When Rule Becomes Devouring: Entrusted Authority and the Morphology of Rebellious Rule

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Abstract. Biblical and Second Temple Jewish texts depict corrupted power through different images: acquisitive kings, self-magnifying empires, false shepherds, devouring beasts, and insatiable giants. This article proposes a Christian theological morphology, developed through canonical and Second Temple comparison, for comparing these figures without collapsing their historical settings, literary functions, kinds of authority, or canonical status. Its central claim is that the fullest form of predatory rule identified here is a directional reversal of entrusted authority: persons and goods placed under authority for a proper end are reinterpreted as resources for the preservation, enlargement, exaltation, or appetite of the ruling power itself. Ezekiel 34 supplies the controlling instance because derivative office, proper purpose, violated limits, reversed direction, judgment, and restored shepherding converge within a single oracle. Other texts participate analogically rather than uniformly. Deuteronomy 17 supplies a grammar of bounded kingship; 1 Samuel 8 depicts royal appropriation; Isaiah 10 portrays providential instrumentality appropriated through self-magnification; Daniel 7 gives predatory imperial exercise a beastly form; and 1 Enoch functions as a Second Temple limit case intensifying disproportion and consumption without depicting entrusted political office. The comparison is governed by four coordinates: derivative status, limits, purpose, and direction. The article argues that this morphology identifies something more specific than domination or exploitation alone: the transformation of beneficiaries or entrusted goods into means of sustaining the authority that was ordered toward their proper good. Within Christian theological construal of the canonical materials, the New Testament presents the definitive contrast in the messianic kingship of Christ, especially the Son of Man who serves, the Good Shepherd who gives his life for the sheep, the obedient Son, and the slain yet reigning Lamb. The result is not an argument against authority, coercion, judgment, or institutional maintenance as such, but a distinction between rightly ordered derivative rule and authority that makes its own preservation or enlargement a governing end. Keywords: biblical theology; authority; kingship; political theology; Ezekiel 34; Daniel 7; 1 Enoch; Christology

1. Introduction: The Problem of Direction Biblical texts describe the corruption of power in markedly different ways. A king accumulates. Another king takes. An empire gathers nations and removes boundaries. Shepherds feed themselves from the flock. A beast devours the earth. Giants exhaust human production and finally consume human beings. These figures do not belong to one literary genre, historical setting, or demonstrated genealogy. Nor do they exercise the same kind of authority. Yet they repeatedly portray power becoming self-referential: what lies under, within, or before a ruling power increasingly comes to be interpreted according to its usefulness to that power. This article argues that the clearest form of this corruption is a directional reversal of entrusted authority. Authority that is derivative, bounded, and ordered toward a proper end becomes possessive when persons or goods under its charge are treated primarily as means of sustaining the authority itself. At its extreme, possessive authority becomes devouring authority. The point requires precision. Possessive authority does not mean merely possessing an office, exercising jurisdiction, maintaining an institution, using resources, levying obligations, punishing wrongdoing, or exercising coercive force. Biblical texts do not identify authority itself with corruption. They assume the legitimacy of rule, judgment, protection, shepherding, and dominion. The relevant question is one of ordering: Does the maintenance of authority remain subordinate to the end for which authority exists, or do preservation, enlargement, exaltation, and appetite become governing ends in themselves? That distinction identifies something more specific than several familiar descriptions of corrupt power. Domination identifies the subordination of others to a ruling will. Exploitation identifies the unjust extraction of benefit. Augustine’s libido dominandi describes the self-exalting lust to dominate, while modern critiques of political sacralization describe the capacity of political orders to gather ultimate loyalties toward themselves.1 The morphology proposed here overlaps with these categories but isolates a narrower relational change: those for whom an authority exists, or goods entrusted to its use, become those from whom the authority feeds. The distinctive analytical contribution therefore lies in the category of directional reversal. These neighboring categories answer different analytical questions. Libido dominandi names disordered desire within the ruler; domination names a relation of subordination; exploitation names unjust extraction; political sacralization names the displacement of ultimate loyalty toward a political order. Directional reversal, by contrast, asks what happens to the purpose-bearing relation itself: whether those toward whose good an authority is ordered remain beneficiaries of that authority or become the material from 1

Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1, preface; cf. 5.19 and 19.15; William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). Augustine’s libido dominandi and Cavanaugh’s account of political sacralization are treated as adjacent interlocutors rather than sources of the morphology proposed here.

