This might be useful to remember as an analogy for the moral calculus and applying moral principles to specific situations.

This is why the Bible spends so little time telling us how things ought to be. Unlike many other religions, it does not concern itself with many specific prescriptions about the state and social order. It is not concerned with providing myths that validate the existing social power structures. If anything, it is constantly undermining them. If it has any real message, it is that God can work with anything and anyone, if they will follow him. The Bible isn’t about prescribing a structural utopia. What it is concerned about is telling you how you should be. What kind of living creature you should become.

The problem with a formula and with the state is that it is too static. If you get too prescriptive it becomes inflexible and limited and tyrannical. It cannot adapt. But a living being can adapt. And a being imprinted with the image of transcendent good will know how to follow it, whatever the time, the place, the circumstances. If the goal of a book and a collection of truths is to be relevant across the greatest span of time and greatest number of places and situations and lives (and that was the goal, for the children blessed through Abraham to be uncountable), then you need the proper focus that will apply to all of them, regardless of what point in time and space they find themselves in.

So the Bible is not overly concerned with explaining or providing validation for kingship. It is far more concerned with pointing out the problems a king is likely to encounter, and even cause. It is more concerned with giving examples of the many and immediate failures of its greatest kings, of the moments that shaped them as people, and God’s concern for the condition of their hearts.

To be sure, there are plenty of records of how certain rituals were to be performed (still a small amount among the many more personal stories and teachings), but the Bible is often at pains to explain how rarely these instructions were properly followed, and how even the following of them could become a kind of false idol and hollow tradition. Far from propping up the conventions of society, the Bible is incredibly vehement about criticizing them and tearing them down in the interest of getting at the hearts of God’s people. God doesn’t want a perfect state or a perfect society. He wants children.

So the concern of the Bible is not with exact instructions for the shape and order of things. Much of that is left to individual and societal freedom and to the fortunes of the world. But it is very concerned about having the right proportions. The instructions given for ordering and organizing the structures of life are not absolute, it relational. They are geometrical, not integral. They are consistent in form, but not in identity.

Some people might regret that the Bible did not spend more time on economics and politics, but instead busied itself with so many individual stories and personal exhortations. Those sorts of things are so prone to misinterpretation. And what really matters is how we should set things up and do things; the tough decisions, the important knowledge, the big stuff.

But the Bible simply doesn’t agree. The personal stuff is the biggest stuff, from a Biblical perspective. And keeping things at that level doesn’t merely enable misinterpretation (and specific political or economic prescription can certainly do that), it enables interpretation, period. It enables those truths to be relevant to any individual person, regardless of circumstances, and interpreted in the relevant ways for their situation.

This burdens us with much more work, because interpretation requires understanding and wisdom, as well as a sort of practical knack of living. It’s asking more of us than to simply follow a formula for a just society and right living. It’s asking us to become something in ourselves that is alive and capable of growth and adaptation and purpose. It is demanding that we be more human than we are. It asks for more of us to be made manifest, rather than less, rather than posting narrow limits that would be sure to be swiftly outdated or irrelevant.

Of course the Bible had to be written in actual time, so it is limited in some ways by that. But it resents a variety of situations and variety of people and their lives, a variety of problems and mistakes and challenges, a variety of solutions. The Bible still reads, though, despite its age and distance from us in so many ways, as a rich and lively and relevant document compared to many other ancient mythologies. It has the texture and variety (and even pedestrian quality) of ordinary human life. It contains the same sorts of things as our own lives contain. And this is because it really focuses on the people and their individual lives and hearts rather than mythologizing the state.

The Bible is not even terribly concerned with explaining the world’s mechanics, except in its most basic elements of divine origin and human experience. Almost immediately it moves on to individual people and their personal lives and struggles and fears and hopes and mistakes. It briefly describes the world of human experience (in the terms in which we experience it, which is still what we do today, even when we know better; I still say I am going up to Denver because it is north of me, despite it being lower in elevation and “up” having little connection to polar north on what I know to be a spherical world, and I still say the sun is going down even though I know that it is the Earth that is moving, because that’s how I experience it). But it doesn’t bother telling us how the sun travels across the sky, only remarking in passing that it obviously does (for whatever reason). There are no verses about giants’ bones becoming stones or turtles carrying continents or chariots carrying fiery balls across the sky being pursued by wolves. The universe comes about ex nihilo, bursting into being and organization from nothing. It has intelligence and purpose and structure behind it. But everything is, essentially, as it seems. In the interest of intelligibility, whatever a person’s understanding, it confines itself to describing the world in those terms.

The real goal of the Bible is to tell you a story about people, because what it’s interested in is people. What the God of the Bible is interested in is people. That is the level of analysis. Not natural phenomena, not the justification of the state, not the mythology of the ruling dynasty. You’re reading the story of a people. The focus and applications shift as the people of God grow from a single person to a family, to a tribe, to an actual nation, then beyond nationhood to a transcendent family that can include all people, families, tribes, and nations. In properly aligning the individual and their relation to God, it reaches to include all possible structures individuals can compose, from the lone person to the empire.

Politics and economics are relevant to the lives and stories of people, as are family, conflict, poetry, philosophy, love, law, history, and so on. The Bible includes all of these things because it is fundamentally a book about people in whose lives all these things feature. It is not a book of law that features people. It is not a book about society building that includes some individual stories. It is not a book of rulers that contains personal anecdotes. All these other subjects are contained within the Bible because its object is people and their relationship to God, and all of these things are part of human and divine concern. That is the right way round to view the Bible.