118 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Exodus and the Exile relate to each other “as the folded-up leaf is related to the unfolded leaf.”
KG 108.
- Ibid., 48.
- Ibid., 90.
- Buber corresponded with the Egyptologist Kurt Sethe, author of Amun und die acht
Urgötter von Hermopolis (1929) and Urgeschichte und älteste Religion der Ägypter (1930), about
textual points in the works of other Egyptologists (including Alexandre Moret’s claim that
there was a “leaderless primeval period” in Egypt, a claim Sethe disputed) and sided with his
correspondent against earlier scholarship; KG 170. He also maintained interest in the topic,
adding sources to the notes of the third edition of KG, including Ivan Engnell, Studies in Di-
vine Kingship in the Ancient Near East (1943), and Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods
(1948). - KG 88–90. Here too, Buber plays the specialists off against each other in the notes. For
example, he marshals Francois Thureau-Dangin against a claim, made by Johannes Hempel in
his 1930 work Altes Testament und Geschichte, that the uniqueness of the Israelite king is that he
is called and adopted, whereas both Babylonian and Egyptian kings are generated. The prepon-
derance of the evidence shows that the Babylonian king was considered adopted, so Buber re-
jects this particular attempt at an Israelite distinction. Buber maintained interest in the topic,
adding sources such as René Labat, La caractère religieux de la royauté assyro-babylonienne
(1939) and C. J. Gadd, Ideas of Divine Rule in the Ancient East (1948) to the third edition. - Buber takes this example to be a refutation of those who consider the biblical verse
“Mine is the land, for you are guests and sojourners with Me” (Lev. 25:23) to be a “theological
utopia” that cannot truly represent a historical, political attitude towards land ownership. - KG 90–92. Buber considers the evidence for the South Arabian case “scanty” and delves
less deeply into the scholarship here. His primary source is Nikolaus Rhodokanakis, “Alt-
sabäische Texte” (1930) and “Die Bodenwirtschaft im alten Südarabien” (1916). - The term Verweltlichung is often translated as “secularization.” Etymologically and
semantically, however, the connotations of Verweltlichung differ from what is commonly
thought of as secularization; today’s German usage prefers Säkularisierung for that purpose.
It would be anachronistic for Buber to posit that the South Arabian malik ceremony involved
the kind of rationalization process we associate with “secularization”; rather, he means that
a certain orientation toward transcendent authority is redirected toward something worldly.
Modern secularization is here reconceived as continuous with its ancient form. - KG 91–92.
- Ibid., 92–93.
- This point was important enough that when Otto Eissfeldt published Molk als Opferbe-
griff im Punischen und Hebräischen und das Ende des Gottes Moloch in 1935, arguing “that the
biblical lam-molekh has nothing to do with a malk-divinity, that it should be understood after
the manner of the Phoenician molk—which signifies promise, vow, sacrifice—‘as a technical
term for this kind of sacrifice,’ namely, for the offering of children,” Buber added an eight-page
footnote to the second edition making a point-by-point refutation. He followed up again in the
third edition, noting subsequent scholars who had supported his position. - In the preface to the 1956 edition, Buber addresses the contention of the Uppsala school
that the texts describing opposition between YHVH and Baal would merely refer to a familiar
mythic conflict between two gods, not to two radically different ways of worshipping or to two
types of gods being worshipped. Buber argues that the role of Baal in the Ras Shamra pantheon
fails to account sufficiently for the biblical examples, much less to diminish the functional
contrast between the baal and the malk, the leader who decides on the path for the tribe.