102 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
them. In its “maximal” meaning, realized at Sinai, both partners are confined
“into a relationship of unconditional super-ordination and sub-ordination, each
of which has its own, its characteristic binding form in the reciprocal connec-
tion.” Buber warns against identifying brit with the contemporary concept of
contract: “Berith is not limited to an agreement which establishes a ‘community
of interest’ between two partners until then strange to one another.” It can also
redefine existing relationships, consecrate them anew, and reestablish them when
the covenant is broken. Above all, the brit is not “purely religious” in character;
rather, it is religio-political, religio-national:
There is by this time a people Israel, enabled to be partner of a sacral-legal
reciprocal act. A people can, however, be partner of such an act only if it al-
ready has the power to act and to operate as a unity, in other words: if it is
national-politically constituted. The liberation, the fearful flight of liberated
wandering, the destruction of the pursuers, promise and leadership, welded
together the shepherd tribes into a people.... It is able only then to become
partner of an act of covenant which can be consummated between a God and a
people—no purely religious, but only a religio-political, a theo-political act. . . .
JHWH is not just the exclusive “Protector-God of the group”; He is its exclu-
sive, political Head.Buber appeals to Weber, who also saw the covenant as “political-legal through-
out, nothing merely theoretical,” on the question of the theopolitical character
of the covenant, and adds that while Urukagina of Lagash (the early Akkadian
lawgiver) and Kariba-ilu Watar (the seventh-century Arabian) each concluded
similar compacts with their gods, both, unlike Moses, sought to transform their
positions as mediatory priest-princes and to claim the title of king. Only Moses
saw that title as already claimed.^73
Here Buber must again defend a position embraced by few other scholars—
that a united Israelite people already existed before it settled Canaan. He takes
issue with those who read the Sinai account as a historicizing version of a cultic
drama or as an interpretation of some mysterious festival rite from the E author’s
own time. Buber assumes that the Israelite faith is itself “historical” and does
not “historicize” contemporary events with imaginary projection into the past:
“This spirit would not be, if there were no experience and memory to which it bears
witness.” Buber admits that such projections may occur with respect to specific
ritual practices, but not with respect to the central narrative of the religion. Such
a projection would violate the spirit of a “historical religion.”^74 He accuses these
scholars of speculation, of imposing arbitrary restrictions while ignoring specific
elements that contradict their efforts, and of unnecessarily doubting ancient re-
ports preserved in the oral tradition.^75
Buber’s argument for the theopolitical nature of the covenant is bolstered
by the fact that the text places its enunciation into the mouth of YHVH himself: