Augustine of Hippo : If you get to enter the land that the Lord your God gives you in luck and you inherit it and live in it, you will say: "I will set princes on me as the other nations that are around me." You must put a prince over you who has chosen the Lord your God, from among your brothers you will put a prince on you; You can not put a foreign man on you, because he is not your brother. We can ask ourselves why the people disliked the Lord, wishing to have a king, (Cf 1R 8,7) when here it appears as a permitted thing. From this passage it is necessary to understand rather that they did not do it reasonably according to the will of God, since God did not command them to do it, but only allowed it to those who wanted it. What he did command was that they did not make a foreigner king, but a brother, that is, a person from the same town, not a foreigner. The words: You can not mean: "you should not". 27 (Deuteronomy 17.17). When speaking of the king, the text says: And he will not have many women, so that his heart will not go astray. Neither will much silver or gold be sought. Based on this text, we can ask if David did not act against this precept, since he did not have a single woman (Cf 2R 5,13). Solomon clearly transgressed this precept, not only as regards women, but as regards silver and gold. But from here it follows rather that the kings were allowed to have more than one woman. They were forbidden to have many. This prohibition was not transgressed if a king had few women, as was the case of David. But you should not have many, like Solomon. When the text adds: so that his heart does not go astray, it seems rather to mean that he should not have a large number, so that he does not have foreign women, which, in the case of Solomon, made his heart turn away of God (Cf 1R 11,1-6). But a large number of women were forbidden in a general way, so that, even if it were a large number of Hebrew women, it could reasonably be said that the king in this case would have acted contrary to this precept. — QUESTIONS ON DEUTERONOMY, Q. 26 (tr. J. Litteral, draft)