  As presented by Buber in the 1930s, the primary governing trope of Jewish political theology—divine kingship (Königtum Gottes)—represents an answer to Schmitt, whose political theology allowed divine power to be absorbed by the human sovereign. Buber resisted this slippage, privileging instead the anti-monarchical strata of the Hebrew Bible. In his 1932 book on the Kingship of God, the biblical hero Gideon from chapter eight of the Book of Judges stands out as the leader who, beating back the Philistine enemy, declines any claim to hereditary kingship. What Buber reads as a genuine, unconditional “no” to political sovereignty rests on an unconditional “yes” affirming the absolute kingship of God. Against the theory staked out by Schmitt, the assertion that God alone is sovereign means that God’s authority is non-transferable to any human head or political institution. Thus Buber preserves the notion of divine sovereignty over all forms of state apparatus and tyranny. Buber privileged simple, preliminary, primitive, and immediate forms of government, insisting that genuine “theocracy” is not a form of government at all, but rather a striving against the political tide. No “theological work of art,” the messianic ideal of divine kingship found in the Hebrew Bible is presented as a reliable image preserved by the collective memory of tradition. Buber maintained that once upon a time the Israelite deity YHWH was, in fact, the heretog or warrior-king of the people. But he also knew that he was unable to posit this for certain, and so proceeded to admit that the image reflects not a historical actuality that we can know but only a historical possibility.