The separation between ethics and politics: Max Weber on ancient Judaism and modernity

Opening remarks

Weber wrote Das Antike Judentum (DAJ, 1921) ³ at a critical moment in modernity. Despite the prominence of Machiavelli, who introduced the picture of an unbridgeable gulf between (Judeo-Christian) ethics and politics (Berlin, 2013, pp. 33–100), various (secularized) visions of a harmony between these two realms of human action – one attainable either in the present or in some distant future – still dominated Western thought until the late nineteenth century, including in key thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. ⁴ Weber, however, expressed a different vista, highlighting a disjoint world of values and priorities, practices and institutions. In one of his most famous pronouncements, Weber wrote that ‘the rationalization and the conscious sublimation of man’s relations to the various spheres of values’, have ‘pressed towards making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual spheres; thereby letting them drift into those tensions which remain hidden to the originally naïve relation with the external world’ (RR, FMW, p. 328). ⁵ Weber, indeed, portrayed a sobering picture of modernity whereby, in the wake of secularization, the ethical and political spheres – as well as the erotic, economical, artistic and intellectual-cultural ones – had grown essentially irreconcilable and even mutually contradictory, each adhering to a different internal logic and generating its own mode of thinking and acting. ⁶ For Weber, the tension between the two spheres is exemplified on one hand, the exclusionary and power-driven form nationalism had assumed since the late nineteenth century and, on the other, the universalization and rational systemization of agent-based ethics as it emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The loss of compatibility between the two spheres – both in practice and as a possible imaginary horizon – troubled Weber deeply. As Paul Honigsheim (who knew him well) remarked: ‘nothing had so deeply affected him [Weber] as the religion-ethical problem, concerning the relations between the individual and the state’ (Honigsheim, 2000, p. 105).

Scholars have often viewed Weber’s theory of diverging value spheres as springing solely from developments within modernity itself, particularly from processes of secularization, disenchantment and rationalization – the three essential themes of Weber’s oeuvre (Habermas, 2001, p. 247; Roth & Schluchter, 1979, p. 22; Turner, 1992, p. 90). ⁷ Other interpreters of Weber have also emphasized the distinctively modern elements in Weber’s theory of value spheres, such as the rise of subject-based culture on the one hand and objectifying social institutions on the other (Scaff, 1989, pp. 73–120; Symonds, 2015, pp. 1–15; Turner, 1992, pp. 86–145). To the extent that scholars have recognized the presence of earlier periods and imaginations in Weber’s theory of multiple, diverging value spheres, they follow him in pointing to Greek polytheism: ‘We live’, Weber writes, ‘as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons…As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo [and to] the gods of his city, so do we’ (SV, FMW, p. 148). ⁸

However, as I will argue below, the religion that influenced Weber most in thinking about the separation between politics and ethics was not the polytheism of the Hellenes (who had, for the most part, a holistic picture of the relationship between these two spheres) but rather the monotheism of the biblical Jews. Indeed, Weber’s discussion about the tension between religious ethics and the political world in Economy and Society stresses the formative role of Judaism in this respect (ES I, pp. 590–593). Here, I will demonstrate Weber’s view of this tension through a reconstruction of his arguments in Ancient Judaism, where it is a central theme of the work: since the Jews, as a community of faith, increasingly embraced the notion of a universal and ethical God that rules all peoples, a tension emerged between the congregation on the one hand and the circumscribed political association and its needs for surviving as a national state (nationalen Staatswesen, Weber, 1952, p. 273; DAJ, 1921, p. 615) on the other. (Weber argues that this tension could not have developed in a city-state with its local God).

In this context, two diverging ways of life and spheres of value evolved among the ancient Jews, especially during the period prior to and following the destruction of the First Temple (586/587 BCE). The kings and their courts upheld a political ethos of valour, honour and self-reliance, as well as a relatively functional, magic and aura-free conception of state. Concomitantly, the prophets, who aspired to represent the powerless strata in society, created a distinct ethical way of life by promoting the virtues of humility, dependency (on God) and ‘friendly forgiveness and passivity in the face of injustice’ (ES, p. 591). The prophets, according to Weber, scorned the unscrupulous compromises and brutal means of politics. What mattered to them were the moral, inner-convictions of the people and their ability to be whole and chaste internally; hence for the prophets, humans are shaped as moral agents separately from that ‘contaminated’, political sphere – and often in opposition to it. Weber suggests that the biblical prophets were the first to advance a rational vision of ethics in which humans (through their free, conscious actions and God’s response to these actions) actively shape their collective circumstances: according to them, ‘world events…have understandable reasons (verständliche Gründe)’ (Weber, 1952, p. 314; DAJ, 1921, p. 418).

