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T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 103, No. 1 (Winter 2013) 74100

History, Myth, and Divine Dialogue in

Martin Bubers Biblical Commentaries
CLAIRE E. SUFRIN

A T E NS I O N B E TW E EN H I ST O RY and myth links three biblical commentaries written by the German Jewish thinker Martin Buber (18781965):
Konigtum Gottes (Kingship of God, 1933); Torat ha-neviim (The Prophetic
Faith, 1942); and Moshe (Moses, 1945).1 Buber wrote extensively on the
Bible throughout his life, and I will argue in this essay that his commentaries represent a distinct, late stage in the development of his biblical
hermeneutics. Bubers commentaries are argument-driven treatises about
the nature of the biblical text, suffused with footnotes.2 They lack the
flowery language and vivid imagery associated with the more widely read
works in which he first presented his philosophy of dialogue and the
pieces of exegesis he wrote while translating the Bible into German with
Franz Rosenzweig in the late 1920s. Bubers commentaries offer a different perspective on his lifes work and reveal at least one arena in which
he moved away from his focus on dialogical philosophy to using techniques of close reading and historical critical analysis to draw theological
conclusions from ancient and sacred texts.3 Significantly, Bubers commentaries may also be read as revisions of his philosophy of dialogue.
1. Martin Buber, Kingship of God (3rd ed.; Amherst, Mass., 1990); Konigtum
Gottes (2nd ed.; Berlin, 1936); The Prophetic Faith (New York, 1949); Torat haneviim (Tel Aviv, 1950); Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant (New York, 1957);
Moshe (Jerusalem, 1999).
2. As Paul Mendes-Flohr observes about Konigtum Gottes, It is appropriately
ponderous; its argumentation is rigorously analytical, with careful attention paid
to historical and philological detail. Mendes-Flohr points to the fact that Buber
wrote Konigtum Gottes with the hope of attaining an academic post within the
German university system. Even after assuming a position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1938, Buber wrote his two other commentaries, indicating
that he continued to hold the goal of entering the larger conversation of Hebrew
Bible scholarship. Paul Mendes-Flohr, ed., Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective (Syracuse, N.Y. 2002), 12.
3. This essay is drawn from a larger project addressing Bubers exploration of
history and historicism in the development of his biblical hermeneutics. Cf. SteThe Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2013)
Copyright 2013 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
All rights reserved.

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Other biblical critics were largely dismissive of Bubers biblical scholarship. Yehezkel Kaufmanns review of Torat ha-neviim concludes with
the comment that the book had merely repeated the problems of Konigtum
Gottes, namely, evaluating Israelite religion on the basis of one testimony
. . . against the testimony of Scripture as a whole.4 Kaufmanns assessment is not necessarily one that Buber would have refuted. Gershom
Scholems assessment points to the tension between Bubers historical
criticism and his commitment to finding a meaning in the text that would
speak to Jews in search of religious meaning in the modern world:
Bubers writings on the Bible present themselves [in] the traditional
framework of scientific questioning; they are circumscribedby precise indications of sources andcompared to his other writingsa
downright strikingly rich and seemingly ostentatious discussion of scholarly literature on the subject. His exegeses are . . . pneumatic exegeses
when it comes to the crunch. But it is pneumatic exegesis with learned
notes, which cause its pneumatic character to recede a bit or even blot
it out.5
Michael Fishbane comments in his assessment of Moshe that the isolation
of theory from practice, and of so-called objective historical research from
the enduring (subjective) teaching of a text, was not his way.6 Scholem
and Fishbane recognize that Bubers commentaries were shaped by his
seeing the biblical text in two interwoven ways, namely, as a historical
artifact to be studied with historicist tools and as a source of transhistorical meaning and guidance for Jews.
In this essay, I do not seek to evaluate whether Bubers commentaries
stand up to the standards of biblical criticism, either of his day or our
own. Instead, I ask why Buber turns to biblical criticism as a tool for
uncovering religious meaning in the text and how that choice shapes the
sorts of arguments he makes about God and the Jewish people. This
perspective allows us to see Buber wrestling with concepts important for
historical biblical critics and Jewish thinkers alike, for within his commentaries he presents a rich discussion of history, revelation, and myth.
ven Kepnes, The Text as Thou: Martin Bubers Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative
Theology (Bloomington, Ind., 1992).
4. Yehezkel Kaufmann, Torat ha-neviim, in Mi-kivshonah shel ha-tetsirah hamikrait (Tel Aviv, 1966), 280.
5. Gershom Scholem, Martin Bubers Conception of Judaism, in On Jews
and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York, 1976), 165.
6. Michael Fishbane, Martin Bubers Moses, in The Garments of Torah:
Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 93.

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I argue that Bubers aim in the commentaries is to articulate the narrative

of what he saw as the true history of Judaism, with Judaism understood as a theological tradition developed by individuals in dialogical relationship with God.7 His examination of particular instances of humandivine relationship described in the biblical narrative lends nuance to this
understanding.
Bubers commentaries develop themes from his earlier works. Buber
first discussed biblical myth and history in lectures he delivered between
1909 and 1919, now known in English as his Early Addresses on Judaism.
In the commentaries, he returns to these categories but presents them
in different terms. The commentaries also echo Bubers description of
revelation as dialogical relationship with God (the Eternal Thou) in I and
Thou, though in the commentaries he emphasizes the contexts in which
individual biblical characters enter into relationship with God, whereas
in I and Thou he argued that dialogical relationships are beyond the
human context of time and space. The commentaries also depart from the
goals of Bubers translation (with Rosenzweig) of the Hebrew Bible into
German. In translating, Buber and Rosenzweig attempted to create a
German text that would restore the power of the text as a whole and call
readers away from biblical criticism.8 Yet in his commentaries Buber uses
techniques borrowed from biblical criticism to present an argument about
the place of contemporary Jews within a Jewish history whose foundations lie in the biblical text itself.
Bubers commentaries are best understood, I suggest, not as works of
biblical criticism but as works of Jewish thought. At the same time,
because they use hermeneutic techniques similar to biblical criticism,
Bubers commentaries are distinct from other works of modern Jewish
thought that also incorporate biblical texts. Unlike Rosenzweigs Star of
7. Compare Michael Zankss treatment of the commentaries in relation to religious studies, in Buber and ReligionswissenschaftThe Case of His Studies on
Biblical Faith, in New Perspectives on Martin Buber, ed. M. Zank (Tubingen, 2006),
6182.
8. For further discussion of the Buber-Rosenzweig translation, see Mara H.
Benjamin, Rosenzweigs Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge,
2009), 10334; Abigail E. Gillman, Between Religion and Culture: Mendelssohn, Buber, Rosenzweig, and the Enterprise of Biblical Translation, in Biblical
Translation in Context, ed. F. W. Knobloch (Bethesda, Md., 2002), 93114; Maren
Ruth Niehoff, The Buber-Rosenzweig Translation of the Bible within JewishGerman Tradition, Journal of Jewish Studies 44.2 (1993): 25879; W. Gunther
Plaut, German-Jewish Bible Translations: Linguistic Theology as a Political Phenomenon
(New York, 1992); Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference
and the Politics of Translation (Chicago, 2006), 15398.

