108 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
7:1; 1 Samuel 12:11), read as “Baal will contend,” is still taken by some to suggest
that the Gideon of the most ancient legends was a Baal worshipper; the incident
in 8:24–27 (the construction of the “ephod”) is adduced in further support of
this reading.^97 In this interpretation, Gideon’s more pious acts (tearing down his
father’s altar to Baal at 6:27, and refusing the kingship) are apologetic interpola-
tions by a late editor. However, this alleged editor left inconsistencies, leaving a
contradictory Gideon in the final redaction.
In Buber’s harmonizing account, by contrast, Gideon remains heroic
throughout. The name Jerubbaal does not imply that Gideon aligned with Baal,
and the ephod was not an idol. In a deft hermeneutical maneuver, Buber inter-
prets Jerubbaal as analogous to the name Israel itself, referring to the view in
Hosea 12:4 that “El” is the object, not the subject, of the verb sara, “to fight.”
Similarly, he vindicates the folk etymology for Jerubbaal given in 6:32 (yarev bo
ha-ba’al, or “Let Baal contend with him”), which others read as late and apolo-
getic: “Beside the former who fought the El, the redactor places the latter who
fought the Baal; thus, beside the wrestler for the blessing of the genuine numen
he places the annihilator of the anti-God and false God—both ‘fighters of God.’”
Not only does he reject the picture of Gideon as an idolater; he deems him worthy
of comparison to Jacob/Israel himself.^98 In the light of Buber’s claim that Abi-
melech is the first usurper of anarcho-theocracy, hubristically naming himself
melekh, we can read the analogy of Gideon to Jacob as an identification with the
spirit of Israel itself. Kingly qualities are first attributed to Gideon by foreigners,
themselves kings—Zebah and Zalmunna, the kings of Midian. The people take
their inspiration from these foreigners and seek to imitate them; the redactor
answers the people with the Gideon passage, which preserves the theocracy and
thereby the identity of Israel. As for the ephod, Buber “cannot understand by this
an idol in spite of all that has been adduced.” But he speculates that a Deuterono-
mist editor may have disapproved of Gideon’s founding an independent oracle
location. If the people later dedicated the spot to a syncretistic Baal, Gideon is
hardly to blame, since his career began with the destruction of a Baal cult: “In
Gideon’s speech the mute saga has its banderole; in the saga Gideon’s speech has
the biographical foundation and authorization without which, notwithstanding
its concreteness, it would be only a splendid aphorism.”^99
The second critical argument against Buber’s reading lies in the fact that the
passage in which it occurs is dated late. Wellhausen and others assert that the
theopolitical sentiment expressed by Gideon in 8:2 is too abstract to have been
conceived during the primitive, nomadic stage of Israel’s development. More
likely that a far later writer, perhaps in the time of Hosea’s prophetic condem-
nation of the monarchy, conceived the theopolitical idea and projected it back
onto an imagined predecessor. Against this objection, Buber does not argue for
the “actual historical” existence of a man named Gideon who actually said the