This rational vision, which stresses humans’ responsibility for and control over their fate and highlights choices before them in embracing one sphere of value or another, is also an important reason why ancient Judaism could have become relevant once again in modernity. From this Weberian perspective, it could be argued, we live in a fractured, ‘Jewish Time’. ⁹ In both periods, the two spheres (constructed as ‘ideal types’, see ES, pp. 20–22) each presupposes an exclusive possession of the ‘true meaning’ of human life; ¹⁰ hence, the split between ethics and politics was, and is, deep, bitter and irreconcilable. Before examining these themes in depth, however, a few remarks about Weber’s sociology of religion and his theory of value spheres are appropriate.

Weber’s sociology of religion and the Jewish model

In his well-known essay Zwischenbetrachtung (translated in FMW as ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’), Weber presented an intriguing picture of civilization based on his sociology of religion (including studies of what he terms ‘world religions:’ Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Judaism and Protestantism). In these studies, Weber identified a few major paths along which the search for personal salvation through religion evolved; each path instantiated a different strategy for ‘rejecting’ the earthly world. Weber submitted four ideal types of such rejection: both inner-worldly and other-worldly ( innerweltlich and ausserweltich, respectively) asceticism as well as both worldly and other-worldly mysticism. (Ancient Judaism does not straightforwardly match any of these ideal types, but it emphasized both inner-worldly existence and everyday ethics, paving the way for the Protestant quest for asceticism within earthy existence). According to Weber, the fuel of religious evolution is a distinct human need for meaning – seeking answers to injustices and suffering (both personal and collective), to the fears of illness and death, to economic and physical insecurity, to the quest to redeem the soul and ensure an afterlife and more (RR, FMW, p. 330; Bellah, 1999, p. 277).

Often, in explicating fate and finding meaning in one’s plight in life, religions have pointed to the ethical conduct of the believer and the community. This emphasis on ethics, Weber suggests, increasingly led salvation religions such as Judaism and Christianity to insist (to various degrees) that the believer must transcend what is grounded in blood (kinship), what is near and familiar (neighbourliness) and even what serves personal interests generally – and instead embrace benevolence towards stranger fellow believers and eventually even towards all human beings as such. Salvation religions develop ‘in the direction of a universalist brotherliness, which goes beyond all barriers of social association, often including that of one’s own faith’ (RR, FMW, p. 330). According to Bellah, in Weber’s interpretation of salvation religions, ‘the principle of the contrast between in-group and out-group has been abandoned and the principle of reciprocity has been absolutized’ (Bellah, 1999, p. 283); great tensions then necessarily arose between bounded political communities on the one hand and universalistic orientations of various religious faiths on the other.

While religions have devised inventive ways to reconcile the expanding demands of brotherly love with those of the political community (including its wars), over time this equipoise became more difficult to sustain as religious ethics in the Occident often turned towards the ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik). The later ethics, which as noted originated with the Hebrew prophets, aims at putting ‘the follower into a permanent state which makes him inwardly safe against suffering’ (RR, FMW, p. 327) by fostering strict adherence to ethical principles and associating human goodness and wholeness with this adherence. With this move toward interiority, the believer became less dependent on contingent external circumstances or on her actions’ consequences. In fact, the ethic of conviction, suggests Weber, tends to deny the world since it is uncompromising regarding goals and ideals – as well as the means and paths towards achieving those objectives. It rejects both the self-evident reality that moral ideas (such as of brotherly love and general benevolence) can sometimes lead to disastrous results and the reverse paradox that dubious, diabolical means may lead to a preferable moral situation (PV, FMW, p. 77, p. 128). ¹¹ Finally, this ethics is based on systemization and universalization, and hence is unable to cope with the exception, with the notion of compromise and with the idea of the lesser evil. For these reasons, the ethic of conviction is unsuitable for the political actor and the democratic citizen.

