110 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
But does the lively opposing power of historical destiny allow itself to be mas-
tered by a pragmatism?^103 Only if in that pragmatism a deeper reality dwells,
even if deficiently... cannot it be assumed that just as at one time the believ-
ing experience of an event constituted the people, so the specific conversion
to the believing experience of history again and again revived anew the power
of unity in the people? That it did not prove itself strong enough gives to the
Book of Judges its melancholy character, to the whole, not just to the closing
section.^104On the one hand, this reads more like philosophy of history, or nationalism, than
like source criticism. On the other hand, Buber claims that this view clarifies
difficult passages. He contests seemingly minor points to show that his hypoth-
esis precludes the need for many unconvincing explanations his critics offer.^105
Buber’s impression that the book of Judges has an overall “melancholy character”
meshes tightly with his general analytical stance.
Buber’s preference for the antimonarchical book extends beyond theopoli-
tics to questions of composition, dating, and priority. He refers once to the anti-
monarchical book, which extends roughly from Judges 1 to 12, up to the story of
Jephthah, as “the original Book of Judges”; the monarchical book, which includes
chapters 17–21, he calls an “appended chronicle.” Buber’s arguments in favor of
the traditional material of the Gideon story, and the oral memory that lies behind
written accounts, do not recur in connection with the monarchical book, which
“has no pre-literary existence.” Rather, it came into existence in a reactionary
fashion:
It is plain that the monarchical book followed after the antimonarchical book
just as a disputation follows the disputed thesis. Oral form and written form,
compactness and confusion, but also information and correction, religious-
political theory and its “purely political” counterpart, in any case thesis and
counter-thesis, thus the two books stand beside one another, books which a
remarkable spirit of balancing has linked together, the same spirit in which,
then, the canon originated.^106Buber asserts that the monarchical book originated at a time when the stories of
the judges were first collected and redacted—not into the antimonarchical por-
tion of our book of Judges, nor into a version contemporary with the redactor of
the final book of Judges, but rather into some very rough early cycle with a clear
antimonarchical intent. The monarchical book was then composed all at once
and circulated in answer, although our redaction bears the marks of later edit-
ing. The cycle that would result in the antimonarchical book, involving the first
stories of the Judges, dated from the so-called Samuelic crisis, a turbulent epoch
in which the tradition of anarcho-theocracy was questioned.^107 Then, during the
period of the monarchy, the partisans of the anarchy finally felt it necessary to
inscribe and circulate their cycle as propaganda, evoking a response from court