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Redemption (1921) or Hermann Cohens Religion of Reason (1919), which

present short passages of biblical text in support of larger philosophical
arguments, in Bubers commentaries the biblical text is central and Buber
presents his more philosophical points in support of his biblical readings.
Buber may be best described as what Benjamin Sommer has called a
theologically oriented Jewish reader of scripture. For such a reader
the most contemporary discussion on Jewish theology may come into
focus precisely when those pursuing it look to the most distant interlocutors . . . modern biblical scholarship allows one to hear forgotten voices
of Jewish creativity.9
Bubers three books of commentary constitute a single project, and my
analysis moves through the texts thematically. I begin with Bubers reading of the book of Judges in Konigtum Gottes and then continue to his
account of the covenant-forming events at Mount Sinai in Moshe. In each
of these sections, I consider Bubers portrayal of the role of individual
actors in developing and articulating foundational elements of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel by examining the hermeneutic tools that Buber brings to his readings of the biblical text. In the
essays third section, I turn to Torat ha-neviim and to Bubers understanding of prophecy and the relationship between God and the people in the
context of the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In particular, I look at Bubers discussion of the prophet Jeremiahs experience
of God as the height of human-divine dialogue and how this dialogue
becomes a model of prayer. In each section, I highlight how Bubers discussion addresses the relationship between the modern reader and the
ancient past described in the biblical narrative. While Bubers Early
Addresses, his biblical translation, and I and Thou inform my analysis, I am
purposefully drawing a more neglected chapter of Bubers work to the
foreground in the hope of showing that his commentaries represent an
important stage in his thinking not only about the Bible but also about
Jewish history.
Before delving further into Bubers understanding of history, it is
important to note that the term historicism is used by scholars to refer
to a number of different phenomena in both philosophy of history and in
the study of the events of the past.10 As I use it here, historicism refers to
a relativistic approach to the past that questions the existence of transhis9. Benjamin D. Sommer, Revelation at Sinai in the Hebrew Bible and in
Jewish Theology, Journal of Religion 79.3 (1999): 423.
10. Georg G. Iggers, Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,
Journal of the History of Ideas 56.1 (1995): 12952.

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torical truths and the assumption of a larger narrative unfolding within

and beyond human actions and experiences. Earlier scholarship on Jewish thinking about history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has
emphasized tensions between historicists such as Simon Dubnow and
Gershom Scholem and antihistoricists such as Hermann Cohen and
Franz Rosenzweig. In these contexts, Buber is often understood as
unconcerned with these questions.11 The few existing accounts of Bubers
thinking on history do not extend to his biblical writings, thus missing
what I consider to be the richest resource for understanding this element
of his thought, for it is in the commentaries that he both philosophizes
about history and tries his hand at historical study.12 My consideration of
his commentaries will demonstrate that Buber was deeply engaged in
questions of how modern Jews should approach, understand, and use
their past, exploring these questions through hermeneutics. The answers
he articulates in his biblical commentaries cannot be easily categorized as
either historicism or antihistoricism.
THE D IVINE KINGSHIP I N HISTORY

In his Early Addresses, Buber describes Jewish history as a constant struggle to overcome the difference between living religiosity and dead religion.13 Religiosity is actual and immediate experience of connection with
11. For example, David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, N.J., 2009), 5455. For further consideration of modern Jewish historians and historiography, see Michael Brenner,
Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, trans. S. Rendall (Princeton, N.J.,
2010).
12. On Buber and history, see Jacob Taubes, Buber and Philosophy of History, in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. P. A. Schilpp and M. Friedman (La
Salle, Ill., 1967), 45168; Leora Batnitzky, Renewing the Jewish Past: Buber
on History and Truth, Jewish Studies Quarterly 10 (2003): 33650; Revelation
and Neues DenkenRethinking Buber and Rosenzweig on the Law, in New
Perspectives on Martin Buber, ed. M. Zank (Tubingen, 2006), 14964; Jules Simon,
Dilthey and Simmel: A Reading from/toward Bubers Philosophy of History,
in New Perspectives on Martin Buber, 12747; Martin Kavka, Verification (Bewahrung) in Martin Buber, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 20.1 (2012):
7198.
13. Martin Buber, Judaism and Mankind, in On Judaism (New York, 1967),
2233; Das Judentum and die Menschheit, in Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsatze und Reden (Gerlingen, 1993), 1827. Buber borrows the terms
religion and religiosity from the early sociologist Georg Simmel though, as
Mendes-Flohr has noted, he treats them not as sociological patterns (as Simmel
observed) but as ontological realities. See Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to
Dialogue: Martin Bubers Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit, 1989).