In Judaism, according to Weber, the separation between the political and ethical spheres emerged especially during the period leading to and following the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple (ES, I, pp. 590–601). Prophets (such as Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Hosea, Amos and Micha) and their supporters from the marginalized and subjected peasantry and herdsman on one hand – and the kings, their courts and the urban and military elites on the other, each presented a distinct picture of the Good and of human excellence. The primary reason for this process of differentiation seems to be the inability of the congregation to hold together a harmonious vision of God and the need to distinguish between His contradictory aspects (Eisenstadt, 2004, p. 6). Thus, as the God of the confederacy (Eidgenossenschaft) of the Hebrew tribes, Yahweh is the God of both conquest and war (Weber, 1952, p. 101; Fahey, 1982, p. 65) – as well as the author and originator of commandments (mitzeva) and law (mishpat, Weber, 1952, p. 87). He is fierce and merciless in fighting His people’s wars and in protecting them, but equally ferocious in punishing them for their moral-legal transgressions against each other and against Him (Deuteronomy, 28; Weber, 1952, p. 128; Girard, 1977; Ophir, 2013, p. 33; ). In His ruthlessness and fury, Yahweh epitomizes the lack of boundaries regarding the use of violence, but He is also the one demanding strict adherence to the moral boundaries He prescribes. Yahweh, in other words, is a Janus-faced God, containing contradictions that prove unbearable in the long run: ‘bloody war code produced that peculiar connection of an almost voluptuously cruel phantasy (Grausamkeitsphantasie) with the commandment of mildness (Milde) toward the weak and toward metics’ (Weber, 1952, p. 94; DAJ, 1921, p. 120).

According to Weber, the original depiction of Yahweh seems altogether too violent for politics and ethics to coexist, and the increasing separation of the ethical and political spheres was the ancient Jews’ partial solution to this predicament. In the early stages of their religion, the Jews attempted to assuage Yahweh through ritualistic animal sacrifice and possibly even through human sacrifice (as in the story of Yiftach Hagiladi, Judges, 11:31). Gradually, as we shall see below, they embraced a dual, more rational strategy to cope with their uncertainty and helplessness in the face of Yahweh. On one hand, they introduced (against His own wishes) kingship – as a purely human institution serving functional-political needs and based on self-reliance (Walzer, 2012) – thereby reducing the divine sovereign’s ‘monopoly’ on violence and their exposure to His explosiveness. On the other hand, they advanced through the late prophets a heightened moral and righteous outlook, with transparent and publicly known normative demands as prescribed by the commandments and laws. They were thereby able to provide their people with a clear and understandable picture of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, and of humans’ moral transgressions and the resultant divine penalties.

Kingship and the emergence of the political sphere

The Israelite kingship is obviously distant in time and no direct links between it and the modern political sphere can be established. Nevertheless, for Weber at least, certain elements constitutive of contemporary politics first evolved with the inauguration of biblical kingship. The latter introduced an essentially functional view of government – free from pretensions of divine or even spiritual status (see Weber, 1952, p. 19; Halbertal & Holmes, 2017). In Judaism, indeed, the king is flesh and blood and chiefly in charge of securing the people internally and externally, preserving the nation’s territory, ensuring the people’s fidelity to Yahweh and imposing the law in civic disputes in an equal and fair manner (Berman, 2011). He is not responsible, however, for his subjects’ moral education or for their virtue. Thus, the use of violence by the king, in contrast to Yahweh, is uncoupled from moral retribution and correction.

According to Weber, the king in Israel was relatively weak and uncertainty constitutive of his rule (Weber, 1952, pp. 19–20; Liebeschütz, 1964, p. 66; Wilson, 2017, pp. 51–52). ¹² This uncertainty partly springs from the notion that his very sovereignty was subordinate to, and in constant comparison and in negotiation with, God’s sovereignty (Weber, 1952, p. 115). In fact, the direct sovereignty of Yahweh, as in the times of the tribes’ confederacy, was always an option for those who became disillusioned with the [human] king, an option they might seek to recover. Especially the prophets of the Northern Kingdom, such as Hosea (13:10), indeed alluded for the desirability of such an option.

The king, moreover, could not have become a great lawgiver in his own right, given the divine source of the essential laws governing individual conduct and the community as a whole (Weber, 1952, pp. 86–87); as noted, he was far removed from any semblance of divine status and cosmological significance, in contrast, for example, to the Egyptian pharaoh (who was the God ‘Horus incarnated’ [Frankfort, 1948, p. 148]). Finally, given this earthly and functional role, the king of Israel faced constant, internal challenges: various houses failed to establish themselves (Abimelech, Gideon, Saul, Samuel, Eli), and immediately after just two formidable kings (David (1000-961) and Solomon (961-922)), the kingdom itself sundered, never regaining its earlier prestige and power.

