According to the implied chronology of events in Paradise Lost, the first action that occurs in the world of the poem is the announcement of the Son's “anointing,” or kingship, over the angels. Although the event is recounted by the angel Raphael through an inset narrative near the middle of the poem, the Father's revelation of the Son's kingship is, in effect, the earliest action presented to human understanding for direct consideration. Why does Milton arrange his narrative to foreground this event and to depict Satan's rebellion, and the ensuing war, as a direct response to the Son's kingship? Given Milton's allowance for the ways in which Scripture, on occasion, “answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader” regarding “great disputes” (CPWii:517), we might expect him to make a similarly educative use of ironic indirection. Regardless of what readers take to be Milton's rhetorical aim, the very ordering of events in Paradise Lost unavoidably raises questions regarding kingship. Most notably, by depicting God as a king, does Milton imply a pious rejection of republicanism or rather a republican rejection of God? Such questions have been posed since the poem's initial publication, and critics continue to offer answers, some of which we shall consider in this chapter. Against recent critical attempts to view Paradise Lost as repudiating the imagining of God as king, I contend that the epic adapts biblical idiom for transforming readers' assumptions regarding the archē in “monarchy.”