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God or the pursuit of such experience, while religion consists of stable

forms such as religious literature, ritual, or law. These forms are necessary, but there is always a danger that they will replace the original religiosity that gave rise to them.14 Throughout his Early Addresses, Buber
argues that Jewish history is defined by this Jewish pursuit of true religiosity and resistance of the potentially stultifying effects of religion from
the biblical period through to his own present day. In short, the interaction of religion and religiosity is the defining framework of Jewish history.
Rather than the collection of artifacts from the past, here Buber argues
that the study of history should identify those moments when the Jewish
spirit succeeded in reaching religiosity. He selectively summarizes Jewish
history in several of the Early Addresses, distilling many centuries into brief
lists of isolated moments representing the peaks of Jewish religiosity.
Each time he presents Jewish history in the Early Addresses, the Bible is
his starting point, the earliest example of Jewish religiosity. Others on
these lists include Jesus, the Essenes, the Hasidim, and Spinoza. Each of
these individuals or groupsthough usually marginalized in accounts of
Jewish historyrepresents for Buber a surging of religiosity against the
mainstream religion of their time.
In his commentaries, as in the Early Addresses, Buber presents individual and isolated events as symbolic representations of forces that run
throughout Jewish history. He highlights patterns, linking disparate
events and often ignoring intervening stages that do not fit. At the same
time, unlike in his Early Addresses, in his commentaries Buber crafts narratives rather than lists, arguing that these events constitute a story of progress in the development of ancient Israelite theology. Thus, for example,
in Konigtum Gottes, he argues that Gideons refusal to become a hereditary
ruler as narrated in the book of Judges was the beginning of a political
theology that continued to appear and to develop through the books of
Samuel and Kings and into the books of the later prophets. In Torat haneviim, Buber traces the development of the idea of the kingship of God
from the time of Abraham and the patriarchs through the particular situations of individual prophets until it becomes the concept of messianic
redemption expressed by Deutero-Isaiah. In Moshe, Buber presents a
biography of Moses as a religious innovator and leader.
In his commentaries Buber reads the Bible with a distinct methodology, which he names Tradition Criticism (bekorot ha-mesorot, suggestive
14. This is Bubers frequent diagnosis of what is wrong with the Judaism of
his own time in the Early Addresses.

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of bekoret ha-mekorot, the Hebrew name for Source Criticism). It is not

clear whether he is referencing the approach of the German biblical
scholar Hermann Gunkel, who developed the more standard methodologies of Form Criticism and Tradition Criticism. Although Buber does cite
Gunkel elsewhere in the commentaries, his name does not appear here
and their methodologies are not identical. However, like Gunkels Tradition Criticism, Bubers method assumes that the texts stories and ideas
record an earlier, oral tradition, and he reads the text as a collection of
these oral traditions that was later written down rather than a collection
of disparate written sources redacted into a single whole. As Buber
describes it, Tradition Criticism is an intuitively scientific method that
seeks concrete facts preserved in the biblical text.15 Upon identifying a
religious event that appears to be historically true, the reader must ask
whether it fits into the narrative of the religious development of Israel,
that is, if it is continuous with previously held ideas but does not reflect
ideas that developed later. If it does not fit, we cannot verify that the
event is historically true or likely. On the other hand, if it does fit into
the larger narrative of religious development, the account of such an
event sheds light on that narrative. It is through this interplay of part (an
individual biblical event) and whole (the larger historical narrative) that
Bubers arguments about biblical theology advance.
In Bubers reading, it is especially the prophetic books that preserve
stages in the development of the relationship between the collective people Israel and God. These stages are captured by descriptions of key
events. As he explains it, we learn from the prophetic narratives that
in a particular age within the particular circle of a tribe or people there
appeared an actual relationship between the believer and that in which
he believes, a unique and special relationship which we can perceive.
And at a particular stage too, which also has to be designated unique,
this relationship embodied itself in an actual event, which continues to
operate.16
Bubers language here is circuitous and difficult. But the argument that
emerges is that the relationship between God and the Israelites who
believed in him, as seen most sharply in the prophetic books, is the central
fact of the Hebrew Bible. In describing this relationship, Buber emphasizes ways in which it was actual and real. He affirms that the relationship
15. Buber, The Prophetic Faith, 6; Torat ha-neviim, 6.
16. Buber, Torat ha-neviim, 6. My translation, based on Prophetic Faith, 6.

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manifested itself in certain events and times, using the word particular
(mesuyam) to underscore their factuality. Though he will describe the
relationship between the Israelites and their God as a relationship of dialogue, determining the historicity of that relationship through particular
events is the readers primary challenge. This takes priority over the pursuit of dialogue in ones own life, though this is certainly not ruled out.
This is markedly different from the task Buber and Rosenzweig set before
the readers of their translation when Buber called upon them to place
themselves anew before the renewed book, hold back nothing of themselves, let everything happen between themselves and it, whatever may
happen.17
Buber formally describes and names Tradition Criticism for the first
time in Torat ha-neviim, but his use of it is already apparent in Konigtum
Gottes, the first of his commentaries. Though he is now focused on determining the historicity of biblical events, his new method nevertheless utilizes the exegetical techniques he developed while translating. Chief
among these is the concept of the Leitwort, the leading word. A Leitwort is
a word or word-root repeated through either a single passage or story or
in multiple passages. Within a single passage, Leitworte offer a clue to the
passages deeper significance; when they appear in a number of passages,
they invite the reader to interpret these passages together.18 In Konigtum
Gottes, the very structure of the book of Judges leads Buber to reflect on
the nature of biblical historicity and the question of how we can ascertain
which elements of the text are the most accurate or reliable representations of the past.
Judges is composed of a series of chronicles from various Israelite
tribes as they struggle to form and maintain alliances and leadership
structures. These chronicles are among the least triumphant of all biblical
histories. As Robert Boling comments in the Anchor Bible commentary
on Judges, the narrators portray the judges realistically, with fears as
well as courage, faults as well as faith. Their attitudes toward Yahweh,
17. Martin Buber, People Today and the Jewish Bible, in Scripture and
Translation, trans. L. Rosenwald and E. Fox (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 7; Der
Mensch von Heute und die Judische Bibel, in Werke, vol. 2 (Munich, 1964),
85253.
18. For further analysis of Leitworte from the perspective of biblical scholarship and literary studies, see Meir Weiss, Be-sod siah. ha-mikra, in Buber, Darkho shel mikra: Iyunim be-defuse signon be-tanakh (Jerusalem, 1997), 933; Edward
L. Greenstein, Theories of Modern Bible Translation, Prooftexts 3 (1983): 939;
Yairah Amit, The Multi-Purpose Leading Word and the Problem of its Usage,
Prooftexts 9 (1989): 99114.