Weber portrays the Jewish king mainly on the basis of the well-known section in Samuel I (8:11 f.) in which the tribes, viewing themselves as ‘a nation’ (am, goy. See Grosby, 2002, pp. 14–16; Goodblatt, 2006; Hutchinson, 1994), demand from Samuel that Yahweh appoint a king to perform practical duties to rule them in an orderly fashion (according to law) and to lead them united in war. The king embodies the Israelites’ wish to be self-reliant and act according to essentially political considerations in ruling and protecting themselves – and to be less dependent on God. As Weber stresses in explicating this section, however, the rule (and law) of the king also includes appointing captains to impose the law and collect taxes, forced military service on a large scale, pressing the sons of the Israelites into servicing and building the king’s war chariots, forced labour and more (Weber, 1952, p. 113). Most importantly, according to Weber, ‘the free Israelites will be his “servants” – that is to say, subjects instead of members of the confederacy’ (Weber, 1952, p. 113). With kingship, then, Israel’s understanding of politics took a tragic turn, since the semi-democratic elements (e.g. free peasants without crushing debts, voluntary participation in wars by self-armed demos, tribal representation and consensual decision-making process) gave way to a non-participatory form of sovereignty – and never reappeared except in fantasy (Weber, 1952, p. 112). With the support of the early, courtly prophets and the Levite priests at the Temple, the Jewish kings transformed the state ‘into a liturgical state, into an Egyptian “house of bondage” (Diensthaus) in connection with chariot combat and world politics’ (Weber, 1952, p. 111; DAJ, 1921, p.143).

While the king’s ethical conduct is not irrelevant to Yahweh’s determination of his fate, ¹³ neither the people nor God expects the king to be an exemplary moral figure. As Weber argues elsewhere, politics ‘is oriented to average human qualities, to the employment of ethically suspect devices and people, and thereby oriented to the relativization of all goals’ (ES, p. 593). In politics, the motivations, means and ends are neither pure nor absolute. The king, as the prime actor in this sphere, is therefore responsible for finding effective (and at times ethically questionable) solutions to contingent political challenges, and do so through characteristically political means, including the use of violence.

The key question, in our context, is what characterizes the political sphere as a semi-autonomous one? Or, more specifically, how does human violence in the relatively ‘disenchanted’, political sphere differ from violence exercised by God, the supreme king? In this sense, ancient Judaism performs a double move. On one hand, the king, in comparison to Yahweh, actually tames violence: he renders it more ‘rational’ by attaching it to earthly imperatives and calculations and by being willing to compromise on its use and extent (Walzer, 2012, p. 155). Moreover, he is essentially unconcerned with evaluating and punishing people for their moral-religious character and mores, but only for their violation of the law of the land. On the other hand, however, and precisely because of the previous point, the Jewish king symbolizes a dangerous move in the political thought of the Occident, since with him begins the severing, conceptually and practically, of the political sphere from the ethical one.

Yahweh, as noted above, is a war God leading His people into battle: ‘Yahweh is a warrior; Yahweh is his name’ (Exodus, 15:3. See also Deuteronomy, 20:1–4). As such, He inspires His people, providing them with the inward security necessary to find their way in a nationally dense, dangerous environment. Yahweh, however, also often exercises violence beyond its likely utility. As Weber puts it: ‘He thirsts for blood, for the blood of the enemies, the disobedient, the victims. His passion is mighty beyond all bounds. In his wrath, God devours the enemies with fire, or he lets them be devoured by the earth’ (Weber, 1952, p. 127). Violence originating from Yahweh employs both natural forces (earthquakes, plagues, thunderstorms, floods) and the brutal violence humans can exercise against one another. As God is omnipotent and commands both nature and humans, then, violence initiated and orchestrated by Him is often destructive beyond human scale or imagination (e.g. Gen. 7:17–24; Exod. 15:1–21). Moreover, the reasons behind this violence (towards Israel or other nations) are not limited to political interests but also include disloyalty of His people and the worship of other gods, violation of the expansive moral codes He prescribed, the prevalence of social injustice and more (see below).

