Martin Buber's Theopolitics

God against Messiah | 113

such a time, in vocation of the liberator and unification of the tribes. Continu-

ity of the union was not guaranteed; without judges, thus without unified and

superior earthly government, the people was not able to maintain order and

civilization. The primitive theocracy therefore was plunged again and again

into anarchy [Anarchie], as is demonstrated for us in the five closing chapters

in two examples.^114

Buber asserts that the intermittent character of the judgeship, crucial to anarcho-
theocracy itself, could no longer be comprehended after a period of monarchy.^115
If the monarchical book polemicized against anarcho-theocracy, the redactor
scarcely even understood it. The period between the calling of each judge was a
terrifying pitfall for Israel; the redactor and the later readers of Judges yearned
for the safety and security that they saw in the monarchy. Thus the tradition came
to identify the anarchy of interregnum, which was theocracy, with the anarchy of
emergency, which was chaos.^116
The editorial conflict between the antimonarchical writers, on the one hand,
and the pro-monarchical writers and the redactor of Judges, on the other hand,
itself only continues the conflict that runs through the period from Joshua to
Saul, between those who see in the absence of a human leader an opportunity to
approach the ideal order and those who perceive it only as a danger. Eventually,
the latter group points to enough physical and historical evidence to overcome
the assertions of the prophets and judges, which will seem distant and abstract
to a people living in harsh conditions: “Disorder, completely unconquered by the
prophetic community, is almost the only universal constant. Only trouble and
tribulation again and again pull together a few tribes for a while and up from
flightiness to theocratic obedience.”^117 Eventually, a military crisis allows the lat-
ter group to gain control—the threat of the Philistines, no mere local tribe but a
well-organized people, ruled by a powerful human king. It is at this moment that
the people rebels against their anarcho-theocracy, as Buber puts it in the final
words of Kingship of God:

Then for the first time does the people rebel against the situation which the

primitive-prophetic leaders tried, ever anew and ever alike in vain, to inflame

with the theocratic will toward constitution. The idea of monarchic unifica-

tion is born and rises against the representatives of the divine kingship. And

the crisis between the two grows to one of the theocratic impulse itself, to the

crisis out of which there emerges the human king of Israel, the follower of

JHWH (12:14), as His “anointed,” meshiach JHWH, χριστòς κυριου.^118

Although Samuel receives most of the attention that Western political theory
pays to the Bible, Buber insists that Judges, too, deserves to be considered a bibli-
cal Politeia.^119 Hidden in its pages, in the separate sources as well as in the tradi-
tion of the redaction, is a profound historical struggle with the paradox of the
two senses of anarchy, as chaos and as utopia; the paradox, that is to say, of the