which it secures its own continuance, enlargement, or exaltation. The category therefore does not replace these adjacent accounts. It identifies a particular deformation that may coexist with them and that becomes most visible where a prior relation of charge, service, or bounded instrumentality can be specified. Four coordinates govern the comparison. Derivative status asks how a power stands in relation to an order it does not create for itself. This category includes acknowledged derivation, accountability, and operative allegiance. It is preferable to a simple question of metaphysical “source,” since biblical texts can simultaneously affirm divine sovereignty and condemn the proximate allegiance and exercise of a rebellious power. Limits concern the boundaries within which authority or power may properly operate. Purpose concerns the end for which an office, commission, or form of rule exists. Wherever possible, that end should be established from the text’s own representation of the office or commission rather than supplied independently by the interpreter. Where a proper end is only canonically inferred or theologically construed, that level of inference should be stated explicitly. Direction concerns the relational movement of authority: whether power and resources remain ordered toward the proper end of the office and the good of those appropriately served by it, or whether those persons and goods are increasingly redirected toward the preservation and enlargement of the ruling order itself. These coordinates do not appear with equal force in every text. That inequality is not a defect in the comparison; it is one of its controls. This article therefore distinguishes three levels of participation in the morphology. First, full custodial deformation occurs where an entrusted office ordered toward the good of those under it is reversed so that the beneficiaries become resources for the officeholder. Ezekiel 34 is the controlling instance. Second, instrumental-power deformation occurs where a derivative power is presented as serving a bounded providential purpose yet pursues a self-magnifying intention beyond it. Isaiah 10 provides the clearest example. Assyria is not a shepherd failing to nurture a flock, nor does Isaiah depict it as consciously receiving and accepting an entrusted office; it is a providential instrument of judgment whose own intention exceeds the purpose for which it is used. Third, predatory intensification occurs where imagery of beastliness, disproportion, appetite, or consumption magnifies selected features of corrupted power without reproducing the full custodial structure. Daniel’s beasts and Enoch’s giants belong here. This hierarchy prevents comparison from becoming identity. The argument does not claim that Samuel’s king, Isaiah’s Assyria, Ezekiel’s shepherds, Daniel’s beasts, and Enoch’s giants are the same kind of figure. Nor does canonical juxtaposition establish literary dependence. 3

The originality claimed here is synthetic and conceptual rather than the discovery of previously unnoticed meanings in individual passages. Scholarship has long examined royal accumulation, contested monarchy, failed shepherding, beastly empire, Enochic appetite, and Christological rule within their respective contexts. At the center of the comparison is a recurring relational change. In its fullest instances, what is received under a prior order is increasingly treated as material for the continuance or enlargement of power itself. Ezekiel 34 provides the clearest textual control because entrusted office, proper end, directional reversal, judgment, and restored shepherding converge within one oracle. The argument distinguishes four registers. Historical exegesis attends to each text in its literary and historical setting; canonical comparison places biblical texts beside one another without making juxtaposition evidence of authorial dependence; Second Temple comparison permits Jewish texts such as 1 Enoch to function here as historically and conceptually relevant comparanda rather than as part of the canonical argument; Christian theological construal asks how the canonical materials are subsequently read within Christian claims about Christ and divine rule. The analytical vocabulary remains secondary to the texts’ own language of taking, arrogance, rebellion, oppression, false shepherding, beastliness, blasphemy, devouring, judgment, service, and obedience.2 The article therefore proceeds differently from a simple canonical survey. Ezekiel 34 first establishes the controlling morphology. Genesis and Deuteronomy then provide a compressed canonical grammar of derivative and bounded rule; Samuel shows royal appropriation; Isaiah clarifies the deformation of instrumental power; Daniel and 1 Enoch function as intensifications and limit cases. The New Testament material then asks how the Christian canon construes the restoration and judgment of rule in relation to Christ. Textual note. Biblical citations and brief quotations use the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue, 2021). Quotations from 1 Enoch follow George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation.3

The Controlling Morphology: Ezekiel 34 Ezekiel 34 supplies the clearest textual control because the entire morphology appears within one prophetic oracle. The rulers of Israel are depicted through the conventional im2

On Christian theological interpretation as a mode of reading Scripture within the theological claims and practices of the Christian community, see Stephen E. Fowl, “Christian Theological Interpretation,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation, ed. Ian Boxall and Bradley C. Gregory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 173-90, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108859226.012. The distinction among historical exegesis, canonical comparison, Second Temple comparison, and Christian theological construal is methodological for this essay. The graded morphology of full custodial deformation, instrumental-power deformation, and predatory intensification is the analytical development advanced here; the governing coordinates are derivative status, limits, purpose, and direction. 3 Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue). Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Quotations from 1 Enoch follow George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). Nickelsburg and VanderKam’s edition incorporates the Ethiopic, Greek, and available Dead Sea Scrolls Aramaic textual evidence.

age of shepherds, an image situated within Ezekiel’s wider theological treatment of failed rule and restoration.4 The problem is not the existence of shepherding authority. The problem is its inversion. Ezekiel 34:2: “Should not shepherds feed the sheep?” (NRSVue) The question establishes the proper direction of the office. Shepherds exist for the flock. The following accusations expose the reversal: the shepherds eat the fat, clothe themselves with wool, slaughter the well-fed animals, fail to strengthen the weak, neglect the sick and injured, do not recover the straying or seek the lost, and rule “with force and harshness” (Ezek. 34:2-4). The flock is scattered and becomes food for wild animals (34:5). YHWH therefore declares himself against the shepherds and announces that he will rescue the sheep “from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them” (34:10). That language is decisive. The shepherds have not merely governed badly. The relation between ruler and ruled has changed its direction. Those entrusted to the shepherds have become material from which the shepherds feed. The four coordinates are unusually visible. Derivative status: the shepherds hold an office for which they remain answerable to YHWH. Their authority is neither self-originating nor ultimate. Limits: the flock is under their charge but is not therefore available for unrestricted consumption. Jurisdiction is not ownership in the possessive sense developed here. Purpose: the repeated verbs of the chapter identify what shepherding should accomplish— feeding, strengthening, healing, binding, seeking, rescuing, and protecting. Direction: proper shepherding directs authority toward the life of the flock. Corrupted shepherding reverses that movement. Life, goods, and productive capacity flow from the flock toward the shepherds. This last coordinate gives the article its central analytical category. The sheep cease to function primarily as those for whom the shepherds exercise office and become those from whom the shepherds sustain themselves. The corruption is therefore more specific than generic oppression. Oppression may describe its effects, but Ezekiel exposes the internal inversion of office. A relation of charge becomes a relation of consumption. Authority becomes possessive when it treats what is under its care principally in terms of its usefulness to the ruling power. Ezekiel also supplies the positive form and thereby establishes an important control on the argument. YHWH does not answer corrupt shepherding by abolishing shepherding. 4

