The Arcanum of the Monarchy | 169In all concreteness the nabi here places state power under the prophetic cri-
tique: his critique, the speaker for God... [T]his kingship in its particular
actuality must have the nabi as verifier and admonisher. Both belong together;
each complements the other for the idea of a task. But both together result also
in the insight of the narrator into the real historical function of the Israelite
prophet, one unparalleled in the ancient Orient, a theopolitical function only
explicable from a special historical location and special dispensation.^70Buber attributes this ideological position to Nathan, the first and last court
prophet who was a real navi, not merely a tool of the king.^71 He serves David, but
he takes no part in the Davidic war against the first king. He combines Saulid
and anti-Saulid traditions in a single vision of the emergence of the anointed
kingship. He and his circle do not pit Samuel against Saul, as did all later genera-
tions of storytellers: the partisans of David, who used Samuel’s authority to dele-
gitimize Saul’s line, and the proto-Deuteronomic opposition to Solomon and the
Deuteronomic and Jeremianic schools, who set Samuel against the kingship as a
whole because they could not conceive that the great prophet could have acqui-
esced in such a folly. Our narrator argues for the navi Samuel as “herald and cus-
todian of the indirect theocracy,” and “by waging his cause, he wages his own.”
Conclusion
For Buber, as for others, the apparent incoherence of the book of Samuel reflects
its being a compilation of traditions that were passed down, revised, and com-
piled “in an epoch of difficult inner-political conflicts or even of civil war.”^72 Un-
biased representations of events are even scarcer than in ordinary times; histo-
riography is a function of politics. Where a single ruler reigns unchallenged, the
state can create annals and odes to its greatness, and such a history has a chance
of being coherent. But this is not our text:
Where on the other hand the sovereign power is contested again and again,
as in the Israelite political system, be it because two dynastic claims stand
against each other, be it because in the people and its spiritual leaders there are
vital aspirations, which have found classical expression from the “anarchistic”
Jotham fable, certainly belonging to a bold early flowering of literature, to the
revolutionary royal slogans of Jeremiah (22:10–23:4), there is together with the
manifold of possibilities for political action also a manifold of conceptions of
histor y.^73Buber sees himself as having cut through layers of contentious tradition-
formation to discover a unique voice in Israelite theopolitical history, perhaps
the only voice that truly explains how the monarchy came to be.
Of course, the hopes of the Nathan circle are not to be fulfilled. The kings
quickly seize total power, and reduce the prophets to a position of powerlessness.
The kingdom forgets that it lives only by the sufferance of YHVH, and it neglects