I was wondering since St Joseph (the foster father of Jesus) was the descendant of David, why was he and the rest of his ancestors silent when it was their right to claim kingship over the Jews? Why didn’t any of them enforce this right by proving their ancestral line, incite riots etc.
I think that it may have to do first of all with the fact that the Jews of the time didn’t really like the monarchical system. As the OT shows, things got messed up when kings began to rule Israel: since human kings tended to be dictators Jews began to resent this form of rule. For over 400 years, from the late 6th or early 5th century BC to 37 BC, when Herod conquered Jerusalem, the Jews in Palestine had been governed by a priestly aristocracy under a remote and usually non-interfering empire - successively Persia, Alexander the Great, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Seleucid Syria; Josephus calls this oligarchic system a ‘theocracy’, in other words the priests and aristocrats rule the people in God’s (the King who will never falter and fail, unlike human rulers) behalf. About as many years had passed under high priestly rule as under monarchical rule, and the priestly years were very recent. Granted, the Hasmonean (Maccabean) high priests - in a somewhat controversial move - did take the title of
basileus ‘king’, but most of them had been more collegial rulers than Herod the Great (and Archelaus) ever were. Given the generally bad track record of the Israelite-Judahite kings and the recent memories of Herod, “king of the Judaeans,” I doubt that there would have been any active interest among many people in reestablishing a monarchy, even if it be that of David.
Second, it was mainly Rome’s prerogative to appoint rulers: it clearly favored Herod and his posterity to be the ‘independent’ rulers the area. (Herod as king, his sons as tetrarchs ‘rulers of a fourth’.) So even if the descendants of David somehow decided to step in and claim the throne, Rome would have slaughtered and crucified the lot of them as troublemaking usurpers. I mean, Jesus was crucified for being “the King of the Judaeans,” the title the Roman Senate originally conferred upon Herod the Great.
