The Arcanum of the Monarchy | 163he unwittingly invited through his initial attempt at hierocratization), by install-
ing a separate individual to assume the responsibility of war making. Buber sees
in this the outline of “a concordat delimiting worldly and sacral power.”^43
Samuel reacts badly to the request. He had thought his intervention in the
most recent battle with the Philistines sufficiently demonstrated his efficacy. Now
the elders want a new person—they haven’t even identified anyone, but expect
Samuel to find and appoint him! This person will be able to fulfill the “revolution-
ary task” (revolutionäre Aufgabe): summoning the tribes, mobilizing the troops,
and uniting Israel for liberation.^44 Samuel is surprised, however, when he turns
to YHVH in prayer:
Samuel considers the desire of the people as an incontrovertible matter, as
something that one can only accept or reject. He rejects it and prays against it.
But JHWH does not see it so. He commands the transforming fulfillment: with
binding testimony, with diplomatic legal-obligation to God as to the giver of
the commission. What he says to Samuel is not an echo of the soul of the
prophets, no projection of human feeling, or such as one might formulate; it
is an immense, manifest contradiction: against that which is said, against that
which is meant, against everything “unconscious” along with it. Initially that
“Not you but me,” and then: Neither their demand, nor your refusal, but rather
this third, in which the human will is elevated into my will and is transformed
within.^45Here Buber provides his account of the greatest problem in the history of the
founding of the monarchy. YHVH tells Samuel: “Hearken unto the people in
all that they tell you, for it is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have
rejected as their king.” Why should such a rejection deserve a hearkening? Buber
declines an antimonarchical reading, available from Jewish tradition, that says
YHVH decides to punish the people for their request by giving them evil kings.^46
“That would be quite abhorrent to the spirit of the genuine narrative, which an-
ticipates nothing of the coming human transgressions.”^47 Rather, for Buber, this
is a moment in which YHVH reveals himself:
He is however even greater and more mysterious than the image that the ex-
egetes... made of him, this God who called world history to happen in order
‘to put to the test’ the liberated human creature. Where he grants him permis-
sion, he transforms the substance of his desires during the fulfillment, so that
it is turned into a new challenge—one that is elevated towards the last, not
passed, test. The human being has failed, and he has enveloped his failure in
a wish and sealed it; God grants the wish and does not grant it, he prevents
disaster and does not prevent it, and from such a Yes and No grows the new,
higher form of the challenge.^48YHVH here teaches Samuel something that combines politics, logic, psychology,
and religion into a single great existential lesson.