For Weber, the Israelite kings mark the genesis of politics as a distinct sphere of human action, one in which violence finds its proper place by being more calculated and nuanced than God’s use of violence. While surely brutal at times (Kings I 11:15–16; Kings I 15:29; Kings II 9:8–7; Sam. I 22:18–19), violence during the era of kingship became more restrained over time: the total annihilation of other nations became rare; internal struggles over power became less bloody (Simon, 2002, pp. 179–219; Michelson, 2011). With kingship, violence is justified mainly when it serves collective, national interests (or the personal interests of the king). Thus, for example, Yahweh orders his people to annihilate completely neighbouring nations along with their property. Saul, however, chooses to evade God’s explicit command by saving the life of Amalek’s king Hgag and taking him hostage, as well as by marauding and keeping the livestock of Amalek (Weber, 1952, pp. 93–94; Sam. I 15:9; see also Deuteronomy, 20:10–18). Since humans, in contrast to God, cannot battle through using natural, catastrophic forces, and since they have material and political needs to consider, their leaders must use violence carefully and form alliances when possible (Weber, 1952, p. 280).

No less importantly, as noted, kingship moderates violence in that this institution initiates the critical separation of politics from ethics. Under Yahweh as the supreme king ruling his people directly, ethics and politics are interwoven: God is the author of the 613 commandments [mitzvoth], many of them moral in nature (they were codified and numbered in later periods). These mitzovth include everything from death by stoning to one who curses his father or mother to the imperative of caring for the poor and, from strict rules concerning animal sacrifice to the prohibition of making a statue of a human frame. From a purely religious perspective, the commandments justify divine violence when violated. Moreover, since it is ‘His’ laws that stand disrespected or ignored, violence often has the character of a personal, harsh retribution by the omnipotent Yahweh.

In contrast, the king not only has less potency to punish than God but is also not concerned with the Mitzovth and with law-making: ‘the tradition simply could not be what it is if the creation of law had been a primary attribute of…the kings’ (Weber, 1952, p. 86). Much of the day-to-day conduct of the Jew, therefore, is less relevant from a political perspective and is secluded from the king’s ‘jurisdiction’. Since the king, moreover, is fulfilling a political role par excellence, he must or could consider other options besides violence and war for promoting the community’s interests. He may compromise and cooperate with his pagan neighbours, depersonalize his dealings with them and forgo grudges – and even respect their cults, Gods and religious rituals. The king also often tolerates the corruption and avarice of the urban elite in his realm, because of their wealth and their high positions in his military and bureaucracy. The king, Weber underscores, speaks the language of politics, justifying his actions in terms of effectiveness and of costs and benefits – not of ethical principles. Yahweh’s emissary prophets, however, objected to this language and outlook, advancing a sceptical vision concerning humans’ political abilities and demanding a utopian moral universe, including in public life (Weber, 1952, p. 282).

Prophets and the emergence of the religious-ethical sphere

The Biblical prophets, Weber argues, ‘hated and considered as an abomination the pride, arrogance, the boastful reliance on one’s own strength (eigene Kraft) as shown by the kings and their warrior heroes’. This rejection led them – through their formidable sense of calling and masterful demagogy – to promote a doctrine characterized by ‘tremendous emphasis upon rational-ethical absolutism’ (Weber, 1952, p. 218; DAJ, 1921, p. 291. See also ES I, p. 439). Since, while often communicating with the king, they were not typically part of a court or financially dependent upon him – and lived for their faith rather than from it – the prophets were intellectually and publicly relatively autonomous. They could present a genuine, powerful alternative to the values and way of life kingship advanced. (In his search for the ‘ideal type’ of prophesy, Weber often downplays the differences of opinions and critiques among the various prophets [Nissinen 2017, p. 295], and my discussion below follows him on this controversial point.) Through their charismatic yet non-personal model of leadership (PV, FMW, pp. 79–80), the prophets were able to ‘create’ a new, distinct sphere of reasoning, meaning and conduct. They were not detached philosophers seeking Theoria through reflection on the world; rather, the prophets demanded that their adherents transform everyday life and the public good (Shmueli, 1968, pp. 238–239). Hence, their collision with the political sphere was inevitable.

Since the days of Solomon, the monarchy developed its military and bureaucracy while the priests of the First Temple developed their own ethical world view. The gulf between the political and ethical spheres began expanding and evolving. ‘The commandments of God, as well as the expiation of offense were more and more sublimated in the direction of ethical absolutism (Gesinnungsethik). What mattered to the heavenly ruler [in determining compensations and rewards in the actual world] was not external conduct, but unconditional obedience and absolute trust’ (Weber, 1952, p. 216; DAJ, 1921, p. 289). The prophets, building on a body of thought developed by the Temple’s priests, the Levites and early courtly prophets (Fahey, 1982, pp. 69–70), helped shape a distinct sphere concerning the human Good and the worthy life, one largely immune to the contingencies of external circumstances. Moreover, beginning with the prophet Hosea (in the eighth-century BCE), the demand was ‘for the abolition of militarism with its horses and chariots’ (Weber, 1952, p. 115). The prophets did not wholly reject the need for kingship, but they pungently criticized its coercive and subjugating character as well as its unjustness and exploitation. They believed that kingship offers limited answers to the world’s ethical challenges – and, therefore, even to its political ones.

