106 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Gideon refuses kingship for himself and rejects the principle of hereditary mon-
archy. Buber’s account of this passage has attracted the lion’s share of the scholar-
ly attention devoted to Kingship of God. Here we place it in a more comprehensive
context.^87
Buber’s argument seems straightforward enough: Judges 8:22–23 means
just what it appears to say. Buber accuses other scholars of retreating from this
truth and introducing unnecessary hypotheses to support faulty assumptions.
When Gideon refuses the offer of hereditary rulership, saying: “I will not rule
over you, my son shall not rule over you, YHVH shall rule over you,” he asserts
the exclusive kingship of YHVH. Scholars who deny the validity of this read-
ing discount the plain sense of the text and distort the history of ancient Israel.
Unlike Gideon, they cannot “dare to deal seriously with the rulership of God.”^88
Instead, because the statement “does not occur eschatologically but historically,
not as prophecy but as political declaration,” scholars commonly view it as “a
risk to be regarded as almost contrary to history.” After all, Buber argues, the-
ocracy is usually seen as “a form of rulership in which the power of men over
men is fundamentally at its strongest, [and] is, according to its constitution,
unlimited, because it is derived from divine authority, or is itself believed to be
div ine.”^89
Buber addresses the two chief arguments of those who read Judges 8:23
against its plain sense. First is the claim that a straightforward reading is incon-
sistent with Judges 9:2, in which Gideon’s son Abimelech, whose name means
“my father [is] king,” challenges the town leaders to help him attain the power his
father supposedly rejected; he asks them: “Which serves you better, that seventy
men rule over you, all sons of Jerubbaal, or that a single man rule over you?”
Since Jerubbaal is another name for Gideon, this passage would indicate that at
some point, despite what Gideon says at 8:23, he must have eventually accepted
the rulership and passed it on to his sons; how else could Abimelech have ac-
quired his name?
Buber sees no contradiction between his reading of 8:23 and the formula-
tion in 9:2. Noting that the root mashal (משל), “to rule,” is used in 9:2 rather
than malakh (מלך), “to be king,” he argues that Abimelech’s statement refers to
the de facto power of the sons of Gideon in Israelite life and offers to institute a
de jure alternative. Mashal “signifies not the formal possession, but rather the
factual practice of a power which can also be affirmed of a ‘kingship’ as predicate
(Psalm 103:19). Thus Joseph ‘rules’ [‘waltet’] in Egypt (Genesis 45:8, 26); thus also
Abraham’s chief steward ‘governs’ [‘gewaltet’] his house (24:2).”^90 Employing the
Leitwort technique he had laid out with Rosenzweig in Die Schrift und ihre Ver-
deutschung, Buber argues that the redactor of Judges wanted 8:22 and 9:2 to be
read together, and that he indicated this by the repetition of mashal: “No matter
whether 8:22ff and 9:2 spring from the same tradition or from two different ones,
in the version which lies before us they form an intelligible and stylistic unity.