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the God of Israel, are not constantly praiseworthy either.19 How God
will lead Israel is, for Buber, the central question driving Judges, and his
discussion of this book highlights the more successful attempts to answer
it. In particular, he emphasizes connections between the idea of God as
the leader of Israel as expressed in Judges (and earlier in the Pentateuch
and Joshua) with Samuels appointment of a human being as a deputy
king, and the messianic faith developed by Isaiah and other later prophets. Judges thus fits into the development of Israelite messianism as a
progressive prehistory of the idea of an Israelite king.
Bubers discussion of Gideon exemplifies his hermeneutic technique
and the larger argument he is building. Gideon, also called Jerubbaal, is
a military leader in Judges 6.118.35, following the death of the judge
Deborah. At the time that Gideon is called to lead by an angel of God
outside the terebinth of Ophrah, the Israelites have offended God, and
God has already been punishing them at the hands of the Midianites for
seven years. In response to the angel, Gideon first protests that he is too
young to lead the Israelites (Jgs 6.15) and then prepares food (6.19).
Finally, God addresses Gideon directly (6.23). Only at this point does
Gideon tear down his fathers altar to Baal and gather troops from the
tribes of Manasseh, Asher, Zebulon, and Naphtali to face the Midianites
in battle.
Buber focuses on the conclusion of Gideons story in the second half
of the eighth chapter of Judges. Here, Gideon has just returned home
from leading the Israelites to victory against the Midianites. As a way of
recognizing his leadership and success, the men of Israel ask him to be
their hereditary king, saying: Rule over usyou, your son, and your
grandson as well; for you have saved us from the Midianites (8.22).
Gideon refuses. Buber considers whether this is just a pro forma refusal,
asserting that the appointment of a Chinese king always included a ritual
refusal before the monarchs eventual acceptance of the crown.20 But he
rejects this possibility and insists that Gideon speaks meaningfully and
honestly when he responds to the men of Israel: I will not rule over you
myself, nor shall my son rule over you; the Lord alone shall rule over
you (8.23). Buber holds Gideons refusal to be a hereditary ruler to be
the earliest statement of a uniquely Israelite principle of limited human
19. Robert G. Boling, Judges: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, The
Anchor Bible Commentary (New York, 1975), 9.
20. This assertion appears without citation. In general, Buber includes citations for the arguments of other biblical critics but not when he presents more
incidental historical and cultural information.

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kingship and the beginning of Israels political theology. As he puts it,

Gideons saying dares to deal seriously with the rulership of God.21
Despite Gideons refusal, in the next chapter of Judges his son Abimelech persuades the people of Shechem that he should rule over them by
asking Which is better for you, to be ruled by seventy menby all the
sons of Jerubbaalor to be ruled by one man? (9.2). The choice Abimelech offers is between himself as sole ruler or all of his half-brothers,
Gideons other sons, sharing the rulership. After Abimelech is appointed
by the people, he kills the seventy half-brothers who might threaten his
rule. With his words and his acts, Abimelech invites the reader to wonder
if perhaps Gideon did accept the kingship on his own behalf and on
behalf of his sons, in a passage deleted in the transmission of the text.
(Specifically because of this issue, some biblical critics have understood
Gideons statement in 8.23 to be a later addition to the text reflecting the
theology of editors already living in an Israelite kingdom.22) This seems
to be an explanation for Abimelekhs assumption that either he or his
brothers should be the next rulers. His very name (literally, my father is
king) further supports this possibility.
To refute this reading, Buber offers a Leitwort-based analysis based on
the texts use of the verb mashal, meaning to govern, rather than malakh,
to be king. Mashal is the verb used in the text for both the rulership
offered to Gideon and the rulership assumed by Abimelech. As Buber
notes, the word mashal also appears in the book of Genesis to describe
Josephs power in Egypt as a member of Pharaohs court (Gen 45.8 and
45.26) and Eliezers control of Abrahams household as his servant (24.2)
as well as the rule of the sun and moon over the day and night (Gen 1.16)
and the rule of a husband over his wife (3.16). Using these verses as
prooftexts, Buber argues that the word [mashal] in Biblical language
signifies not the formal possession, but rather the factual practice of a power
which can also be affirmed of a kingship as predicate.23 That is, while
mashal refers to the assumption of power regardless of formal role or
position, it is specifically not the same as kingship, malkhut. He cites
Psalm 103 as a prooftext for the use of mashal as an aspect of kingship,
rather than kingship itself. This psalm describes Gods kingship as malkhuto be-kol mashalah, His kingship [malkhut, from the verb malakh] rules
[mashalah] over all (Ps 103.19). This psalm also serves to underscore
21. Buber, Kingship of God, 59; Konigtum Gottes , 3.
22. E.g., Marc Brettler, The Book of Judges: Literature as Politics, Journal
of Biblical Literature 108.3 (1989): 395418.
23. Buber, Kingship of God, 61; Konigtum Gottes, 7. Emphasis added.

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Bubers portrayal of biblical political theology as based in recognition of

the absolute power of Gods kingship.
On the basis of this Leitwort reading, Buber argues further that Abimelech did not see himself as a king even though he seems to have based his
rule over Shechem on a hereditary claim of some sort. That is, the redactors of Judges chose to use the Leitwort mashal specifically so that the
reader would find the link between 8.23 and 9.2 and thus understand that
Gideon and Abimelech viewed their leadership in the same light and,
more specifically, not as a hereditary kingship. This Leitwort analysis is
an essential piece of Bubers argument that both Gideon and Abimelech
believed God to be the true king over human beings, itself a necessary
step in his larger argument that the idea of God as the true king was
present from the earliest stages of Israelite political theology.24 As a Leitwort, the word mashal would seem to offer insight into the reality of the
Jewish people in their most ancient form.
MOSES IN S AG A A ND IN HISTOR Y

Beyond the analytical technique of identifying and tracing Leitworte, Bubers Tradition Criticism depends on the distinction between two types of
biblical writing: saga and history. Historical writing is that in which we
can discern a true event or at least a trace of it, while saga refers to
narratives in which the historical truth is distorted by layers of legend
and myth. Thus, in the story of Gideon, Gods calling him and leading
him into battle is saga, as the narrator gives a supernatural or divine
explanation for events in the natural world. Buber specifies that it is not
as if saga had joined itself to history and accordingly had to be detached
from it, but the holy saga is for this reporter the immediate and single way
of articulating his knowledge about the events.25 Because the tellers of
saga believe in the possibility of miracles and divine intervention, they
experience miracles and divine interventions. Their descriptions of such
events are true, despite the fact that they point beyond the natural world.
The writing of history, in contrast to saga, attempts to provide an account
of events as happening solely within a this-worldly course of human
affairs. The perspective taken by a narrator of history can be shared with
any reader, regardless of her attitude toward supernatural events.
The distinction between biblical saga and history will sound familiar to
24. As Konigtum Gottes proceeds, Buber extends his argument to suggest than
the idea of God as the true king was uniquely Israelite and distinguished the
people from its neighbors in the ancient Near East.
25. Buber, Kingship of God, 63; Konigtum Gottes, 9.

