Gustave Dore! Gustave Dore! Hooray, hooray for Gustave Dore! I really like these.
 

I've added you to my blogroll. Cheers!
 

Yeah - I would pay real money for an ESV Dore Bible. Hear that, standard Bible society? Money!
 

"They are no longer free to do what is right in their own eyes. Their loyalty is split between the will of their sovereign and their Lord."

I wouldn't call the times of the Judges when they had "freedom to do what is right in their own eyes" as anything good or positive. Israel needed a king - they were a constantly lawless people. What they wanted was not just any king, but a king like the other nations. Saul fit the bill perfectly.

So were their loyalties split between the king and Jehovah? I don't think so - I don't know that they had any loyalties to Jehovah to begin with.

And were kings in the East deified? Great point: indeed they were. And Israel would blindly follow every king they had except for the truly Divine King who was born in a stable.

Good thoughts. I'll be visiting here often.
 

Shhhh! Dave! You're giving away the ending. Here I take great pains not to talk about Jesus in this post (as the one who brings these contradictions into stunning unity) and you go and spill the beans. ;-)

To say they don't have any loyalties to the Lord is overly harsh - David does, Abiathar does, Jonathan does, Samuel does, and we can presume the average Joe Israelite ranges from solid devotion to total apathy to utter idolatry. The point is that they are supposed to be loyal to the Lord, but now they have a king they must be loyal to as well. Hopefully the king and the Lord will want the same things - otherwise they're in a different sort of pickle than they were in the age of the Judges (which was the absolute low point so far).
 

I gotta write some kind of defense for (and against) the average Joe Schmoe Israelite.

I was talking to a friend this weekend about the opera Moses und Aron by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, a Bohemian Austrian Jewish convert to Christianity. This opera depicts the conversation that Moses and Aaron had after the golden calf incident. Aaron defends his actions by explaining that God was invisible, and the people could not serve an invisible God. All he was doing, Aaron argues, is giving them a physical representation of this God they are trying to follow in the wilderness. Remember that Aaron’s words to the people had been “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!" and "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.”

The point of the reference is that idolatry for the Israelites is sometimes not a matter of serving the gods of the other nations, but in demanding that God be a little more physical, a little more near, a little more touchable. There is a reference at some point to their making an idol out of the bronze snake in the wilderness, a physical object that the LORD himself had used to heal them.

And here they demand a king to lead them. I would propose that this is the continuation of their wrestling with trying to follow an intangible God, and their demand that he make himself tangible. In a sense, one could say that Christ eventually becomes the ultimate idol, the redemption of their constant inability to follow an intangible God.
 

Also something to remember is that Deuteronomy gives some rules that kings must follow - so this was not an unforeseen event. Given, we can talk about when exactly Deut was written, but as far as the narrative is concerned it was written before Saul showed up, so God expected that one day they would have a king.
 

"To say they don't have any loyalties to the Lord is overly harsh"

At the time this was written, we don't have any reason to think that there was too much piety amongst the Israelites - this was before all the great Old Testament saints you listed.