124 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Song of Deborah is repeatedly mined for its “primordial” information about the
Israelite faith in the direct kingship of YHVH, and the contrast between YHVH
and the Baalim is drawn repeatedly. Buber retreads all this ground, I suspect, so
that each book may stand alone as containing the rudiments of his overall view.
To avoid such repetition myself, I focus on what each work uniquely adds to the
theopolitical picture and on ways they clarify matters touched on but left unde-
veloped in Kingship of God.
Although The Anointed came first chronologically, having been written in
German in the mid-1930s, while Moses and The Prophetic Faith were first pub-
lished in Hebrew in the mid-1940s, I treat them in their biblical order, in accor-
dance with the project for The Biblical Faith that Buber planned with Rosenzweig
even before thinking of Das Kommende: Moses first, the paradigm and founder of
the biblical faith and its archetypal expression; The Anointed second, to follow up
on the tension-filled conclusion of Kingship of God and to show how Buber deals
with the transition from divine to human kingship; and The Prophetic Faith last,
as the monarchy calls forth opposition from the prophets and the theme of sub-
sequent Israelite history takes shape. I thus draw the sequence of my discussion
from the works themselves, in which the triad Moses-Samuel-Jeremiah serves to
illuminate the continuity of the theopolitical vision that Buber considers the es-
sence of the project that goes under the name “Israel.”