The Arcanum of the Monarchy | 153vents him from making simplistic theological maneuvers that could have served
to further his thesis. For example, one could argue that the entire Deuteronom-
ic history—from the fifth Book of Moses through Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and
Kings—represents a strongly antimonarchical viewpoint in its final form.^6 Some
would argue that therefore “the Bible” opposes monarchy, rendering efforts to
valorize monarchic or authoritarian politics on scriptural grounds misguided
at best. However, such an argument invites an account of the scriptural sources
informed by a cynical, realpolitisch secular worldview: that during the time of
the Davidic-Solomonic ascent, the historical texts and psalms proclaiming the
divine approval of the monarchy and the eternal glory of the Davidic house were
written, and that later, during the period of the exile, these texts were placed by
an editor into a context that rendered them ironic, tragic, or at the very least bal-
anced by antimonarchical voices. In such an account, the canon emerges in ac-
cordance with the caprice of human attitudes to power: in times of success people
praise kings and hold them divinely appointed, but in times of failure they decide
that God never really liked kings after all.
The people of Israel, as characters in the narrative, may display such caprice.
But Buber finds this untenable as a scholarly view of the origin of the core nar-
rative of 1 Samuel. He finds another voice in the text, one that expresses an in-
termediate position between the anarcho-theocratic vision of the judges and the
revolutionary reformism of the later prophets. The Anointed intends to articulate
this voice, which Buber links to a circle around the prophet Nathan in the court
of David, and to show that it forms the basis for the rest of our Book of Samuel.
Buber aims to isolate the “original narrative,” and also to focus on several themes
within this reconstructed source text: secrecy and mystery as keys to monarchi-
cal power; the succession of powers in Israel and the variety of offices (kohen,
priest; nabi, prophet; shofet, judge; zaken, elder; nagid, prince) that attempt to
secure the people against internal degeneration and external domination prior
to the institution of the melukha, the kingship; and the unbreakable connection
between the anointed one, the king, and the one who anoints, the prophet.
The Voice of Our Narrator: Reconstructing How Saul Became King
The book of Samuel is the object of a large and contentious critical literature,
both for its political centrality and for its many apparent inconsistencies and
contradictions. Well before professional biblical criticism, Baruch Spinoza wrote
that he could not imagine 1 Samuel as the work of a single narrator with a single
purpose.^7 And for historical-critical scholarship at large, it made sense to attri-
bute contradictions in the text to divergent traditions and haphazard redaction.
The defense of 1 Samuel’s coherence, however, argues that in its final form the
text does serve a discernible editorial purpose and that its “inconsistencies” are
only apparent. In The Anointed, Buber seeks to locate and explicate the original