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readers of Bubers Early Addresses on Judaism, especially Myth in Judaism (1916), as well as to readers of his collections of Hasidic tales, which
he calls legends and myths.26 The word myth, however, does not appear
in his commentaries. Instead, the term he chooses is saga (Sage in Konigtum Gottes, and agadah in Torat ha-neviim and Moshe). He does not discuss
his shift from myth to saga, leaving us to surmise that perhaps he did not
wish to draw attention to the connection between his discussions of biblical saga and his earlier discussions of Jewish myths. We must remember
as well that by 1933 the term myth had been transformed in Germany
from its Romantic roots into a tool for National Socialism.27 By using the
word saga instead of myth, Buber escapes the anti-Semitic connotations that had gathered around the latter term. Additionally, the German
term Sage appeared in contrast to history (Geschichte) in other works of
biblical criticism of the time.28 Regardless of this shift in vocabulary, Bubers portrayal of biblical saga is distinctly different from his embrace of
myth as the expression of a true Jewish spirit in his earlier writings. For
the first time, mythic writings are of secondary importance for the reader
who seeks to understand Judaism and its development through history.29
Bubers account of the revelation at Mount Sinai in Moshe powerfully
illustrates the distinction between history and saga.30 He affirms that
what happened at Sinai was a natural or even ordinary event understood
by an awestruck Israel as wondrous, a view he first expressed while
26. On Bubers retelling of Hasidic myths, see Martina Urban, Aesthetics of
Renewal: Martin Bubers Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago,
2008); Kepnes, The Text as Thou.
27. Roots of Nazi ideology may be traced to the same Romantic thinkers
that likely inspired Bubers interest in myth (e.g., Herder, Schlegel, and Schelling). Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago, 1999), 75.
28. Brian M. Britt, Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text (New York,
2004), 5963. Bubers definitions of saga and history do not match those of other
German biblical critics who used the terms.
29. According to Leora Batnitzky, myth is what makes history possible.
Myth in this sense is the inner ontological reality that enables the epistemological
claim of history. While her argument is convincing in the context of the Early
Addresses, Bubers account of history and saga in the commentaries suggests, if
not a shift in his understanding of the philosophical relationship between these
two, then at least a shift in his approach to them and the value he places on each.
Batnitzky, Renewing the Jewish Past. On dualistic structure in Bubers work
more generally, see Avraham Shapira, Hope for Our Time: Key Trends in the Thought
of Martin Buber (Albany, N.Y., 1999).
30. For an alternate account of Bubers reading of Moses, see Britt, Rewriting
Moses, 7780.

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translating with Rosenzweig.31 Their awe is what leads them to describe

it as something that happened between the divine and the human realms:
What takes place here is a meeting between two fires, the earthly and
the heavenly; and if either of them is struck out, there is an immediate
lacuna in the picture which has so enraptured the generations of the People of Israel.32 But to understand Moses, Buber must separate the
prophet as portrayed by the saga-teller from the prophet of the historian:
Yonder Moses who ascends the smoking mountain before the eyes of
the assembled people, who speaks to the Height and receives from the
thunder and trumpet-blasts a response which he brings to his people
in the form of commandments and laws,yonder Moses is not merely
a stranger to us, which the real Moses also threatens to become at
times when we sense him most; he is unreal.33
More specifically, modern people, the late-born who are oppressed . . .
by the merciless problem of Truth,34 cannot believe that Moses received
the Ten Commandments from God at the top of a mountain or that the
Israelites simultaneously encountered God at the mountains base during
an awe-inspiring thunderstorm. These modern readers must regard this
account as saga.
In contrast to the wondrous accounts of saga, the most concrete and
least marvelous aspects of a biblical account are the strongest indicators
of factual material. These aspects are the original nucleus of the biblical
story and portray events as occurring entirely within the natural world,
without the distorting lens of believing memory that shapes the saga that
surrounds them. In the case of Sinai, Buber finds historical nuclei in two
places: first, in the steps Moses takes to bring the Israelites into a covenant with God before the eruption of thunder and lightning at Sinai, and
second, in the content of the Ten Commandments and the stone tablets
upon which they were written.
31. In his essay People Today and the Jewish People, written in connection
with his translation work, Buber describes the revelation at Sinai as a collective
experience of Gods presence. The record we have of what happened at Sinai is
the verbal trace of a natural event, i.e., an event having occurred in the common
sensory world of humankind and having fitted into its patterns, which the assemblage that experienced it experienced as Gods revelation to it and so preserved
it in the inspired and in no way arbitrary formative memory of generations.
Buber, People Today, 10; Der Mensch von Heute, 85657.
32. Buber, Moses, 110; Moshe, 140.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.

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Buber argues that the historical heart of the covenant is the utterance
of the phrase YHVH God of Israel that together with the acts of ritual
bloodshed and feasting that Moses performs at the base of Mount Sinai
in Exodus 24 turns the Israelite tribes into the nation of Israel. As he
writes:
We may rest reasonably well assured that he, and none other than he,
to whom we may well attribute a knowledge of the inner organization
of the peoples, educed the tribal system of Israel from out of the natural
structure of the natural material; and that by completing the appropriate parts he made it possible to weld them together.35
In his account of Moses here and elsewhere in his commentary, Buber
describes him as the genius behind the biblical laws.36 For Buber, who
believes that human beings are capable of knowing God in relationship,
Mosess great achievement is found in the steps he takes to solidify that
relationship in the symbols and words of a formal covenant.
Why does Moses undertake the task of bringing the Israelites from a
group of tribes into a nation in a covenantal relationship with God? In
the passage quoted above, Buber writes of Mosess conviction that this
was Gods wish derived from a direct experience. This points us to
Bubers discussion of Gods revelation to Moses at the burning bush in
Exodus 3. In this revelation, Moses asks for Gods name and God
responds in 3.14 by naming himself as ehyeh asher ehyeh, a phrase notoriously difficult to translate that can be understood as I am that I am or
I will be that I will be. In Torat ha-neviim, Buber reads the phrase ehyeh
asher ehyeh as an explanation or rationalization of the Tetragrammaton:
YHWH is not a collection of sounds that the Israelites might use to call
upon their God (based, perhaps, on the call Yah or Yahu) but rather
a verb expressing how their God exists.
In contrast, in Moshe, Buber begins his discussion of the burning bush
episode with Exodus 3.6, where God identifies himself as the God of
the Fathers who was known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Bubers
35. Buber, Moses, 113; Moshe, 143.
36. This is an interesting point of overlap between Buber and Spinoza. As
Spinoza writes, Such sovereignty Moses easily succeeded in keeping in his
hands, because he surpassed all others in divine power which he convinced the
people he possessed, providing many proofs thereof . . . He, then, by the divine
power with which he was gifted, established a system of law and ordained it for
the people. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-political Treatise, trans. S. Shirley (2nd ed.;
Indianapolis, Ind., 2001), 64.

