Martin Buber's Theopolitics

God against Messiah | 107

There is no contradiction in content, and the stylistic connectedness is expressly
brought to the fore.”^91
In Buber’s reading, Abimelech repudiates his father’s renunciation of mo-
narchical authority, because it led to a situation in which too many men could
accrue power. As for Abimelech, Buber argues that he obviously named himself.
As one of Gideon’s lowborn sons, his mother a Shechemite concubine, he asserts
proudly that his father was actually a king.^92 Worse still, Abimelech’s is the first
Israelite name to contain the term melekh, although the Canaanites previously
used it to connect “two different orders of divine denotation, the father-order and
the king-order, thus the biological (the god as primeval father of the tribe) and
the political conception (the god as overlord of the tribe). In the adoption, the
name’s constituent parts referring to the divinity were here as well as on other
occasions applied to JHWH”—an especially offensive act of usurpation.^93 In fact,
Buber argues, Abimelech appears as a villain, as “the demonically intended ad-
versary of the thought of the exclusive kingship of God.” Everything in his story
pairs with something in the Gideon story; his narrative is the doppelgänger of
the Gideon passage. Gideon correctly understands the role of the charismatic
leader under anarcho-theocracy: “a completely personal and wholly once-for-all
commission [Auftrag] which can neither be continued, handed over nor dynasti-
cally exploited. Every attempt to do this, as well as every step into an authority-
less self-rule [auftraglose Selbstherrlichkeit], would be betrayal of the giver of the
authority [Auftrags], the one ruling Lord.”^94 Abimelech takes just such a step,
inciting a bloody civil war in the process. The contrast between Gideon and Abi-
melech extends to the style of the passages. Buber, like Wellhausen, finds little
supernatural embellishment in the Abimelech story:

The redactor sees in him, the enemy of the theocratic bias, the man who

wishes—expressed in our language—to politicize history, rather, to make it

into an arena of merely political interests. The style of the legend must give

way here to that of the profane chronicle: God allows the adversary to set the

tone—until the moment of annihilation. With the report of divine punish-

ment the legendary style could resume again.^95

As Carl Schmitt might say, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I will tell you who
you are.” This characterization of Abimelech—that he wants to make history into
an arena of merely political interests—could also apply, from Buber’s perspective,
to scholars who deny the historicity of the Gideon passage because they deny the
possibility of primitive theocracy. The importance of Abimelech is merely the
shadow of the importance of Gideon.
Buber sees Gideon as “the genuine hero of the primitive-theocratic legend . .

. the only one among the pre-Samuelic judges whose call is actually narrated;”
he thus opposes any negative interpretation of Gideon’s character, whether as
ambitious or as idolatrous.^96 Gideon’s other name, Jerubbaal (Judges 6:32 and