170 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
his commandments. As a result, the later prophetic voices become increasingly
rebellious, seeking to recover the old anarcho-theocratic traditions, finding little
use in the possibility of the anointing, longing for theocracy not as an immanent
future but as the search for “a lost world.” True, “the revolutionary stance of the
Judean prophets is constrained through the Davidist character of pre-exilic mes-
sianism,” and prior to Jeremiah they never quite reach the point of proclaiming
opposition to the kingdom itself.^74 They nonetheless seek to assert the kingship
of YHVH, against the kingships of Israel and Judah. The story of this struggle is
The Prophetic Faith.
Notes
- WZB 725–845. Citations in this chapter will be to the new critical edition, SM 281–379.
Translations from Der Gesalbte are my own. - These chapters are “Das Volksbegehren” (The Desire/Demand of the People), in In Me-
moriam Ernst Lohmeyer, ed. Werner Schmauch (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1951),
53–66; “Die Erzählung von Sauls Königswahl,” first published as מעשה המלכת שאול (Ma’a seh
Hamelukhat Sha’ul, Tarbitz 22 [1950]: 1–84); and “Samuel und die Abfolge der Gewalten,” first
published as שמואל והשתלשלות הרשויות בישראל (Shmu’el ve-Hishtalshlut ha-Reshuyot Be-Yisrael,
Zion 4 (1939: 1–29). Both the We rk e and Buber’s bibliography give the year as 1938, but the
journal gives 1939 , תרצ"ט). Brief excerpts of “Samuel und die Abfolge der Gewalten” appeared
as “Samuel und die Lade,” in Essays Presented to Leo Baeck on the Occasion of His Eightieth
Birthday (London: East and West Library, 1954), 20–25. Michael A. Meyer’s fine “Samuel and
the Ark,” in Buber, On the Bible, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1982),
131–136, is the only English translation of this material I have found. - Buber, introduction to “Das Volksbegehren,” in In Memoriam Ernst Lohmeyer, 53. In
this short paragraph Buber refers to “Das Volksbegehren” as the first chapter of Der Gesalbte
and calls the second chapter “Wie Saul König ward.” - This variety surged in the early modern period, when the Protestant commitment
to sola scriptura fueled a “political Hebraism”; cf. Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish
Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2011); Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones, Political Hebra-
ism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (New York: Shalem, 2008). Take one ex-
ample, from a thinker who helped define the term “theocracy” for the modern period: “If it was
rightly said about the people of Israel when they rejected Samuel’s rule (I Sam 8:7) that they
would not allow [God] to reign over them, why might the same thing not equally well be said
today about those who allow themselves license to malign all positions of authority instituted
by God?” John Calvin, On Civil Government, in Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority, ed.
and trans. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55. Jean Bodin offers a
nearly identical interpretation: “Contempt for one’s sovereign prince is contempt toward God,
of whom he is the earthly image.” Bodin, On Sovereignty, ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46. Bodin’s interpretation makes Samuel into a “prince”
and accuses the Israelites of demanding a “different” prince. A Huguenot writer appealed to
this same passage to make an opposite point: “Kings should always remember that it is from
God, but by the people and for the people that they rule.... [T]hey should not claim that they
have received their kingdom from God alone and by the sword... since they were first girded
with that very sword by the people.” George Garnett, ed. and trans., Vindiciae, Contra Tyran-
nos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 68–69. These interpretations assume that