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reading, this connection is further underscored by the Leitworte ami (my

people) and Mitsrayim (Egypt). At this point, Gods connection to their
ancestors is stronger than Gods connection to the enslaved Israelites
themselves, for the latter connection will only truly be established at
Mount Sinai:
With this repeated my people (ami) at the commencement and close
of the passage, YHVH recognizes Israel in a fashion more powerful
and unequivocal than would have been possible by any other verbal
means. To be sure, he has not yet designated himself their God. He
will become the God of Israel as a people solely through the revelation
to the people; now he wishes to be known only as the God of their
forefathers, to whom he had once promised the land whither he would
lead Israel.37
In part, Bubers stress on the connection between the God of the Fathers
and the God speaking at the burning bush seems intended to refute theories found in biblical criticism of his time, specifically the hypothesis that
YHWH was a Kenite God who resided at Mount Sinai and was then
adopted (and adapted) by the Israelites. But more significantly for our
inquiry, in this discussion Buber also holds that God revealed more than
a divine presence at the burning bush. We must also note that the revelation to Moses was a revelation of a specific content, namely, the connection between this revealing God, the Israelites, and the Israelite
forefathers.
As the narrative of the burning bush encounter continues, Moses and
God enter into what Buber terms the great [dialogue] in which the God
commands and the man resists.38 He finds the bulk of this dialogue in
Exodus 4. Most importantly, Buber regards Mosess resistance as a later
addition to the text and not as part of the original kernel. He makes this
argument on the basis of literary features of the text, namely, changes in
the rhythmic structure of the narrative and, in particular, the way in
which the word ot (sign) is used to suggest a supernatural act.39 Though
Buber uses more structural aspects of the narrative to argue that certain
verses were added later, he identifies original kernels of the narrative
37. Buber, Moses, 4546; Moshe, 68.
38. Buber, Moses, 46; Moshe, 69.
39. Buber argued that the true meaning of ot in the prophetic writings, in
contrast, is a symbolization, a sensory presentation of a manifested truth, a perceptible reality which, no matter whether it is more or less wondrous, always
reminds people once again of that truth. Buber, Moses, 47; Moshe, 70.

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(namely, Ex 3.6 and 3.14) by their content. The way in which a particular
event is described is a less reliable indicator of its truth than the theological content the event assumes or expresses. As Buber writes, With all
the deference to literary categories, their scientific dignity is not great
enough to decide the character and dimension of the content of truth in
an account of a revelation; it is not even enough to ensure the correct
formulation of the question.40 Bubers methodology for finding the original kernels of truth in the biblical text relies upon his own sense of how
the theology of the Bible develops according to a historical narrative that
he never spells out other than identifying when a particular segment of
the text fits into it (and is thus an original and true textual fragment) or
does not (and is thus a late addition and most likely historically inaccurate).41
In his analysis of the burning bush, Buber describes several moments
in which God states something or makes a particular promise. But ultimately it is not clear whether Buber believes that God spoke specific
words aloud for Moses to hear them or if the words that the text ascribes
to God were Mosess interpretation of his experience of revelation, as
they would have to be with the model of wordless revelation he had presented in I and Thou. In his concluding statement on ehyeh asher ehyeh,
Buber writes that this proclamation
does not belong to literature but to the sphere attained by the founders
of religion. If it is theology, it is that archaic theology which, in the
form of a historical narrative, stands at the threshold of every genuine
historical religion. No matter who related that speech or when, he
derived it from a tradition which, in the last resort, cannot go back to
anybody other than the founder.42
40. Buber, Moses, 41; Moshe, 63.
41. Just as Buber provides no specific guidelines for identifying kernels of
biblical history in his commentaries, he provides no guidelines for identifying
Leitworte. As Dan Avnon comments about Leitworte, The proof of this theory of
reading is in the reading itself. This is a proposition difficult to defend in systematic discourse. The proof (or refutation) is in the experience; sensitive reading
of the Bible serves as testimony that such reading is experienced as described,
manifested in the reading, not in the words read; in the how to relate, not in the
what that is related. Dan Avnon, Martin Buber: The Hidden Dialogue (Lanham,
Md., 1998), 50; emphasis in the original. See as well Amit, Multi-Purpose Leading Word, 111; Shemaryahu Talmon, Martin Bubers Ways of Interpreting the
Bible, Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (1976): 205.
42. Buber, Moses, 55; Moshe, 78.

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Even if it was not Moses himself who recorded the words we have, by
the nature of what they describe, we can be certain that they point to an
event in his life and thus in history. At the same time, Moses is responsible for the content of the revelation. That is to say, even while we can be
certain that something happened at the burning bush, we must give credit
to Moses for the developments he brings to Israelite theology in response
to this moment of revelation.
Bubers method of distinguishing between the original nucleus of the
text and its later embellishments is most apparent in his discussions of
the Ten Commandments and the separation he draws between the events
surrounding the theophany at Sinai and the content of the Ten Commandments. As we have seen, he does hold that something happened at
Sinai and that this something was experienced by the people Israel as an
awesome event. Furthermore, he understands this experience to be
closely tied to the Israelites existence as a unified people. At the same
time, however, Buber insists that the account of this event is saga, shaped
as much by the power of believing memory as by the facts on the ground
at the time.
Buber views the Ten Commandments, however, as completely unaffected by believing memory or any other force that might distort their
factual reality. The Decalogue is Mosess invention for the sake of the
peoples unity and their covenant with God. Mosess ingenuity extends
even to his decision to inscribe the commandments on stone tablets. As
Buber writes:
It seems to me . . . more likely both from the introduction to the passage
commencing I, as well as from the prose-like structure of the sentences, that the manifestation took place in written form. That it was
written down on two tablets is a tradition which is worthy of belief.
Tables or stelae with laws ascribed to the divinity, are known to us
both from Babylon and from early Greece.43
The description of Moses ascending the mountain for forty days and
forty nights and returning with his face aglow is a tremendous scene
that must be disregarded by the reader searching for the true biblical
history. We can trust from the biblical account that Moses retreated to
the mountain with two stone tablets and returned with them inscribed,
and ultimately, this is what matters most. The stone ensures that the
Commandments will endure, serving as a witness: it sees what there is
43. Buber, Moses, 138; Moshe, 17071.