As part of the rational outlook they advanced, the prophets maintained that God’s intentions and demands, and rewards and punishments, are reasonable and transparent. The believer needs neither magic nor mystical practices to understand her existence and the world. The prophet offers his followers a systematic and ‘unified view of the world, derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life’ [ES, I, p. 450; Chowers, 2004, pp. 59–93]. Each ethical action demanded by God has import and purpose behind it, and it is consequential; God is predictable, knowable and his laws coherent. The Jew, suggests Weber, cannot experience the world as arbitrary and incompressible (Weber, 1952, p. 313). This dependency on their own intentions and conduct means that Jews bear responsibility for shaping their circumstances through essentially non-political means, through ‘inner devotion’ to follow God’s laws and especially their spirit (Weber, 1952, p. 247).

These rational prophetic innovations, writes Weber, ‘were first conceived, not in Babylon, Athens, Alexandria…but in Jerusalem of pre-exilic’ [times]. As a small nation at the margins of great powers, the Israelites were often ‘astonished about the course of events’ (Weber, 1952, pp. 206–207) beyond their control, including the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE and the deportations to Assyria, and had to devise satisfactory explanations. Rational prophecy thus gave them a semblance of control when in reality command over events in the political sphere lay outside their hands.

Since the ‘key’ to understanding this world, and acting within it, is ethical in nature, the prophets display an intricate relation to their political community. They were surely personally invested in the Israelite people and saw themselves as taking part in that community’s life (Weber, 1952, p. 269). They offered their people, especially after the destruction of the First Temple, eschatological prophesies of collective consolation and redemption (e.g. Isa. 54:1–10, 61:10, 63:9; Jer. 31; Ezek. 36:15–32). Yet the prophets were also harsh critics of their nation – bemoaning especially political and economic elites – because of many moral and religious lapses (Weber, 1952, pp. 116–117). More generally, power – economic, political, military – they viewed with suspicion: ^‘ Thy ministers are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the orphaned, neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the LORD…I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine enemies’ (Isa. 1:23–24, translation altered). For the prophets, argues Weber, power as such is sullying, involving mendacious conduct and the pressuring of others.

This corruption of the elite in the kingdom stood, in the prophets’ view, against the essence of Judaism. They argued (following Amos) that from the very beginning an ethical, universal vision – not political-military interests – was the foundation of the covenant with God, and hence of the religion as a whole (Weber, 1952, p. 342; see also Weber, 1952, p. 327). As part of this vision and its revival, the prophets demanded the cultivation of brotherliness and a distinct epistemology that allowed one to see the weakest, marginal members in the community and their needs: the defenceless widow, the orphaned child, the poor and destitute, the stranger without rights and the defendants injured by corrupt verdicts (Weber, 1952, pp. 302-3; Weber, 1952, p. 258). Moreover, relatively equitable distribution of resources as well as tribal responsibility to all members of the tribe were more prevalent in the time of the confederacy, and the prophets relied on that idealized past in their critique of the hierarchical society formed by kingship – which for them was both unjust and failed to secure the people against the surrounding empires. Thus, the prophets, avers Weber, called on the people to achieve political well-being by holding fast to Yahweh’s moral laws and the human ideals they embody.

