God against Messiah | 109words ascribed to him. Indeed, he questions the scientific basis of any such pro-
cedure. In the absence of other evidence, it would be impossible to distinguish
the “natural” historical content from the “religious” layer of legend. Fundamen-
tally, “it is not as if saga had joined itself to history and accordingly had to be
detached from it, but the holy saga is for this reporter the immediate and single
way of articulating his ‘knowledge’ about the events,” which is itself a “legendary
knowledge,” representing a believing narrator’s view of history. Buber views the
question in this way: “A time has been given, a saying has been given—can the
saying, according to its nature, have been spoken in the time, according to its
nature? That is all I mean to affirm for the Gideon passage and for the epoch of
history between Joshua’s death and Saul’s ascension to the throne... proof of the
historical possibility of the Gideon passage would be at the same time the proof
of its historical truth.”^100 If his early dating of the Gideon passage is admitted as
possible, then his whole argument may follow.
Richterbuch und Richterbücher: The Book(s) of Judges
between Monarchy and Anarchy
In the second chapter of Kingship of God, “Books of Judges and Book of Judges,”
Buber reenacts the tension between Gideon and the men of Israel, which pre-
figures the tension between his reading and Wellhausen’s. This time, he sees it
as a conflict between two earlier groups of “historians,” namely the redactors of
the two “books of Judges,” which Buber sees in the canonical book Shoftim as
we have it: “The work is composed of two books between which stand the two
dissimilar Samson legends. Each of the two books is edited from a biased view-
point, the first from an anti-monarchical, the second from a monarchical.”^101 The
final redactor of the book, faced with these two separate texts, aligns them from
a particular political-historical standpoint: “Something has been attempted—
about which the first part reports; but it has failed—as the last part shows. This
‘something’ is that which I call the primitive theocracy.”^102 Tradition then adopted
the redactor’s view, perhaps influencing its eventual, habitual veneration of the
House of David.
The prevalent critical view of Judges in Buber’s time, according to his own
account, divided the book into even more parts than Buber does himself. It was
held that there was no “people Israel” in the time Judges describes, only separate
tribes and their chieftains. Much later, the alleged Deuteronomist wove disparate
legends about the exploits of these chieftains into a chronological narrative of
successive “judges” of the united people Israel. Buber does not entirely disagree
with this picture. He admits the presence of a “schema,” even a “literarily stiff ”
one, imposed on the events described. However, he asserts once again that the
schema “is in no way contrary to history.” Insisting on the need to account for the
horizon of faith of the compilers and redactors, Buber asks: