God against Messiah | 85level of the “development of ideas,” but only in the three-dimensionality of a
living fact of folk history, be understood and attested, a literary-critical inves-
tigation is again necessary, this time of several Pentateuch passages (seventh
chapter). This clears the way for the venture of an historical outline of the pre-
state Canaan-period of Israel in its relation to a primitive-theocratic tendency
and to its transformations (eighth chapter) up until the crisis of the tendency
which is to be treated in the second volume.^11This order of exposition is puzzling. Buber seems to veer wildly both chronologi-
cally (beginning with Judges and then moving back in time to the desert wan-
derings, then forward again to the Sinai covenant and the conquest) and discipli-
narily (beginning with literary and source criticism, then moving to comparative
history of religions, then to exegesis). The principles that determine when certain
subjects should be raised, when digressions are necessary, et cetera, are unclear.
As a result, the book is even more difficult than one might expect given its subject
matter and subtle, complex argument. Buber may have seen these eight chap-
ters as a satisfying narrative arc, beginning with an illustration of his thesis (the
Gideon passage), then anticipating a series of challenges to the thesis, and ar-
riving at the dramatic claims of the conclusion. However, if we are to gauge by
the book’s reception, Buber was mistaken in this judgment. It is among the least
studied of his works, and its difficult structure surely contributes to that fact. The
few studies that do exist confine themselves mainly to the first and second chap-
ters, thereby missing the larger picture that emerges in a full reading.
Here we ignore Buber’s order of exposition and begin by articulating his
theopolitical thesis; we go on to apply this thesis to each of his subjects in turn. In
some cases, the scholars whom Buber disputes actually tailor their objections di-
rectly to the theopolitical thesis; in most cases, however, they simply represent the
current scholarly consensus on questions of the dating or provenance of biblical
texts, contesting individual claims without regard to broad theopolitical implica-
tions. Nonetheless, Buber’s defenses always keep the theopolitical thesis in view,
and the fact that he defends a point is often more important than the substance
of his defense. On other occasions, however, the nature of Buber’s argument in
defense of his claim will in itself be important. Throughout his discussion, Bu-
ber strategically identifies theopolitical factions described within the biblical text
with factions among the editors of the biblical text, and he further depicts these
factions as manifest in contemporary scholarly camps arguing about the biblical
text, using academic language to create a kind of transhistorical conflict between
political theology and theopolitics in which he himself is a partisan.
The Theopolitical Thesis
In Kingship of God the theopolitical thesis operates on two levels: that of content,
the level of events described in the biblical text, and that of scholarship, the level