The prophets, despite their patriotism, increasingly presented Yahweh as a non-territorial God lacking any bounds – to His reach, responsibility and power. The exclusive bond between a political community on the one hand and a God guarding that community alone on the other attenuated little by little (ES, p. 413). The prophets, indeed, no longer concerned themselves solely with the people of Israel: the more the Israelites felt helpless in face of the world powers around them and grew disillusioned by their attempts at self-reliance, the more weight they gave to their expansive views about a God who dominates all, interdependent nations (ES, p. 591). Not only were the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians and other great powers doing the will of God – bringing disasters on Israel as part of His grand design – but the well-being and righteousness of these peoples were God’s concern as well. Thus, the Yahweh of the prophets punished nations for their own crimes too, especially those preformed in war (Weber, 1952, p. 302; Amos 1:2–15). The prophets expanded their vision – redefined, in fact, the scope of the ethical sphere – and presumed ‘brotherly’ relations and shared norms between different peoples. ‘The purely ethical turn was consummated with the rise of the universalist conception of god (Gotteskonzeption)’ (Weber, 1952, p. 302; DAJ, 1921, p. 401. See also Weber, 1952, pp. 308–309; Barton, 1980; Kauffmann, 1962, p. 346). In fact, ‘from the beginning’, suggests Weber, ‘a certain universalism was inherent in the conception of Yahweh’ (Weber, 1952, p. 133).

Since the prophets did not control any institutions and were reluctant to exercise conventional forms of power, they relied on charisma (Weber, 1952, p. 395; Riesebrodt, 2010, p. 125) and on the power of words. The prophets had to attract their audience through captivating rhetoric, stories about shared memories, emotional conviction and convincing reasoning concerning human sins and divine punishment; they ‘were primarily speakers’ in public (emphasis in the original, Weber, 1952, pp. 267–268) and even the first independent, political ‘demagogues’ who were free to moralize in the streets (Weber, 1952, p. 269). But they did not speak in virtue of their own person and individuality: God inserts his words, devarim, ‘in the mouth’ of the prophet and through them reveals his moral essence (Weber, 1952, p. 289; Boman, 1970, pp. 66–67; see also Hazoni, 2012, Ch. 7). This effective, divinely originating, speech of the prophets is not available to the political actor, and no rhetorical tradition by and for citizens developed in Judaism (in fact, even the kings’ speeches about political-national affairs are mostly not canonized).

Indeed, similarly to the kings but for different reasons, ‘no prophet was a champion of “democratic” ideals’ (Weber, 1952, p. 278, emphasis added). The prophet’s ‘demand to honor God alone and an abject submission to his counsels’ explains Weber, ‘could attain supremacy only in the neighborhood of world monarchies, not free states’ (Weber, 1952, p. 319), since in this dangerous, overwhelming neighbourhood a sense of security and safety could come only through faith in and subjection to a powerful, boundless, sovereign God. According to Weber, the growing rift between the political and the ethical spheres destroyed – from both directions – the limited democratic spirit that existed in the confederacy. It led, on the one hand, to ‘functional’ and disenchanted kingship aimed at uniting and defending the nation through hierarchical order enjoying near monopoly of the decisive means of violence (Weber, 1952, pp. 18–19) and to ethical absolutism, to disdain for politics and human self-reliance and to a spirit of submission, on the other. For Weber, then, the divergence of value spheres, as it originated in ancient Judaism, is interwoven with the decline of democracy as a viable horizon.

Conclusion

In Ancient Judaism, Weber portrays the emergence of two distinct spheres, the ethical and the political. Although the tension between kingship and prophesy is a major theme of the book, the text itself does not explicitly discuss Judaism in light of Weber’s theory of value spheres, and the present work is an attempt to reconstruct his argument along these theoretical lines, more familiar from other texts of his, especially Zwischenbetrachtung.

To recapitulate, according to Weber, the prophets not only criticized their kings for worshiping foreign deities, for oppressing and exploiting the poor, for subverting justice in commerce and courts or for their dubious foreign alliances. Their criticism was ‘above all, directed at world politics per se, the means (Mitteln) and presuppositions (Voraussetzungen) of which were unholy’ (Weber, 1952, p. 280; DAJ, 1921, p. 370. See also Weber, 1952, pp. 276–277). To be exact, they rejected the ‘secular’ politics of their day, the politics of failed human self-reliance – one based on the state, the royal army and the functional office of the king. According to Weber, they longed for a past which was enshrined in collective memory, a time when politics and ethics where in complete harmony because God ruled directly through Moses and the Judges, prior to kingship. They also yearned, however, for a future that similarly transcended ordinary politics and its tension with ethics, a time that might include a messiah (who is an offspring of a distinct king, of David. See Isa. 11:1; Jer. 23:5), but in any event an epoch free from the need for the main instrument of politics, violence, since ‘their future kingdom [was] the kingdom of peace’ (Weber, 1952, p. 281). Moreover, as part of their rejection of human-based politics – and in stark contrast to the Hellenes – ‘they did not posit the problem: how can man be a good citizen’ (Weber, 1952, p. 275) ¹⁴ since, for them, human goodness did not involve political engagement.