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to see, it hears what there is to hear; and it testifies thereto, makes

present and contemporary for all coming generations that which it has
to see and hear; the stone outlasts the decaying eyes and ears, and goes
on speaking.44
In Bubers reading, stone is first linked with revelation when Moses
uses stones to represent the tribes of Israel in the covenant-founding rite
at the base of Mount Sinai. As the surface of the Ten Commandments, it
takes on an even greater importance:
By means of [writing] one can embody in the stone what has been
revealed to one; so that it is no longer simply an event, the making of
the Covenant, but also, word by word, it continues to serve as evidence
of a revelation, of the law of the King. What Moses says may be
clumsy, but not what he writes; that is suitable for his time and for the
later times in which the stone will testify.45
In his description of the tablets on which Moses records the Ten Commandments, Buber is clear: the written words themselves are Mosess
invention. God never speaks the particular words that Moses records.
Nevertheless, Moses does encounter God in some way at Mount Sinai
and this encounter is what leads him to engrave commandments on the
tablets. The words that Moses writes point toward the encounter that he
shared with God, even as they also outline the terms of the covenant
between God and Israel and offer directives for life.
While translating, Buber had described the orality of the text as one of
its most essential features, insisting that one should hear the text, and not
read it, in order to access its true power. The dynamic capabilities of the
text to address the life of its reader rest in its orality, and its writtenness
threatens to make the text static and to choke its powers of address. Now,
in praising Moses as a theologian who not only encounters God but crafts
the covenant between God and Israel and sets Israel on the path toward
ethical living specifically through the writtenness of the Ten Commandments, Buber complicates his earlier view. He does not openly acknowledge the significance of this shift, and this is the only place in which he
praises writing over orality. What we find on this theme elsewhere in the
commentaries is a continuation of his preference for oral over written
communication and the attribution of this preference to the prophets as
well.
44. Buber, Moses, 139; Moshe, 172.
45. Buber, Moses, 139140; Moshe, 172.

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ON DIALOGUE

In Bubers commentaries, as we have already seen, the possibility of

human-divine dialogue is a central principle in his account of Israelite
theology, playing an important role in the establishment of Israelite kingship and in Mosess role as a lawgiver. But the divine-human dialogue
Buber describes in his commentaries is distinctly different from the presentation of revelation as a wordless dialogue between God (the Eternal
Thou) and a human partner in I and Thou. There, referring to Gods
words to Moses at the burning bush, Buber wrote: I do not believe in
Gods defining himself before man. The word of revelation is: I am there
as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That
which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength
flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing
more.46 According to this definition of revelation as a dialogical relationship, an encounter with God has no content beyond an affirmation of
divine existence.
In contrast, the sort of close reading that Buber undertakes in his commentaries forces him to come to terms with biblical records of revelation
in which human beings receive specific messages from God and respond
to them. As we have seen, one response is to assign these accounts to the
realm of saga, as Buber does in presenting the message Gideon received
from God in Konigtum Gottes and as he does in his presentation of the
events at Mount Sinai in Moshe. In Torat ha-neviim, Bubers approach is
slightly different. By presenting each prophets message as a theological
response to his own particular context, Buber argues that the prophets
collectively develop the idea of Gods kingship from roots that go back
not only to Judges but even to Abraham. We might better describe the
prophets by calling them theologians.
Whether the prophets heard actual words of God becomes an incidental question as Buber assesses the ideas they express when addressing the
people in the name of God. He stresses how, particularly as the human
kings of Israel and Judah fail, the prophets emphasize themes of return
and repentance (teshuvah), always offering the people the chance to
change their future. God has not set the fate of his people but will shape
their history in response to their decisions and deeds:
The God of the universe is the God of history. He is the deity Who
walks with the creature of His hands, man, Who walks with His elect,
46. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufman (New York, 1970), 160; Ich
und Du, in Werke, vol. 1 (Munich, 1962), 154.

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Israel, along the hard way of history. He reveals Himself in history; it

is not as if He produced it but, as He accompanies man, He demands
from him that he should serve Him lovingly in all the breadth of historic life, and zealously He lets the resisting experience his fate in history, the fate resulting from his own deeds.47
God is here a companion, sharing in the experience of the people of
Israel, whether they disobey or repent. The prophet is the one who seeks
to teach this; but because he himself already knows this, the prophet is
also the one who stands in a different and more direct relationship with
God. Each prophet in his time advances not the human-divine relationship but rather the human understanding of that relationship.
Bubers description of Jeremiahs dialogue with God highlights the
experience of prophetic dialogue:
He [Jeremiah], to whom and by whom the word is spoken, is in the
full sense of the word a person (ishiut). Before the word is spoken by
him in human language it is spoken to him in another language, from
which he has to translate it into human language, to him this word is
spoken as between person and person. In order to speak to man
(adam), God must become a person; but in order to speak to him, He
must make him too a person.48
Buber begins by describing Jeremiahs prophetic task as that of a translator: the language in which God speaks with him is not human. But to
explain this, Buber must distinguish between a human being (adam) created by God and a person (ish) ready to be in dialogue with God. Both
God and Jeremiah are transformed through dialogue into persons. And,
as a person, Jeremiah is able to respond:
This human person not only adopts the word, it also answers, lamenting, complaining to God himself (15.18), disputing with Him about
justice (12.1), humbling himself before Him, praying. Only Jeremiah
of all the Israelite prophets has dared to note this bold and devout life
conversation of the utterly inferior with the utterly superiorin such
a manner is man here become a person. All Israelite relationship of
faith is dialogic; here the dialogue has reached its pure form.49
47. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 94; Torat ha-neviim, 89.
48. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 164165; Torat ha-neviim, 151.
49. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 165; Torat ha-neviim, 151.

