To distinguish him from the smaller and dependent kings, the king of Assyria bore the title "king of kings." II. In the New Testament it is used even for the head of a province (Re 17:12). The title "king" was applied also to dependent kings.
#God appoints kings and rulers free
His good or bad conduct depended upon his own free will. No constitutional obligations were laid upon the ruler nor were any restrictions put upon his arbitrary authority. In this sense the title is applied to Yahweh, and to human rulers.
The earliest Biblical usage of this title "king," in consonance with the general oriental practice, denotes an absolute monarch who exercises unchecked control over his subjects. At first the extent of the dominion of kings was often very limited, as appears from 70 of them being conquered by Adonibezek (Jg 1:7), 31 by Joshua (Jos 12:7 ff), and 32 being subject to Ben-hadad (1Ki 20:1). In Ge 14:18 we read of Melchizedek, who was a priest, and king of Salem. Thus also the Edomites, who were related to Israel (Ge 36:31), the Moabites, and the Midianites had kings (Nu 22:4 31:8) earlier than the Israelites. The Canaanites and Philistines had kings as early as the times of Abraham (Ge 14:2 20:2). According to Isa 19:11, it was the pride of the Egyptian princes that they could trace their lineage to most ancient kings. Historical research regarding the kings of Babylonia and Egypt corroborates this Biblical statement in so far as the ancestry of these kings is traced back to the earliest times of antiquity. The first king of whom we read in the Bible was Nimrod (Ge 10:8-10), who was supposedly the founder of the Babylonian empire. And since the first form of monarchy known was that of a "city-state," the office of king may have evolved from that of the chief "elder" or intellectual head of the clan. If, as has been suggested, the root idea of "king" is "counsellor" and not "ruler," then the rise of the kingly office and power would be due to intellectual superiority rather than to physical prowess. The Hebrew word for king is melekh its denominative malakh, "to reign" "to be king." The word is apparently derived from the mlkh which denotes: (1) in the Arabic (the verb and the noun) it means "to possess," "to reign," inasmuch as the possessor is also "lord" and "ruler" (2) in the Aramaic melekh), and Assyrian "counsel," and in the Syrian "to consult" compare Latin, consul. Short Character Sketch of Israel's Kingdom
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