God against Messiah | 97is stationary “master” or “owner” of a place, but malk is “leader” of the mobile
tribe. Buber thus separates the malk from any sociological or anthropological
schema in which all religion serves the same purpose. The baal carries out the
holy copulation that fertilizes the fields, but the tribe looks to the malk for the
increase of its own numbers in the form of children.^50 “The consecration of a city
is not earth-magic,” Buber writes, “but social-magic; not the power of earth and
also not that of the sky, only that of the people’s destiny, is represented.” Buber
also denies the contention of “the French school of the sociology of religion” (i.e.,
Durkheim) that the malk is “the personified spirit of the community”; he argues,
rather, that “he represents the power which transcends it, happens to it, which
changes it, even historicizes it.” To be sure, it can happen that over the course of
history the malk and the baal can combine. The baal can be hailed as the malk
and can come to be seen as identical with the malk. It may be that the wandering
desert people, once settled, allow themselves “to be initiated by the indigenous
population into Canaanitic Baal-customs, into sexual myths and sexual rites as
into the standardized basis of blessed agriculture.” But Buber insists that it was
not the baal, but the malk, who was the tribal god, accompanying the nomadic
people in their wandering.^51 Buber’s treatment of YHVH, as the malk of Israel,
serves as a transition from comparative history of religions to the field of biblical
studies.^52
The Kingship of God: The Theopolitical Thesis in the Bible
YHVH as M-L-K of Israel
For Buber, YHVH is paradigmatically manifest as malk, as leader-god of the
wanderers. He is not a sky god, although he is often said to dwell in heaven, and
he is not a mountain god, despite his manifestation at Sinai. When he attaches to
a place, prior to the establishment of the Temple, Buber reads the biblical text as
always making clear that he is not the baal of that place; the Bethel of Jacob and
the Sinai of Moses are prominent examples. In each case a theophany occurs and
the place is marked, but the recipient moves on, knowing that “God is not bound
to the spot at which he appears; He lingers at it... only as at a place of manifesta-
t ion.”^53 Rather, God leads his chosen ones, individually and as a people, from one
place to another, traveling before them.^54 After Sinai, the Ark of the Covenant
exemplifies YHVH’s nature as malk, a “movable place” (Buber’s italics) that goes
with and before the tribe in the wilderness; Buber emphasizes that the ark, like
the later Temple, is not a permanent dwelling place for YHVH but more like a
guesthouse upon which YHVH may descend at will. In a description fraught
with significance for Buber’s own readings of prophets and politics, Buber claims
that “the tent is the corporeal sign against that Baalization [Baalisierung] of the
God Who does not allow Himself to be attached to any natural spot, not even to
Zion, the original spot of his habitation.”^55 With respect both to Bethel and to