84 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
question [die christologische].”^9 This provides context for the intended title of the
trilogy of which Kingship of God was to have been the first installment: Das Kom-
mende: Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte des messianischen Glaubens
(The Coming One: Investigations into the Origin-History of the Messianic Faith).
This title appears on the inside front page of the first edition, but by the time
of the third edition in 1956 it had been abandoned. Explanatory footnotes thus
needed to be added to reprints of the 1932 preface, to clarify what Buber meant
when he indirectly referenced Das Kommende with asides about “the three-fold
division of the subject.”^10 Buber sees a disquisition on the idea of God’s kingship
as a necessary first stage in an argument about the historical origins of the Jew-
ish idea of the Messiah, and thus also of the Christian idea of Christ (the Greek
χριστòς, or Christos, is a direct translation of the Hebrew משיח, or mashiach, both
literally meaning “anointed”). In the original three-volume plan, the mission of
Kingship of God was to discuss “the religious idea of a folk-kingship of God as an
actual-historical one for the early period of Israel,” whereas Der Gesalbte was to
show how “the sacral character of the Israelitish king as one ‘anointed’ of JHWH
is related to this.” It would then be left to the third, unnamed volume “to portray
how both conceptions—already in the period of the kings—change from history
into eschatology.” In other words, Buber intended to demonstrate that a single
process leads from the exclusive kingship of God, without human intermediary,
to the rise of a human king, God’s “anointed” one, and from there to the idea of
the awaited Messiah who brings cosmic, eschatological closure.
A Difficult Structure
While the goals of Kingship of God and its position in the projected trilogy may
be clear enough, the argumentation of the book, as it emerges from the structure,
is far less apparent. Here is how Buber lays out the eight chapters of Kingship of
God in the 1932 preface:
The present volume starts out from a particular literary-critical question, that
of Judges 8:22ff (first chapter). In order to clarify this question as far as befits
the limitations of this volume (the pertinent texts in Samuel cannot be exam-
ined until volume two), the genre, structure, and origin of the Book of Judges
must be investigated anew (second chapter). The historical-political concrete-
ness of a fundamental idea of the Biblical faith, disclosed in this manner, is
now religio-historically elucidated and confirmed by the consideration of re-
lated ancient-oriental ideas in general (third chapter) and west-Semitic ones in
particular (fourth chapter). It is then, to be sure, ranged alongside of them (fifth
chapter), but only in order to be rightly contrasted with them and to cause the
divine kingship of Israel to be recognized in its uniqueness (sixth chapter), a
uniqueness to which the beginning of the book had expressly referred—a con-
sciously “theological,” but in every point hermeneutically verified recognition.
In order that the origin of this uniqueness, which is not to be sought upon a