Adam’s heirs, when the right heir (if God had ever ordained any such inheritance) could not but be known, Shem then living, and they being all one people.
Nimrod is his next instance of enjoying this patriarchal power, p. 16; but I know not for what reason our author seems a little unkind to him, and says, that he “against right enlarged his empire, by seizing violently on the rights of other lords of families.” These lords of families here were called fathers of families, in his account of the dispersion at Babel; but it matters not how they were called, so we know who they are; for this fatherly authority must be in them, either as heirs to Adam, and so there could not be seventy-two, nor above one at once; or else as natural parents over their children, and so every father will have paternal authority over his children by the same right, and in as large extent as those seventy-two had, and so be independent princes over their own offspring. Taking his lords of families in this latter sense, (as it is hard to give those words any other sense in this place) he gives us a very pretty account of the original of monarchy, in these following words, p. 16, “And in this sense he may be said to be the author and founder of monarchy,” viz. As against right seizing violently on the rights of fathers over their children; which paternal authority, if it be in them, by right of nature (for else how could those seventy-two come by it?) nobody can take from them without their own consents; and then I desire our author and his friends to consider how far this will concern other princes, and whether it will not, according to his conclusion of that paragraph, resolve all regal power of those, whose dominions extend beyond their families, either into tyranny and usurpation, or election and consent of fathers of families, which will differ very little from consent of the people.
All his instances in the next section, p. 17, of the twelve dukes of Edom, the nine kings in a little corner of Asia in Abraham’s days, the thirty-one kings in Canaan destroyed by Joshua, and the care he takes to prove that these were all sovereign princes, and that every town in those days had a