Ancient Judaism also provides an important insight: The separation between the ethical and political spheres – their diverging set of human values and actions – is neither solely a modern nor a secular phenomenon; it emerged first in a thoroughly religious age. Surely, this separation is more extreme in modernity, especially given the absence of an all-encompassing God to bridge the spheres and since each of them has been developed further throughout history – but in principle it is nothing new. This insight is contrary to what Weber himself claims (RR, FMW, p. 328), not to mention the numerous interpretations of his work on this point. Nevertheless, a comprehensive examination of Weber’s writings reveals that for him history is not linear, nor is it a journey of expanding rationality, but at least in certain cases it is semi-cyclical. Specific constellations of how human beings organize their world – values, institutions, practices – could repeat themselves given analogous conditions. This repetition could take place since tradition is the home of past solutions to fundamental, perhaps universal, antinomies in humans’ collective life – such as that between the ethical and political spheres. More specifically, it could be argued that ancient Judaism was one possible model for organizing the relationship between these spheres, a model which for many generations laid dormant but suddenly became relevant again – in part precisely because it was integral to the memory of the Western tradition. In modernity, according to Weber, the present is meeting its distant past:

Faced with the realities of outer and inner life, Christianity has deemed it necessary to make those compromises and relative judgments, which we all know from its history. Today, the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted, and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives, and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. (SV, FMW, p. 149)

The breakdown of the Christian compromises – both Catholic and Protestant (Troeltsch, 1992) – between the ethical and political spheres, and the failure of “rational” undertandings of religion (e.g., Kant, 1838) to replace the traditional faith, led to  the renewed conflict between these sphers of human action and to the resurgence of the ancient Jewish model, albeit in a secularized mode. An unexpected affinity between modernity and that distant era has emerged. As Weber interprets his times in this context: ‘The use of force within the political community increasingly assumes the form of the Rechtsstaat. But from the point of view of religion, this is merely the effective mimicry of brutality’ (ES, pp. 600–601; see also Weber, 1952, p. 326; Weber, 1994; Frazer, 2006, p. 26).

Now in trying to mitigate the tension between ethics and politics in modernity, Weber famously submits a distinct concept of ethics based on ‘responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik) which, he believed, should guide the political actor. The separation of the spheres, he seems to argue, does not mean they should necessarily be kept apart in the concrete individual leader (Cherniss, 2016; Satkunanandan, 2014). The responsible politician is marked by passion for a collective cause and by strongly held beliefs about the good, including about moral ideals – without which, in Weber’s view, politics is meaningless. The actor’s convictions, however, should be combined with a sense of proportion, with flexibility of mind and openness to contingencies and with responsibility for the consequences of the action and not only for the sincerity of the actor’s intentions. Clear-eyed and matured, this leader knows that not every cause justifies the means necessary to accomplish it, and achieving worthy goals sometimes requires dubious means.

The responsible leader recognizes that the ‘final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in complete inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning’ (PV, FMW, p. 117). The sensible politician, partly out of moral considerations, therefore acts according to the maxim: ‘You shall resist evil with force, for if you do not, you are responsible for the spread of evil’ (PV, FMW, pp. 119–120). In order to do so, this actor must distance himself from his own self – take an objective and unflustered assessment of reality and admit what he can achieve in it and what not; he or she must also learn to live with uncertainty, lack of coherence, remorse, helplessness. It is, however, the privilege of the few to constantly attempt to bridge – as part of their vocation as political actors – ethical principles on one hand and political imperatives (such as maintaining order and stability or augmenting power) on the other. However, even with his or her privileged position, one must admit, the politician in Weber’s picture remains an essentially internally conflicted, un-whole, perhaps tragic self: no individual can truly marry objectively conflicting, sharply diverging, value spheres.

Moreover, what Weber offers to the politicians in his ‘leadership democracy’ (Führerdemokratie) he does not offer or demand from ordinary citizens, from the demos. He seems to suggest that only singular individuals can perhaps bear the responsibility and tragedy of political action in a world marked by growing conflict among value spheres. Weber does not call for each and every one of us to try and bridge the gap between the spheres through genuine self-rule and active participation in free associations, local governments, decentralized state and more. In this sense, it seems not only that he put too much faith in leaders, not to mention charismatic leaders, but also that he did not submit a genuine solution to the potentially catastrophic picture of modernity he himself so excelled in portraying.