God against Messiah | 103“You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Buber
turns this statement against the classical interpretation of “theocracy” in ancient
Israel: the only way to understand a “kingdom of priests” in this context is to
imagine priestly service to a king as the model for service to God by all the people
of Israel. Buber also sees the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15), which ends with the
exultant cry “YHVH will reign [yimlokh] forever and ever,” as a precursor to
the covenant establishing: “The shout runs ahead... like a herald.” He sees the
indwelling of YHVH in the Israelite camp as endowed by the covenant with “a
theopolitical character.”^76 The people themselves, through their shouts of joy out-
side the tent of meeting, showed that they knew their King dwelled among them
and that Moses was meeting with him inside.^77
From Moses to Joshua: Holy War and Theopolitical Reduction
Moses never enters the Promised Land; he transfers the responsibility of leader-
ship—and conquest—to Joshua. Buber, now undermining “pre-critical formula-
tions,” writes that although the book of Joshua itself may say (23:1) that Joshua died
having completed his conquest, “historical investigation” determines otherwise,
indicating an extended period of Israelite “infiltration” of the land of Canaan
attended by short bursts of violent conquest. Buber therefore turns to the discus-
sion of the holy war, “a war which was experienced, not first by its chroniclers, but
already by its fighters, as one commanded by and under the command of JHWH.”
Buber denies that YHVH is a war god, any more than a sky god or an earth god.
While war gods help their fighting peoples, they do not wage their own wars, as
does YHVH, wars that are listed in a “Book of the Wars of JHWH” (Numbers
21:14). Like any king deciding whether to wage war, YHVH considers the mo-
ment at hand: “He is not a ‘man of war’ (Exodus 15:3); He becomes one when it is
necessary. ‘JHWH’—the Present One—‘is His name.’” So the heroes of the holy
war, from Samson to Deborah, understand with “naïve-theocratic enthusiasm”
that they are serving in their King’s army, “coming to the help of JHWH among
the heroes” (Judges 5:23). Naïve-theocratic enthusiasm, however, cannot survive
the institution of the dynastic principle and ends with the kingship of David.^78
The text clearly demarcates the two periods, according to Buber, at 2 Samuel
7:10: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they
may dwell in their own place.” Ordinarily understood as foreshadowing the es-
tablishment of Solomon’s Temple, Buber reads the verse as a farewell to the past:
“One cannot say more clearly that here an era comes to an end, the era of that his-
torical action which we call the wandering and settlement of Israel—and there-
with also the era of the JHWH-war.” Not just any campaign or raid of an Israelite
tribe, however, counts as a YHVH war. Nor does just any war waged in the name
of YHVH become a YHVH war; it is not the Israelite war per se. Rather, it refers
to the “one action, taking place on many fronts and covering many generations,