The Arcanum of the Monarchy | 1559:16 YHVH tells Samuel that he will send him a man from the land of Benjamin,
to “anoint him nagid.” Nagid, Buber argues, is intentionally chosen in contrast
to melekh:
Here it is to be pointed out, that on the basis of Old Testament word-usage
Nagid is not an autocrat, but rather can only designate one commissioned
[Beauftragten], and that hence “to anoint” someone for this purpose plainly
does not mean to bestow power upon him (as had been demanded), but rather
to charge him with a commission [Auftrag] and likewise to grant him nec-
essary authorization to its execution. In the order to Samuel JHWH’s actual
answer to the desire of the people declares itself, the critical transformation of
that which was granted. The event signifies to the narrator the replacement,
ordered by God, of the primitive direct theocracy by the indirect. On the right
understanding of this sense depends the understanding of the Politeia the
Book of Samuel is narrating generally.^12Here the nagid is described in terms that Buber used in Kingship of God for the
shophet: he is a delegate or commissioner, a Beauftragter, to whom a commission,
an Auftrag, is given. In 9:17, when Samuel first sees Saul, YHVH points him out,
telling Samuel, “This is the man who will protect [ya’atzor] my people.” Buber
notes that ya’atzor, a word that often means “detain,” “prevent,” or even “arrest,”
is used rather than yimlokh (“will reign,” from melekh) or yimshol (“will rule”) or
yishlot (“will govern”). In this context, the word means something like “protect,”
but it also connotes “hold together, enclose, care for.” Such is the Auftrag of Saul
in these early moments, when he is anointed, before the narrative switches to
Melekh.^13 This crucial distinction, for Buber, is what makes 1 Samuel a Politeia, a
work of political thought.
There are also cases, however, in which Buber’s theopolitical concerns over-
ride his Leitwort method. Historical-critical analysis of a more traditional sort
then intervenes to separate the Leitworter from one another. In 1 Samuel 8, for
example, the root shafat recurs three times: at 8:1, when Samuel makes his sons
judges (shoftim) over Israel; at 8:5, when the elders ask for a king “to judge us
[l’shofteinu] like all the nations”; and at 8:6, when Samuel is displeased that the
elders said “give us a king to judge us [l’shofteinu].” These uses in turn follow on
a threefold repetition: at 7:15 (“Samuel judged [vayishpot] Israel all the days of his
life”), 7:16 (“and he judged [veshafat] Israel in all these places”), and 7:17 (“and
there he judged [shafat] Israel”). Buber admits that after the first four of these six
usages, “the unbiased reader... cannot really do otherwise but understand the
same verb in like manner in v. 5 and 6.”^14 Yet Buber is not the unbiased reader,
and he argues against interpreting the sixfold repetition of the Leitwort identi-
cally at each point. To do so, he thinks, would be to fall into at least two edito-
rial traps: one set by the author of 7:15–17, which exaggerates Samuel’s temporary
victory against the Philistines and wrongly describes his subsequent peacetime