God against Messiah | 91will to realization, or a will to constitution, which seeks to take seriously the
exclusive kingship of God over historical reality. The other side is a resistance,
a desire to replace God with some sort of human ruler. When Buber centers the
Gideon passage, as the “most visible form” of the will to realization, his engage-
ment with his opponents reveals that he views himself as engaged in a second-
order form of the same struggle. Buber seeks to affirm the will to realization in
the Gideon passage, acknowledging that the Israelites once proclaimed the exclu-
sive kingship of God, while Wellhausen and his school deny its presence there,
placing it in a much later, reflective context—that of a reaction to a human king.
The Theopolitical Thesis on the Level of Scholarship
It is important to recognize Buber’s emphasis not only on the nature of anarcho-
theocracy in the biblical sources but also on the role of historical-critical method
in confirming it:
The messianic faith of Israel is, as is to be shown, according to its central con-
tent the being-oriented-toward the fulfillment of the relation between God
and the world in a consummated kingly rule of God. That Israel perceives
this believing expectation and its living expression as belonging to, and en-
trusted most peculiarly to, it among all the nations is based upon the believing
memory that it once proclaimed JHWH as its direct and exclusive folk-king.
Whether the memory—necessarily mythicizing—of such an occurrence orig-
inated from its historical actuality or signifies only a late illusion, a theological
art-product, is decisively important for our method of proceeding; for only if
the memory is historical can the expectation, even in its oldest utterances, be
traced back to it.^31Here Buber highlights the most “scientific” part of his thesis (in the sense of sub-
ject to disconfirmation). It is critical for him that the textual evidence he finds
in the Bible of a theopolitical relationship between Israel and its God be deriv-
able from a historical condition that actually existed, not from a “theological
art-product” created in later times and projected back onto Israelite antiquity.
While Buber himself may believe, as a matter of faith, that the God of the Bible
really did have this relationship to ancient Israel, this is not what he argues here.
Rather, he tries to show that the texts that report this relationship are rooted in
a tradition, based on a memory of a time when the people of Israel thought that
this was their relationship to their God and would have described it in that way if
asked to do so. This framing makes it possible for other biblical scholars, Jewish
or non-Jewish, to engage Buber’s hypothesis on its merits and to challenge both
the evidence he advances and his interpretation of that evidence.
Buber is keenly aware that the theopolitical thesis runs counter to the bibli-
cal scholarship of his time. Therefore, he takes seriously his obligation to con-
front the arguments of his opponents and to anticipate objections: