176 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
given fuller exposition, as the Israelite faith transforms into the exilic tradition
that will be known as Judaism.
Methodology and Structure
From the perspective of the theopolitics laid out in Kingship of God and The
Anointed, Buber’s primary challenge in The Prophetic Faith is the extent to which
the prophets accept the parameters of the monarchical period. Kingship of God,
in its discussion of the redaction of the book of Judges, placed great emphasis on
how the anarcho-theocracy was forgotten after the rise of the monarchy. The Pro-
phetic Faith, in accordance with this, treats the prophets as people of their own
times, embedded in particular historical contexts, no matter how much legend-
ary material has accumulated around them. As men of the monarchical period,
the prophets criticize the kings, but rarely the kingship; they criticize monarchs,
but not monarchy. In this sense, the “fight against the kings... is not fundamen-
ta l.”^5 Their longing for a just and righteous order usually takes the form of a long-
ing for a just and righteous (human) king. Yet these are the figures Buber presents
as the true inheritors of the tradition of Moses and Samuel as he understands it
(in this Buber follows Jeremiah himself, for whom Moses and Samuel are linked
as predecessors; Jeremiah 15:1). Buber relies on the proposition established in The
Anointed that when the people asked for a king, YHVH both did and did not
give them what they wanted, creating a monarch but also an independent navi to
check the king’s power.
Buber’s methodological preliminaries are even shorter here than in Moses.
Once again denying that source criticism has the ability to identify and date dis-
crete “documents” in the larger biblical text, he proposes instead a “tradition-
critical” division into three literary tendencies, defined by the authors’ political
interests: court prophets (interested in the monarchy and its antecedents), free
prophets (interested in antecedents to the rule of the Spirit), and priests (inter-
ested in antecedents to the cult). However, in developing their material, these
editors build on oral traditions; therefore, a late literary form can contain ancient
content. Buber repeats his defense (from Moses) of legend as a source of history,
as well as his emphasis (from Kingship of God) on moving to the very borders of
knowledge to study religious phenomena.
The Prophetic Faith contains significantly less documentation of its argu-
ments than Kingship of God and Moses; this is partially because it is less argu-
mentative.^6 Buber sometimes asserts that scholars miss the sense of a passage
when they attribute it to a later editor rather than to the prophet himself or to
one of his disciples. Seldom, however, does this assertion pertain to a pivotal
part of his argument, and he rarely confronts a scholarly consensus as dog-
matic as that which he faced with respect to other parts of the Bible. If there is
scholarly disagreement, for example, about the historical order of the prophets,
or whether they lived at all, or whether they are responsible for preaching the