Madhavi Nevader, “Ezekiel and Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ezekiel, ed. Corrine Carvalho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 218-36, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190634513.013.28; Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 273-308. Nevader situates Ezekiel’s royal condemnation and restoration within the book’s wider theological rethinking of human and divine rule; Block provides a sustained exegetical treatment of Ezekiel 34:1-31.

He promises to seek the sheep, rescue them, gather them, feed them, bind the injured, strengthen the weak, and judge within the flock (34:11-22). He then promises to set over them “one shepherd, my servant David” (34:23). The answer to devouring rule is therefore not rulelessness. It is restored rule. This point also establishes several negative controls that will govern the rest of the study. An authority’s use of resources is not by itself devouring. Institutional continuity is not by itself devouring. Hierarchy is not by itself devouring. Judgment is not by itself devouring. Coercion is not by itself devouring. Ezekiel’s own positive vision includes judgment and authoritative intervention. Corruption occurs when the proper end of rule is subordinated to the maintenance, appetite, security, or enlargement of the ruling power itself. The full morphology can therefore be stated provisionally: entrusted office → proper end → reversal of direction → beneficiaries become resources → judgment upon the ruler → restoration of rightly ordered authority The remaining texts should not be forced to reproduce that entire sequence. They can now be measured against it.

Derivative and Bounded Rule: Genesis 1 and Deuteronomy 17 The canonical background can be stated briefly. Genesis 1 places human dominion within a creation humans neither originate nor own absolutely. Dominion is given by divine speech and blessing (Gen. 1:26-28). Genesis is not thereby presenting a political constitution, and the present argument does not require a comprehensive account of the imago Dei. It requires only the more modest claim that human agency is creaturely and received within an already ordered creation.5 That grammar matters because the biblical problem is not power as such. Human dominion is given. Psalm 72 can pray for a king who judges justly, defends the poor, delivers the needy, and crushes the oppressor (Ps. 72:1-4). Authority can protect and judge precisely because righteous rule is not reducible to noninterference or self-sacrifice. Deuteronomy 17 sharpens this creaturely grammar politically. Israel’s king is permitted to hold genuine office, but his authority is bounded. He is not to multiply horses, wives, silver, or gold for himself (Deut. 17:16-17). He must remain under Torah, learn the fear of YHWH, and resist self-elevation. Deuteronomy 17:20: “neither exalting himself above other members of the community” (NRSVue) The text places restrictions precisely where royal power can turn office into enlargement. The king remains a member of the covenant community rather than becoming the source 5

D. J. A. Clines, “The Image of God in Man,” Tyndale Bulletin 19, no. 1 (1968): 53-103, https://doi.org/10.53751 /001c.30671; J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005).

of its order. His authority is vertically bounded by divine instruction and horizontally bounded by his relation to those he rules. Historical interpretation of the law of the king remains disputed. Bernard Levinson emphasizes Deuteronomy’s radical subordination of monarchy to Torah, whereas Ernest Nicholson questions whether the law grants monarchy a substantial positive function at all.6 The present argument does not depend on resolving that debate. In the final form of the text, the king is denied unrestricted sovereignty and indefinite accumulation. Deuteronomy therefore provides a useful baseline: authority may be real without being ultimate, and rule may possess resources without becoming possessive rule.

From Bounded Kingship to Royal Appropriation: 1 Samuel 8 First Samuel 8 portrays a movement from displaced confidence to appropriation. Israel requests a king “like other nations” (1 Sam. 8:5), and YHWH interprets the request theologically: 1 Samuel 8:7: “they have rejected me from being king over them” (NRSVue) The problem cannot simply be the existence of monarchy, since the wider biblical tradition can envision legitimate kingship. The narrative concern is the terms on which the people seek it. They want a visible ruler who will “go out before us and fight our battles” (8:20). The king is sought as a concentrated center of security. Samuel answers by describing what such concentrated kingship can take. The king will take sons for chariots and military service, daughters for royal service, the best fields and vineyards, portions of produce, servants, livestock, and finally a tenth of the flocks. The catalogue ends: 1 Samuel 8:17: “you shall be his slaves” (NRSVue) The rhetorical movement matters. Israel seeks a king who will act for the people; Samuel warns that the people and their productive goods can instead become resources of the royal order. Their sons become military capacity. Their daughters become royal labor. Their land and produce move toward the court. Their servants and animals are absorbed into royal use. Finally, they themselves become servants of the king. This is not yet Ezekiel 34’s complete custodial morphology. Samuel’s point is framed through the danger of concentrated royal appropriation, not through a developed shepherd-office analogy. Yet the directional similarity is substantial: people who seek the 6 Bernard M. Levinson, “The Reconceptualization of Kingship in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History’s Transformation of Torah,” Vetus Testamentum 51, no. 4 (2001): 511-34, https://doi.org/10.1163/ 15685330152939523; Ernest Nicholson, “The ‘Law’ of the King in Deuteronomy 17:14-20,” in Deuteronomy and the Judaean Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 101-16, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198702733.003.0005. Levinson construes the passage as a radical constitutional delimitation of monarchy, whereas Nicholson questions whether monarchy has a substantive positive function in Deuteronomy’s polity.

