3 God against Messiah

The Kingship of God and the Ancient

Israelite Anarcho-Theocracy

I will cause your judges to return as before, / your counselors as at the beginning.

—Isaiah 1:26

The sociological “utopia” of a voluntary community is nothing else but the imma-

nent side of the direct theocracy.

—Martin Buber

Introduction and Methodological Remarks

Martin Buber, a man noted for much both before and beyond Religionswissen-
schaft, the scientific study of religion, deployed biblical scholarship on the ancient
Israelite monarchy and the period immediately preceding its establishment to
articulate a polemical theopolitical position. This position has been described as
“anarcho-theocratic.” Other scholars have noted that Buber’s Königtum Gottes
(hereafter Kingship of God) of 1932, which appears to be his most “scientific”
work, is fraught with political and theological implications.^1 The work presents
itself as a historical-critical study of the Bible and duly employs the professional
vocabulary of that field. The book’s first readers, to whose criticisms Buber replies
in the second and third editions, were primarily biblical scholars. Although the
book does not engage explicitly with political philosophers or legal theorists, it
does do so implicitly. While developing his theopolitical thesis as an alternative
reading of certain key biblical passages, Buber arrives at a full-fledged conception
of an anarcho-theocratic essence of Judaism. He presents the theopolitical, anar-
cho-theocratic, faithful tendency in Jewish history as involved in a kind of tran-
shistorical spiritual conflict with an opposite tendency, the political- theological,
authoritarian, idolatrous. By “transhistorical,” I mean that he sees the spiritual
conflict as continuous throughout the whole span that the Bible claims to report,
lasting into the period of rabbinic Judaism and persisting up to the present—
when it informs Buber’s own arguments against those who would contest his
interpretations of ancient evidence.