When thou art come unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me;
When thou ... shalt say, I will set a king over me. In the following passage Moses prophetically announces a revolution which should occur at a later period in the national history of Israel. No sanction nor recommendation was indicated; on the contrary, when the popular clamour had effected that constitutional change on the Theocracy by the appointment of a king, the divine disapproval was expressed in the most unequivocal terms (1 Samuel 8:7).
Permission at length was granted, God reserving to Himself the nomination of the family and the person who should be elevated to the regal dignity (1 Samuel 9:16; 1 Samuel 10:24; 1 Samuel 16:12; 1 Chronicles 28:4). In short, Moses, foreseeing that his ignorant and fickle countrymen, insensible to their advantages as a special people, would soon wish to change their constitution and be like other nations, provides to a certain extent for such an emergency, and lays down the principles on which a king in Israel must act, (cf. 1 Samuel 8:1-22; 1 Samuel 10:1-27; 1 Samuel 12:1-25.)
He was to possess certain indispensable requisites; he was not to be a foreigner, but a native Israelite, of the same race and religion as the people, to preserve the civil and ecclesiastical laws of the state, especially to maintain the purity of the established worship, as well as to be a type of Christ, a spiritual king, one of their brethren (Graves 'On the Pentateuch.' 2:, p. 153; also, 1:, p. 32-35; Hengstenberg, 'Christology,' 1: p. 227, 228).