Martin Buber's Theopolitics

The Arcanum of the Monarchy | 159

the position of the narrator of 1 Samuel vis-à-vis the traditions of the judges, and
explains his desire to account for the emergence of a new tradition, the charis-
matic kingship:

Here he was dealing with another situation: in an enemy-emergency... longer

than any previously known, the emergency of an entire era, JHWH had not

helped through the empowerment of a doer, but rather the people, sated of suf-

fering, had undertaken, finally, to provide themselves the form of help to God,

so to speak, one borrowed from the surrounding world, the perennial task, the

task of sovereignty.^26

The rhetoric of Zionism resonates here (self-empowerment versus waiting for
God, sovereignty versus isolation from the world and history), and Buber’s eluci-
dation of this narrator’s voice parallels his struggles to articulate his own Zionist
position. Our narrator willingly accepts the task of countering the inheritance of
Gideon, the victorious general who refuses dynastic leadership as an offense to
divine sovereignty. He must explain why divine approval is conferred on human
kingship regardless of this tradition. And he does this by viewing the concept of
kingship as denoting a transition from direct to indirect theocracy rather than
from theocracy to human rule. Samuel, as a navi who at first resists but then ap-
proves the institution of the melukha, is the agent of this transformation.
The earliest Samuel narratives need not be attributed to the same sources
as in Buber’s core narrative of Saul’s anointing, but in his reconstruction they
become theopolitically compatible.^27 The Anointed is largely devoted to clarifying
Samuel’s status and to defending the proposition that he is a navi par excellence,
rather than a kohen or a shofet. Samuel’s prominence is unquestioned, but his
specific office remains unclear:

The narrative accepts as self-evident that this Samuel, who in the preceding

passages of the book appears first as Temple attendant (2:11; 3:1), then as Nabi

(3:20), then as sacrificer of the public sacrifices (7:9f ), then as Shophet (7:15–17),

is the man authorized and competent for the fulfillment of the demand ex-

pressed to him; but whether we have to consider him as such because he pos-

sesses an authority and it can also be conferred, or because he is intermediary

between the people and its God, and therefore called by God to carry out the

realization of any wish of the people, we are not told.^28

Buber opts for the second position: Samuel can represent the will of YHVH and
mediate between the divine and the human. Although the kohen and the shofet
also occupy such mediatory roles, Buber argues that Samuel must be understood
as a navi, although he defies the lines of accepted categories by performing some
functions of the other offices.
Having disposed of the notion that Samuel was a shofet, Buber denies that
Samuel was a kohen. He acknowledges the textual support for scholars who main-