָהּ עִמּוֹ. יוֹשֵׁב בַּדִּין, הִיא עִמּוֹ. מֵסֵב, הִיא כְנֶגְדּוֹ. “He writes for himself a Torah scroll for his own sake. Going out to war, he brings it out with him. Coming in, he brings it in with him. Sitting in judgment, it is with him. Reclining at his meal, it is opposite him” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 2:4).
Three times עִמּוֹ, “with him”; then, at the table, the preposition changes: כְנֶגְדּוֹ, “opposite him.” At war and in court the Torah is the king’s companion. At the banquet, the one venue that is pure royal pleasure, it moves across the table and faces him, seated like a guest who will not leave and cannot be dismissed.
The Gemara on Sanhedrin 21b adds that the king writes two scrolls, one stored in his treasury and one that goes out and comes in with him, made כְּמִין קָמֵיעַ, “like a kind of amulet,” and hung on his arm. Other kings wore amulets to ward off harm from themselves. This king wears one that wards off himself. That protects him from his own ego.
The Tosefta closes the last loophole, the dynastic one: he writes the scroll ללמוד לשמו, to learn from it in his own name, שֶׁלֹּא יְהֵא נָאוֹת בְּשֶׁל אֲבוֹתָיו אֶלָּא בְּשֶׁלּוֹ, “so that he may adorn himself only with his own, never with his fathers’” (Tosefta Sanhedrin 4:5). A throne can be inherited. The scroll cannot. Each king in the line starts over as a copyist.
The Sifrei reads the doubled verb שׂוֹם תָּשִׂים as commanding royal awe, שֶׁתְּהֵא אֵימָתוֹ עָלֶיךָ, “that his awe be upon you”: none may ride his horse, sit on his throne, or use his scepter (Sifrei Devarim 157). And then the very same section records Agrippa’s tears and the crowd’s cry, “You are our brother.” The midrash holds both points: a king must be feared, and a king must remain a brother.
Solomon and Agrippa reveal two different ways a king can be shielded from the Torah.
Solomon shields himself. He reads the prohibition against multiplying wives and horses, understands the reasons the Torah gives, and decides that those dangers do not apply to him. “I will multiply,” he says, “and I will not turn aside.” He does not reject the Torah openly; he interprets himself into an exception.
At Hakhel, Agrippa does the opposite. He does not evade the Torah. He stands respectfully before it, reads the verse that calls his own eligibility into question, and weeps. At that moment the scroll is truly כְנֶגְדּוֹ—opposite him. It confronts the king publicly with a judgment he cannot comfortably absorb.
The failure belongs to the audience. Rather than allowing the verse to retain its force, the people reassure Agrippa: “You are our brother.” Rabbi Natan therefore gives a startling verdict:
בְּאוֹתָהּ שָׁעָה נִתְחַיְּיבוּ שׂוֹנְאֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל כְּלָיָיה, שֶׁהֶחֱנִיפוּ לוֹ לְאַגְרִיפַּס
“At that hour Israel became liable to destruction, because they flattered Agrippa” (Sotah 41b).
The problem was not their affection for Agrippa. The problem was that affection became a reason to silence what the Torah had just said. Solomon exempted himself from the law; Agrippa’s audience exempted him on his behalf.
The two stories thus expose complementary dangers. A ruler can place himself above the Torah, but a loyal public can also do it for him. The scroll may be present, honored, and read aloud, yet still be rendered politically powerless if neither the king nor the people will allow it to contradict him.
The platform came down after the festival, but according to Rabbi Natan the destruction had already begun. Israel maintained a performative commitment to Torah, and yet because, at the decisive moment, it flattered the king, it brought about its destruction.
The law of the king also speaks to the kingdom within each of us. Torah must be not only עִמּוֹ, with us as something we study and honor, but also כְנֶגְדּוֹ, opposite us as a voice permitted to challenge our desires, excuses, and self-image. The Torah cautions against flattering ourselves and receiving the flattery of others. The Torah is an amulet against egotism - but even a king who writes a Torah scroll is not immune from self-deception. We are obligated to exercise power and to participate in social and organizational hierarchy, while never allowing it to turn us into Pharaoh.
Chodesh Tov and Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar
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