ruler as an instrument of security can become means of sustaining the ruler’s security and enlargement. The wider Samuel tradition prevents an indiscriminate anti-monarchical reading. Saul is also chosen under YHWH’s direction, and the books preserve complex positive and negative presentations of kingship.7 First Samuel 8 therefore functions better as a diagnosis of monarchy’s deformation than as proof that monarchy is intrinsically illegitimate. Historical comparison with Neo-Assyrian practice gives the warning further concreteness, though it need not determine the theological meaning of the final text. Mark Leuchter has argued that 1 Samuel 8:11-18 reflects Judah’s encounter with Neo-Assyrian imperial practices, while Jonathan Kaplan places the warning within a wider ancient Near Eastern admonitory tradition concerning royal conduct.8 The Assyrian evidence is suggestive. Sargon II’s inscriptions describe deportation from Samaria, incorporation of conquered personnel into the military establishment, installation of an Assyrian governor, and tribute. Sennacherib’s inscriptions describe conquest, deportation, seizure of livestock, territorial reduction, redistribution of cities, and increased tribute.9 Imperial inscriptions are propagandistic and their numerical claims should not be treated as modern statistical reports. The administrative direction, however, is clear: persons, land, goods, and military capacity are drawn toward an enlarging imperial center. Samuel therefore supplies an important extension of the controlling morphology. Ezekiel shows shepherds feeding on a flock explicitly entrusted to their care. Samuel shows a royal order capable of converting the people who sought it for security into resources of that order. The distinction should remain intact. The texts are not identical. The directional reversal is comparable. 7

Serge Frolov, “The Semiotics of Covert Action in 1 Samuel 9-10,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31, no. 4 (2007): 429-50, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089207080559; Dawn Maria Sellars, “An Obedient Servant? The Reign of King Saul (1 Samuel 13-15) Reassessed,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 35, no. 3 (2011): 317-38, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309089211398710. These studies approach the literary and ideological tensions differently, but both underscore the complexity of Samuel’s presentation of kingship and Saul. 8 Mark Leuchter, “A King Like All The Nations: The Composition of I Sam 8,11-18,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 117, no. 4 (2006): 543-58; Jonathan Kaplan, “1 Samuel 8:11-18 as ‘A Mirror for Princes,’ ” Journal of Biblical Literature 131, no. 4 (2012): 625-42. 9 Grant Frame, The Royal Inscriptions of Sargon II, King of Assyria (721-705 BC), Royal Inscriptions of the NeoAssyrian Period 2 (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2021), RINAP 2 Q006488, lines 23b-24, for the conquest of Samaria, deportation of inhabitants, conscription of fifty chariots, appointment of a governor, and imposition of tribute. For Sennacherib’s Judah campaign, see A. Kirk Grayson and Jamie Novotny, The Royal Inscriptions of Sennacherib, King of Assyria (704-681 BC), Part 1, Royal Inscriptions of the Neo-Assyrian Period 3/1 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), RINAP 3 Q003492, iii 15-25, for the forty-six fortified cities and the removal of inhabitants and livestock as booty; and RINAP 3 Q003478, lines 49-53, for the same campaign together with the reduction of Hezekiah’s territory, redistribution of conquered cities, and increased tribute. The RINAP texts are also available through Oracc.

5. Instrumental Power and Self-Magnification: Isaiah 10 and 14 Isaiah 10 requires a different category. Assyria does not hold a custodial office over Judah analogous to Ezekiel’s shepherds. It functions instead as an instrument of divine judgment. Isaiah 10:5: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger” (NRSVue) The instrumentality here is providential rather than administrative: Isaiah does not portray Assyria as consciously receiving an entrusted office and then violating its terms. The power is instead used within divine judgment. The decisive distinction appears in verse 7: “this is not what he intends.” Assyria acts within a purpose it does not author while pursuing an intention of its own—destruction, accumulation, and self-magnification. The ruler boasts: Isaiah 10:13: “I have removed the boundaries of peoples” (NRSVue) He attributes his accomplishments to his own strength and wisdom, gathers nations as one gathers abandoned eggs, and treats the political world as material available for collection (10:13-14). Isaiah then exposes the arrogance through the analogy of an ax boasting against the one who wields it (10:15). The deformation here is best described as instrumental-power deformation. Assyria is genuinely instrumental within divine judgment, but it acts as though the instrument were the author of its own power and the possessor of its results. Its intention exceeds the purpose that gives its action a place within God’s judgment and converts providential instrumentality into a self-magnifying imperial project. This case clarifies why the first coordinate should be formulated as derivative status rather than simple “source.” The problem is not that Assyria somehow exists outside God’s sovereign ordering. Isaiah explicitly says the opposite. The problem is that the power does not acknowledge or operate according to its derivative status. It interprets power as selfgenerated achievement and the world as available for its enlargement. Isaiah 14 intensifies the same problem vertically. The taunt is addressed to the king of Babylon (Isa. 14:4). The present argument does not depend on identifying that king ontologically with Satan or another rebellious heavenly being. The poem nevertheless casts royal arrogance in cosmic and mythic language: ascent to heaven, the stars of God, the mount of assembly, and resemblance to the Most High.10 Isaiah 14:14: “I will make myself like the Most High.” (NRSVue) Isaiah 10 and 14 therefore disclose two forms of violated limit. Isaiah 10 depicts horizontal expansion: boundaries, treasures, peoples, and kingdoms become objects of collection. 10

