94 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
of “stages of development,” which proceed teleologically toward what are viewed
as most characteristic features of modernity. This alleged progress moves from
the sensuous, embodied religion of paganism to the abstraction of pure mono-
theism; and if the story is continued through the advent of Christianity, it bal-
ances abstraction and concreteness in the concept of the God-man. When taken
up by biblical scholars, such schemes can produce fine-grained distinctions be-
tween earlier and later periods. Much contortion is then required to demonstrate
“progressive” movement between different textual strata, though “regression” or
backsliding may also sometimes be allowed.^39 Buber accepts many of these cat-
egories but rejects particular conclusions, especially those related to the develop-
ment of the Israelite conception of YHVH.^40
Buber’s basic comparative principle is that “every great religion arises be-
fore a background which more or less resembles it typologically, with which it,
however, nevertheless contrasts decisively.... [T]he incomparable in it can be
scientifically grasped only from the point of view of the comparable.”^41 From this
perspective, he considers how ancient Near Eastern peoples viewed their gods
as kings. Buber’s academic contemporaries admitted that these cultures dei-
fied their kings but considered the concept of gods as kings a more abstract, and
therefore later, development.
Buber creates an additional schematic layer by arranging Egyptian, Babylo-
nian, and South Arabian material according to how closely it approximates the
Israelite idea of immediate and exclusive divine rulership. There is also a general
theory of cross-cultural exchange operating here. Buber avoids the difficult con-
cept of influence, which is often loaded with normative biases in favor of origi-
nality (consider religious leaders who recoil from suggestions that their holy texts
took ideas from previous sources). He argues instead that “everything flows to-
gether and yet marks itself off from everything else again, since form always orig-
inates because there follows upon surrender a resistance, a new independence.”^42
Buber thus turns away from asking who took what idea from whom and when,
asking instead: what did each culture do with these ideas once they had them?
For this investigation, images of and analogies between cosmic and earthly
kingdoms are irrelevant. What matters is neither the god’s domination of nature
nor even his rule over a pantheon as “king of the gods”; Buber is interested in the
political relationship between the god and the people, however manifested in the
title and responsibilities of the human king. This focus is especially important in
Semitic studies, since for Buber the Semitic root m-l-k (ך-ל-מ) did not originally
mean “to rule as king,” but “leader,” in the literal sense of “guide who goes in
front,” and in the oracular sense of guiding with counsel.
Buber delves just deep enough into Egyptology to retrieve the case of the
hierocracy of the Theban priests of Amun, which he portrays as continuous with
earlier Pharaonic practice.^43 He downplays the period of Isis and Osiris worship,