God against Messiah | 117- Ibid., 138.
- Ibid., 148–149. Scheimann has “anarchy” here, although Buber seems to distinguish be-
tween Herrschaftslosigkeit, here clearly negative, and anarchische, used elsewhere to describe
the characteristic psychological inclination to freedom of desert tribes. - Ibid., 139.
- Ibid., 148. The form and nature of this conflict, however, can vary. For example, Buber
contrasts the “spiritual” polemic of the antimonarchical judges and prophets against their
fellow Israelites with the “attitude of opposition, determined by religious commandment and
urging on to the most gruesome massacres,” assumed by the Kharijite sect of early Islam to
the whole body of their coreligionists. Buber otherwise considers the Kharijites to parallel the
anarcho-theocratic attitude found in Judges, except that “the Kharijites want to prevent any
one from ruling upon whom the Spirit does not rest; by Gideon’s mouth, however, the person
on whom the Spirit rests says that he does not want to rule.” Ibid., 159–160. - “History” is a term with many valences in Buber; here, in quotation marks to show that
it is being spoken by the opponents of anarcho-theocracy, referencing the notion that force and
necessity govern the temporal realm. Cf. Buber, “What Is to Be Done?” in PW 109–111; and Bu-
ber, “The Question to the Single One,” in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor-Smith
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 46–97. - KG 64.
- Scheimann renders Zwiegespräch in this paragraph as both “dialectic” (for which Buber
already used dialektik earlier in the sentence) and “dialogue.” There might be some value in
distinguishing paradox, dialectic, and dialogue here, if only to show the degree to which Buber
treats them as interchangeable. The italicized eschaton is Scheimann’s, not Buber’s. - KG 65. I have restored these italics, omitted in Scheimann’s English translation, from
the 1932 edition of Königtum Gottes, 12, which reads “der in der Geschichtschreibung wirkt,
weil er in der Geschichte gewirkt hat.” - KG 15. My italics.
- The reference is to Wilhelm Caspari’s 1928 essay “Der Herr ist König,” Christentum und
Wissenschaft 4 (1928): 23–31. - KG 15.
- Readers unfamiliar with the terminology of biblical scholarship will benefit from con-
sulting John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
Source criticism assumes that the final text of the Bible is compiled or redacted from parallel,
originally independent source documents. The most famous attempt to identify these docu-
ments, for the Pentateuch in particular, is Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis, which as-
signs texts to J (for Jahwist source), E (Elohist), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomist). - KG 16.
- Ibid., 17.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 85.
- The intellectual origins of this progressive schema include Hegel’s history of religion
and liberal Protestant theology more broadly. Weber, a closer resource for Buber, often polemi-
cized against facile and reductionist attempts to divide history into preconceived systems of
“stages,” although he himself may not always overcome this tendency. - For example, against the allegation that the exile introduces either “new values of the
spirit and of morality” or “a loss in reality-content” to the Israelite conception of God—the
latter a view he had once held—Buber argues that “The God of Whom it is known that His
kingship rules over all (Psalm 103:19) is neither more spiritual nor is He less real than He of
whom it is only known that He ‘was King in Jeshurun’ (Deuteronomy 33:5).” The theisms of the