M. David Litwa, “ ‘I Will Be Like the Most High!’: The Self-deification of Helel,” in Desiring Divinity: Selfdeification in Early Jewish and Christian Mythmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 29-46, https: //doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190467166.003.0003. Litwa treats the historical-literary setting of Isaiah 13-14 together with the mythological background of Helel; the present essay uses that work only to mark the cosmic/mythic register of the taunt, not to identify the king with a later Satan figure.

Isaiah 14 depicts vertical self-exaltation: derivative rule imagines itself ascending toward divine status. These texts do not display Ezekiel’s complete custodial sequence. There is no flock whose shepherd turns beneficiaries into food. What they add is a sharper account of self-absolutizing derivative power. Authority ceases to understand itself as an instrument within an order it does not control and instead treats itself as the center of reference for that order. This distinction also guards the morphology against pacifistic or anti-coercive reduction. Assyria’s problem is not merely that it exercises force. Isaiah 10 begins by locating Assyria’s force within an act of divine judgment. The corruption lies in arrogance, the selfauthorizing appropriation of its instrumentality, self-attribution, and imperial appetite.

Predatory Intensification: Daniel 7 and 1 Enoch 6.1 Daniel 7: Beastly Empire Daniel 7 moves from political and administrative description into symbolic morphology. The vision presents successive kingdoms as beasts rising from the sea (Dan. 7:2-7), and the interpretation within the chapter identifies the beasts as kings and kingdoms (7:17, 23). In the conventional critical reconstruction, the vision is situated within the Hellenistic crisis and the little horn is associated with Antiochus IV Epiphanes.11 Whatever subsequent canonical uses are made of the imagery, its political reference is therefore internal to the chapter itself. The fourth kingdom is described in predatory terms: Daniel 7:23: “devour the whole earth” (NRSVue) It devours, tramples, and breaks apart (7:7, 19, 23). Daniel therefore contributes not the full custodial sequence of Ezekiel 34 but an apocalyptic intensification of predation. Imperial exercise receives the body of a beast. Read canonically alongside Genesis 1, the imagery permits a theological contrast without requiring Genesis 1 to be Daniel’s controlling literary intertext. Genesis depicts human beings receiving dominion within God’s creation. Daniel depicts human kingdoms as animals while “one like a human being” receives dominion before the Ancient One (Dan. 7:13-14). The kingdom is also given to “the holy ones of the Most High” (7:18, 22, 27). The identity and representative function of the humanlike figure have been extensively debated, with individual, corporate, angelic, and representative proposals continuing in scholarship.12 The present comparison need not resolve those questions. At the symbolic 11

John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 278, 295, 324. Collins locates Daniel 7 within the Antiochene crisis and identifies the little horn with Antiochus IV Epiphanes within the standard critical reconstruction. 12 John J. Collins, “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 93, no. 1 (1974): 50-66, https://doi.org/10.2307/3263865; John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary

level relevant here, beastly imperial dominion stands under divine judgment while humanlike dominion is received before the Ancient One and associated with the holy ones. The contrast is significant because it prevents enlargement from being confused with perfected rule. The most expansive empire appears not as the fullest realization of humanity but as beastly. Predatory dominion dehumanizes symbolically even while it magnifies itself politically. Daniel therefore intensifies limits, domination, and consumption, but it should not be made to prove a custodial thesis that belongs most clearly to Ezekiel. 6.2 1 Enoch: A Limit Case of Appetite The Book of the Watchers is an even clearer limit case because its giants do not hold entrusted governing office. It should therefore not be treated as an instance of failed kingship. Its value for the comparison lies elsewhere: it gives disproportion and appetite a monstrous body. The Watchers transgress a divinely ordered boundary, take human women, transmit illicit knowledge, and produce giant offspring (1 En. 6-8). The giants’ appetite becomes one of their defining narrative features.13 1 Enoch 7:3: “They were devouring the labor of all the sons of men” (NickelsburgVanderKam) The sequence then escalates. Human production is no longer sufficient to sustain the giants. They begin consuming human beings, violence multiplies, blood is shed, and the cry of the earth rises toward heaven (1 En. 7:3-6; 8:4; 9:1-3). The sequence can be summarized: boundary violation → disproportion → appetite → exhaustion of production → consumption of life → cry → judgment This does not make the giants political allegories or coded Assyrian kings. Amar Annus has argued that the Watcher tradition transforms Mesopotamian traditions concerning antediluvian sages and their giant offspring.14 That discussion concerns the formation of the tradition, not a hidden political identity. on the Book of Daniel, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), esp. the discussion of Daniel 7; Klaus Koch, “Der ‘Menschensohn’ in Daniel,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 119, no. 3 (2007): 36985, https://doi.org/10.1515/ZAW.2007.027; Phillip Munoa, “The Son of Man and the Angel of the Lord: Daniel 7.13-14 and Israel’s Angel Traditions,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 28, no. 2 (2018): 143-67, https://doi.org/10.1177/0951820718823392. These works illustrate the continuing diversity of individual, corporate, representative, and angelic proposals. 13 Nickelsburg and VanderKam, 1 Enoch, 1 En. 7:3-6; 8:4; 9:1-3; George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36; 81-108, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 181-88; Matthew Goff, “Monstrous Appetites: Giants, Cannibalism, and Insatiable Eating in Enochic Literature,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1, no. 1 (2010): 19-42. 14 Amar Annus, “On the Origin of Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19, no. 4 (2010): 277-320.

