132 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
the military virtues”; but it also calls for a peculiar mixture of adaptability and
the urge to independence. The civilizations into which they penetrate are their
opportunity; they are also their danger.^31Missing from this account are the usual signs of normative privilege within a
Buberian schema. There is no claim that life within nomadic bands especially
encourages I-Thou relationships, that families and clans combine into larger con-
federations to form a Gemeinschaft der Gemeinschaften, that such life lends itself
to the greater development of human capacities. We should take this as a sign
that Moses still has something to contribute.
Nomads believe in their lifestyle; Buber calls it, following the anthropologist
Marcel Mauss, “a kind of faith.” They find settlement both alluring and threaten-
ing. They may seek control of the settlement, even assuming positions of power
in settled societies if possible. But this provides for the tribe at the expense of that
which defined it. This is what Buber thinks happened to the Hyksos. Moses and
his mission offer one possible resolution of this ambivalence: settlement without
rule, without masters, except for the invisible One who makes the settlement pos-
sible through his emancipatory action on behalf of the people.^32
The broad civilizational contrast denoted by the Israel-Egypt dyad has its
counterpart in innumerable individual institutions and practices that model the
contrast in microcosm. The way Moses appoints Joshua as his successor is one
example. According to Buber, “It is entirely in harmony with the nomadic and
semi-nomadic style of life that Moses should by choice educate his spiritual son
and successor” rather than his biological son.^33 Although Buber is ambivalent
about Joshua—both the book and the man—this is no recommendation for the
dynastic alternative of the settled states. A second example is land tenure prac-
tice. In Egypt, “the King... exercises a strict, unremittent supervision over all
landed property, so that all landed property merges in that of the King. ‘The land,’
as the Bible expresses it in full accordance with the historical reality, ‘became
Pharaoh’s’; and every worker-family was left with just as much of the yield of the
soil as was required for bare subsistence.”^34 In contrast to this, one could easily
imagine a system of private property that empowers smallholders to invest and
undertake enterprises through the promise of profit. Buber hints at this possibil-
ity in his discussion of the ideal vision of Israel in the proclamation of Balaam:
“Moses had wished for such an Israel, he had desired life, marriage and property
to be secure, and envy to be eradicated among the people.”^35
This quasi-Lockean formulation is undermined, however, by Buber’s even-
tual description of the Mosaic alternative to Egyptian land-tenure practices. As a
nomad by tradition and commitment, Moses would have had trouble imagining
the transformations involved in switching to agricultural life. At Kadesh, how-
ever, on the verge of crossing into the Promised Land, the people began sustained
farming. At this point, Moses “would have had to start out from his basic idea,