How Common Sense drew on Samuel
A documented line of influence: Thomas Paine demonstrably engaged Samuel’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
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On Common Sense’s page
- Paine's case against kings rests on 1 Samuel 8 — he quotes the chapter directly, naming Samuel and Gideon
- Israel's demand for a king, and God's warning against it, becomes Paine's scriptural proof that monarchy is a sin, not a right
- Read Samuel first and you'll see Paine isn't improvising — he's handing his Protestant readers their own Bible as the anti-monarchy brief
On Samuel’s page
- Israel's demand for a king in 1 Samuel 8 became, 2,300 years later, the backbone of America's case against monarchy
- Paine quotes the chapter at length in Common Sense, naming the prophet Samuel and Gideon, reading their warnings as God's own disapproval of government by kings
- The Bible's oldest argument with monarchy, repurposed as a revolutionary pamphlet's opening salvo