From Saul To Manasseh to Trump: The Bible’s Long, Sordid Warning About Corrupt Leaders

When the Israelites first demanded a king, the prophet Samuel warned them what would happen. God had Samuel speak words that sound eerily contemporary: “He will take your sons and appoint them for himself… He will take the best of your fields and vineyards… He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.” The people wanted a strongman “like the nations.” They got one— and then another, and another. The Deuteronomistic historians who compiled Samuel and Kings built their narrative around a clear moral: leaders who betray covenantal principles for power and wealth drag the nation down with them.

Saul, the first strongman, starts promising but soon reveals his insecurity and rashness. He spares the powerful, disobeys the rules he swore to uphold, and turns his office into a vehicle for paranoia and revenge. Americans are watching this happen in real time: a leader who cannot govern his own impulses cannot govern a nation.

After Solomon’s death, his son Rehoboam scorns wise counsel and increases the burden on the Jewish people. His arrogance splits the kingdom in two. This is the archetype of the divider-in-chief— a leader who makes polarization his method, until one nation becomes two hostile camps.

Then came Ahab, the most infamous of the northern kings, who married Jezebel, built altars to Baal while she silenced prophets and engineered Naboth’s murder to seize his vineyard. This is state-sponsored corruption and cruelty. We see its echo today in a president who substitutes loyalty for integrity, who punishes whistleblowers, who uses the state to enrich himself and his cronies while persecuting critics.

Jehu was a false reformer who rose on the promise of cleansing corruption but repeated the same sins as his predecessors. Sound familiar? He basically campaigned as an outsider, governed as an oligarch, and drained the swamp only to fill it again.

Meanwhile in the South, Ahaz remodeled the Temple altar to please Assyria, making Judah a vassal state. More recently, we have watched a leader cozy up to autocrats abroad, trading away national dignity for personal gain, undermining alliances for photo-ops with strongmen.

Manasseh was the one who sealed the Hebrews’ doom, introducing child sacrifice, desecrating the Temple, filling Jerusalem with bloodshed. The text says even Josiah’s later reforms cannot undo the damage. This is the warning for our moment— not to mention current-day Isarel’s— a president (and prime minister) who undermines democratic institutions and traditions so deeply that even their successors will struggle to repair them, who normalize cruelty and political violence so thoroughly that it becomes the new baseline.

Again and again, Kings repeats, “He did evil in the sight of the LORD.” Again and again, the people tolerate it until disaster hits. The authors of these books aren’t just writing history; they’re writing a sermon about political reality. Bad leadership isn’t just personal failure— it hollows out institutions, hardens hearts, and drags a whole nation into ruin. There were reformist kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, who tried to restore justice and covenant faithfulness. Renewal proven possible but fragile. Their efforts showed that even after long seasons of corruption, a leader can begin to heal the breach— but only if the people demand it, and only if they remember the cost of complacency.

The books of Kings end with Jerusalem destroyed, the Temple burned, the people in exile. The text’s moral is clear: a nation that tolerates corrupt rulers, that shrugs at injustice and idolatry, will eventually lose its freedom. The authors of the Hebrew Bible told this story so that later generations would not repeat it.

We are living in our own Deuteronomistic history now. We have watched a leader who divides like Rehoboam, corrupts like Ahab, appeases like Ahaz, and undermines institutions like Manasseh. Are Americans responding like the Israelites— demanding a king and then suffering his abuses— or whether we will heed the warning written in ancient ink urging us to not let bad kings destroy our covenant, our justice, and our freedom.

May I urge a k.d. lang version of Leonard Cohen’s classic “Hallelujah” on you? Trying this one, one of my favorites:

Although it’s a masterclass in poetic license, the song takes fragments of biblical stories (David playing for the Lord, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah) and folds them into a meditation on erotic love, betrayal, longing and spiritual transcendence. But the details don’t line up neatly with scripture— and that’s deliberate. For example, the “secret chord” David played that “pleased the Lord” is never specified in the Bible— that’s pure poetic invention. The verse about “your faith was strong but you needed proof / you saw her bathing on the roof” fuses David seeing Bathsheba with Samson losing his strength to Delilah— two very different stories. The “broken throne” and “cut your hair” imagery again blends Davidic and Samson motifs. Cohen wasn’t writing a Sunday school lesson; he was using biblical archetypes as metaphors for the messy, ecstatic, painful intersection of the sacred and the profane. In Jewish midrashic tradition, that kind of creative reshaping of scripture to illuminate new meanings is actually very common. Cohen, who knew his Tanakh and commentaries, was working in that spirit.