The comparative value of the giants is narrower. They isolate the logic of insatiability. Ordinary productive life becomes incapable of satisfying an enlarged appetite, and consumption moves from labor to the laborers themselves. For that reason, 1 Enoch should remain subordinate in the argument. It does not establish the article’s morphology. Ezekiel does that. Enoch shows what consumption looks like when appetite and disproportion are mythically intensified apart from entrusted political office. The comparison can now be stated more carefully than a flat catalogue: Ezekiel’s shepherds instantiate full custodial reversal. Samuel’s king depicts royal appropriation. Isaiah’s empire converts providential instrumentality into self-magnification. Daniel gives predatory imperial exercise a beastly body. Enoch gives insatiable appetite a gigantic body. The similarities are morphological. The differences remain substantive.

Christ and the Restoration of Dominion Within a Christian canonical reading, the answer to disordered authority is not simply an abstract theory of better governance. The New Testament locates the restoration and final judgment of rule in the unique kingship of Christ. That claim must be made carefully. Christ is not merely one ethical ruler among others, nor is his messianic kingship a political program that creaturely governments simply reproduce. His relation to the Father, his identity as the incarnate Son, his redemptive death, his eschatological judgment, and his universal reign are unique. Nevertheless, several New Testament texts provide a canonical inversion of the directions identified above. 7.1 The Son of Man Who Serves In Mark 10, James and John seek elevated places in Jesus’ glory. Jesus answers by contrasting the familiar pattern of Gentile domination with the ordering of authority among his disciples: Mark 10:42-43: “those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them … But it is not so among you” (NRSVue) The alternative culminates in the Son of Man: Mark 10:45: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” (NRSVue) Matthew Thiessen has located Mark 10:45 within Roman political and sacrificial discourse; the present argument makes a more limited use of the passage, emphasizing Mark’s explicit contrast between domination, service, and the Son of Man’s self-giving.15 15

Matthew Thiessen, “The Many for One or One for the Many? Reading Mark 10:45 in the Roman Empire,”

The canonical significance is striking. The Son of Man, a title elsewhere associated in Mark with Danielic authority, is not portrayed as a ruler who gathers others into service for the enlargement of his own status. His authority moves outward in service and self-giving. That does not make authority synonymous with mere self-abnegation. The Son of Man also exercises judgment and eschatological rule. The point is one of direction: greatness in his kingdom does not consist in making others the material of self-exaltation. 7.2 The Good Shepherd Who Gives Himself John 10 brings the contrast with Ezekiel 34 into sharper focus. John 10:11: “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (NRSVue) Ezekiel 34 has long been recognized as a major scriptural background for the Johannine shepherd discourse.16 The structural reversal is direct. Ezekiel’s corrupt shepherds feed themselves from the flock. Jesus identifies the Good Shepherd by the contrary direction: he gives his life for the sheep (John 10:10-18). The connection is stronger than a generalized metaphor of kindness. John presents the shepherd’s authority in relation to the Father as well. Jesus speaks of the authority to lay down his life and take it up again and of the command received from his Father (10:18). The four coordinates therefore appear in restored form. The shepherd acts in ordered relation to the Father; his exercise of authority serves the purpose of giving life and protecting the sheep; and the direction of the relation is the inverse of Ezekiel’s condemnation. The shepherd does not consume the flock. He gives himself for it. Within Christian theological construal, this is not merely an ethical illustration for rulers. Christ’s death is redemptive and unique. Creaturely rulers do not atone for those under them. Yet the messianic fulfillment of the shepherd image reveals decisively that rightful rule is not self-consuming appetite directed at its subjects. 7.3 Obedience Rather Than Self-Ascent Philippians 2 provides a corresponding vertical contrast. The comparison with Isaiah 14 is canonical and theological rather than a claim that Paul is directly exegeting Isaiah’s taunt. Isaiah’s ruler speaks in the first-person grammar of ascent: “I will ascend” and “I will make myself like the Most High” (Isa. 14:13-14). Philippians describes an opposite movement. Harvard Theological Review 109, no. 3 (2016): 447-66, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816016000171. Thiessen situates Mark 10:45 within Roman political and sacrificial discourse; the present essay invokes the passage more modestly for Mark’s contrast between domination, service, and the Son of Man’s self-giving. 16 Johannes Beutler, “Der alttestamentlich-jüdische Hintergrund der Hirtenrede in Johannes 10,” in The Shepherd Discourse of John 10 and Its Context, ed. Johannes Beutler and Robert T. Fortna, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 18-32, https://doi.org/10.1017/CB O9780511554865.003.

Christ, existing “in the form of God,” does not organize his incarnate action around selfexaltation but takes the form of a slave and becomes obedient unto death. Philippians 2:8-9: “he humbled himself … Therefore God exalted him even more highly” (NRSVue) The interpretation of harpagmos, the relation of equality with God to Christ’s action, and the precise movement of the hymn remain debated.17 Those debates caution against using the passage as a slogan about leadership. Within the Christian theological construal developed here, however, the relevant contrast remains clear enough: the incarnate Son’s messianic path is characterized by obedience and humiliation, while exaltation is the Father’s vindicating act. Isaiah’s ruler makes ascent his project. Philippians’ Christ humbles himself in obedience and is exalted by the Father. The distinction is especially important because it prevents “self-giving leadership” from becoming a flattened account of Christology. The eternal Son is not merely a powerful individual who voluntarily behaves modestly. Christian confession concerns the incarnate and mediatorial action of the divine Son. Taken together, Mark, John, and Philippians produce a canonical inversion: devouring rule: others → ruling power → preservation, appetite, exaltation, enlargement Christ’s messianic kingship: king → service, self-giving, justice, protection → life and restoration of his people Yet even that schema requires qualification. Christ’s kingship includes judgment. He protects by defeating enemies. He rules rather than merely facilitates. He is not simply an ethical exemplar for political officeholders. The proper conclusion is therefore not that all legitimate authority consists in identical imitation of Christ’s redemptive self-giving. Rather, Christ’s unique kingship reveals, fulfills, judges, and orders creaturely authority beneath himself. His rule exposes the lie that authority achieves fullness by feeding upon those under it. 17

Roy W. Hoover, “The Harpagmos Enigma: A Philological Solution,” Harvard Theological Review 64, no. 1 (1971): 95-119, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816000018058; N. T. Wright, “ἁρπαγμός and the Meaning of Philippians 2:5-11,” Journal of Theological Studies 37, no. 2 (1986): 321-52, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/37.2.321; Angela Standhartinger, Der Philipperbrief, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament 11/I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), esp. 152-56, https://doi.org/10.1628/978-3-16-160103-3; Michael C. Magree, The Interpretation of Kenosis from Origen to Cyril of Alexandria: Dimensions of Self-Emptying in the Reception of Philippians 2:7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 8-46, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198896661.003.0002. Standhartinger provides recent exegetical orientation to the hymn’s genre, background, preexistence, and Christological claims; Magree traces the reception and theological construal of kenosis in early Christian interpretation.

8. Derivative Political Authority, Beastly Allegiance, and the Lamb Romans 13 and Revelation 13 provide a useful final control on the category of derivative status. Paul can call governing authority God’s servant: Romans 13:4: “it is God’s servant for your good” (NRSVue) The present argument does not attempt to resolve the wider interpretive debates concerning submission, resistance, particular Roman circumstances, or the full scope of Romans 13:1-7. It uses only Paul’s explicit designation of governing authority as diakonos of God.18 That designation is important because political authority is not intrinsically beastly. It can be described as derivative service within God’s ordering purposes. Revelation 13, however, deliberately describes the Beast as receiving power, throne, and authority from the dragon (Rev. 13:2), while also depicting its period of authority as bounded and permitted (13:5, 7). Revelation does not thereby establish a metaphysical dualism in which God and the dragon are rival ultimate sources. The Apocalypse remains thoroughly theocentric in its doctrine of sovereignty.19 This clarifies the first coordinate. Derivative status cannot be reduced to the question, “From whom did this power metaphysically originate?” All creaturely power exists beneath God’s sovereignty. The relevant questions include how a power understands its status, where its proximate allegiance lies, what claims it makes, and how it exercises its authority. Romans can therefore call governing power God’s servant, while Revelation can portray political-imperial power as beastly in allegiance, worship, blasphemy, coercion, and violence. 8.1 Beast and Lamb Revelation’s reuse of Danielic imagery brings the canonical comparison to its sharpest symbolic contrast.20 The Beast speaks arrogant and blasphemous words, receives worship, 18 Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, assisted by Roy D. Kotansky, ed. Eldon Jay Epp, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), on Rom. 13:1-7. The present essay invokes Romans 13 only for Paul’s explicit designation of governing authority as God’s servant and does not attempt to adjudicate the broader debates over submission, resistance, or historical referents. 19 Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 23-53; Warren Carter, “Revelation and Roman Rule in First-Century Asia Minor,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Revelation, ed. Craig R. Koester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 132-51, https://doi.or g/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190655433.013.8. Bauckham emphasizes Revelation’s theocentric vision of divine sovereignty; Carter situates the Apocalypse’s opposition to Roman power within first-century social, political, and economic participation. 20 G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), commentary on Rev. 13:1-8; Loren L. Johns, “Jesus in the Book of Revelation,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Book of Revelation, ed. Craig R. Koester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 223-39, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190655433.013.13. Beale treats Daniel 7 as a primary scriptural background for Revelation 13, while Johns situates Lamb Christology within Revelation’s theological rhetoric of rule and victory.

makes war on the saints, and exercises coercive power (Rev. 13:1-8). The point is not simply that it is strong. Nor is its condemnation reducible to the fact that it coerces. Its rule is ordered toward false worship, blasphemous self-magnification, domination, and violent opposition to God and his people. Against the Beast stands not a larger beast but the Lamb. Revelation 5 links the Lamb’s worthiness to rule with his slaughter and redemptive victory: Revelation 5:9: “you are worthy … for you were slaughtered” (NRSVue) The Lamb’s self-giving does not cancel judgment. Revelation later depicts him conquering, judging, and reigning (cf. Rev. 17:14; 19:11-16). The contrast therefore cannot be reduced to violence versus nonviolence, strength versus weakness, or coercion versus persuasion. The contrast concerns the order and direction of rule. The Beast’s power is organized around blasphemy, worship of the ruling power, domination, and war against the saints. The Lamb gives himself, redeems a people for God, judges evil, and reigns. The canonical trajectory therefore does not culminate in the victory of a larger predator over smaller predators. Beastly dominion is judged, and dominion is gathered around the slain and reigning Lamb. This also clarifies the theological status of Christ’s kingship in the argument. Christ is not merely a model within the same class as earthly rulers. He is the eschatological King beneath whose rule all creaturely authority stands and by whose rule it is finally judged. His messianic kingship discloses rightly ordered dominion while remaining irreducibly unique.

What Devouring Authority Is—and Is Not The comparison now permits sharper diagnostic boundaries. First, devouring authority is not synonymous with strong authority. Biblical texts can commend effective rule, protection, punishment, and judgment. Second, devouring authority is not synonymous with hierarchy. Ezekiel’s answer to corrupt shepherds is restored shepherding, not the disappearance of office. Third, devouring authority is not established merely by resource use. Every enduring institution requires resources, labor, structures, and forms of maintenance. The relevant question is whether maintenance remains subordinate to the proper end of the institution. Fourth, devouring authority is not established merely by taxation, military obligation, punishment, or coercion in the abstract. Those matters require their own moral and exegetical judgments. The morphology concerns the conversion of persons and goods into means of self-preserving or self-enlarging power.

Fifth, not every predatory image instantiates the full morphology. Daniel’s beasts intensify domination and devouring. Enoch’s giants intensify appetite and disproportion. Neither should automatically be described as a failed shepherding office. Sixth, consumption is an extreme form, not necessarily the first stage of corruption. A power may begin by accumulating, absorbing, centralizing, or redirecting goods toward itself before becoming explicitly destructive. Samuel’s catalogue of taking makes that point particularly clear. These controls matter because without them “devouring authority” could become a rhetorical label applied to any disliked institution or exercise of power. The morphology is useful only if it discriminates. A responsible diagnosis therefore asks: 1. What kind of authority or power is actually present? 2. In what sense is it derivative and accountable? 3. What limits belong to its office or commission? 4. What purpose does the relevant text assign to it? 5. In what direction are persons, goods, labor, loyalty, or productive capacity moving? 6. Has institutional maintenance remained subordinate to the proper end, or has preservation and enlargement become a governing end? 7. Are those under the authority still treated as persons toward whose proper good the office is ordered, or primarily as resources sustaining the office itself? These questions do not mechanically resolve every political or ecclesial dispute. They provide a disciplined morphology for asking what kind of corruption a text actually portrays.

Conclusion: From Entrusted Rule to Devouring Rule The comparison yields several propositions. First, authority is derivative before it is possessive. Biblical rule exists within an order rulers do not finally create for themselves. Genesis gives dominion; Deuteronomy bounds kingship; Isaiah reduces imperial boasting to the absurdity of an ax boasting over the one who wields it. Second, the clearest sign of corruption is not power itself but misdirection. Ezekiel 34 provides the controlling form: those for whom the shepherds exist become those from whom the shepherds feed. Third, possessive authority is relational before it is material. The crucial change is not simply that a ruler possesses resources. It is that persons and goods under authority are reinterpreted primarily according to their usefulness to the ruling power.

Fourth, devouring is the extreme form of a process that may begin with appropriation or self-magnification. Samuel’s king takes. Isaiah’s empire gathers and boasts. Daniel’s beast devours. Enoch’s giants exhaust production and finally consume life. Fifth, not all texts instantiate the same structure. Ezekiel provides full custodial deformation. Isaiah provides instrumental-power deformation. Daniel and Enoch provide predatory intensifications. Comparison becomes more persuasive, not less, when analogy is graded rather than flattened. Sixth, the biblical answer is not the abolition of authority. Ezekiel anticipates restored shepherding. Deuteronomy imagines bounded kingship. Romans can describe governing authority as God’s servant. Righteous rule may protect, judge, punish, and preserve. Within Christian theological construal of the canonical materials, these lines culminate not in a generalized political ethic but in the unique kingship of Christ. The Son of Man serves rather than making greatness consist in domination. The Good Shepherd does not feed on the sheep but gives his life for them. The incarnate Son rejects the grammar of self-ascent and walks the path of obedience. The slain Lamb conquers, judges, and reigns. Christ’s kingship cannot simply be reproduced by creaturely rulers. His person and redemptive work are unique. Yet his reign decisively judges the logic of devouring power. Authority does not become truly sovereign by forgetting that it is derivative. It does not become truly great by converting those beneath it into material for itself. And it does not become properly ordered by abandoning judgment or effective rule. The final contrast is more exact. It is not weak power versus strong power. It is not noncoercion versus judgment. It is not institutional fragility versus institutional maintenance. It is derivative authority ordered toward its proper end under God versus authority that makes its own preservation, enlargement, exaltation, or appetite the governing end and therefore turns what lies under its power into material for itself. That is when rule becomes devouring.

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