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Jeremiahs pure and true speech is his complaining and his objecting to
Gods plans. Many, if not all, of the biblical prophets protested their calling to some degree. But for Buber, Jeremiahs lamenting and praying
takes the idea of protest before God to a new level. The specific verses
Buber cites suggest that Jeremiahs protest is unique because of his
audacity in complaint and his humility in prayer. Buber concludes his
discussion of the dialogue by writing that Man can speak, he is permitted to speak; if only he truly speaks to God, there is nothing he cannot
say to Him.50
Buber describes Jeremiahs personhood as belonging to the entire collective people Israel. As Jeremiah is in dialogue with God, the entire
people is in dialogue with God. Jeremiahs
I is so deeply set in the I of the people that this life cannot be
regarded as that of an individual . . . The I of the individual remains
transparent into the I of the community. It is no metaphor when
Jeremiah speaks of the people of Israel not only as we but also as
I . . . Israel could not have been chosen if it were no person.51
This description of Jeremiah introduces a new dimension into Bubers
view of the relationship between the prophet and the people. Jeremiahs
condemnation of the peoples sinfulness might seem to distance him from
the people. He stands with God against the peoples actions; only if they
repent and return to God will the people overcome the distance between
them and the prophet. At the same time, Jeremiahs personhood is the
peoples personhood. When Jeremiah expresses his anguish in watching
the people suffering for their sinfulness, his anguish is their anguish.52
Jeremiah suffers as the people suffer, even though only he understands
that they bring their suffering upon themselves.
Jeremiahs embodiment of the peoples collective I suggests a way in
which the faith of Israel can be always dialogic. As long as the prophet
is in dialogue with God, the people as a whole are also in dialogue with
God. At the same time, Bubers reading of Jeremiah does not fully
explain what he means by personhood or the idea of the I of Jeremiah or of the people. I would suggest that we turn here to I and Thou,
and to Bubers argument that ones I is always part of a word pair,
50. Ibid.
51. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 181; Torat ha-neviim, 166.
52. He really bears the people within himself. The contradiction that destroys
the people resides in his very self. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 182; Torat ha-neviim,
166.

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either I-It or I-Thou. To express, or even to have, a self is to orient ones

self toward an other. To treat that other as an It produces one kind of
self; to treat the other as a Thou produces a dialogical self. With this in
mind, we might say that Jeremiahs position in dialogue with God is the
embodiment of an orientation toward God, the orientation that is at the
heart of the relationship between Israel and God, when Israel is doing its
part to realize that relationship.
The prophetic narrative of course draws to a close, but as Buber continues his discussion of Jeremiah, he suggests that the way in which this
prophet lived in dialogue with God points toward prayer as a model of
post-prophetic human divine dialogue. It is through prayer that postprophetic Israel will embody dialogue with their God. To this end, Buber
develops Jeremiahs model of prayer further through a close reading of
Psalm 73. The psalmist opens with the statement that God is good to
those who have a pure heart. He describes how he once despaired at
seeing evil men prosper (vv. 216). It was only through the experience
of purifying his own heart and drawing close to God that the psalmist
comes to understand that the goodness of God and the force of divine
justice exceed human understanding.53 In his analysis, Buber stresses that
the psalmist speaks from his own experience of coming to know God,
which Buber understands to be an I-Thou relationship.54 He cannot convey his knowledge of God outside of this context.
At one point, Buber refers to the psalmist as the bearer of a prophetic
message. But more significant than the psalmist being a prophet, Buber
also describes him as a true man of prayer, that is to say, not a man who
composes a speech to God, but one who speaks in truth to God.55 While
prophets generally do not pursue God but in fact often protest when God
first calls them, the psalmist establishes a relationship with God through
53. When the Psalmist has become pure of heart, he approaches near to God
where alone it is possible to ponder his spiritual sanctuaries, the structure of
His mysteries. Now that he experiences in himself what the true certainty and
composure is, he recognizes that the assurance of the assured ones was nothing
but an appearance. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 200; Torat ha-neviim, 184.
54. There lies hid an overwhelming experience of life, the novelty and
strength of which act upon the recipient of a mission . . . It is necessary to make
known the most personal matter, to lay bare the secret of the heart, in order that
the manifestation be really effected. It is not permissible to translate it from the
intimate language of prayer into a more objective manner of speech: the one
who prays cannot perform his testimony without preserving the immediacy of the
relationship between the I and the thou. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 198; Torat haneviim, 182.
55. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 19798; Torat ha-neviim, 182.

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his own efforts. A person cannot induce God to make him a prophet, but
he can draw closer to God by developing his own purity of heart and
openness to knowing God. In this sense, the psalmist models the sort of
religious renewal that Buber describes earlier in his work, such as when
he encouraged people today to pursue unity of self and to be open to
belief in God. Yet the line between prayer and prophecy is not absolute:
Buber describes the prophet Jeremiah as praying and the praying writer
of Psalm 73 as the receiver of a revelation. Perhaps we may say only that
both prayer and revelation are present in any I-Thou relationship with
God, and that, at least for the modern person, prayer is one, or even the
only, way to approach revelation. When the psalmist attains purity of
heart, he experiences Gods justice as the man who stands in communion
with God.56
Buber returns to Psalm 73 in his 1952 essay The Heart Determines.
Here, Buber restates and expands the interpretation he first expressed in
Torat ha-neviim, defining purity of heart as the condition of feeling closer
to God; this closeness is the very definition of receiving Gods favor: The
state of the heart determines whether a man lives in the truth, in which
Gods goodness is experienced, or in the semblance of truth, where the
fact that it goes ill with him is confused with the illusion that God is not
good to him.57 In coming to understand Gods goodness, the psalmist
enters the divine sanctuary, the sphere of Gods holiness. The message
of this psalm is that God is found not in moments of turmoil (as in the
book of Job) but in moments of calm, when one attains purity of heart.
This moment of transformation is revelation in the sense in which Buber
had defined it in I and Thou: a life-changing moment in which one senses
Gods presence. Yet, given that purity of heart must be attained before
turning to God, the psalm teaches that revelation happens within a
human context and does not offer an escape from it.
In this account, Buber extends his portrayal of Jeremiahs empathic
participation in the life and suffering of Israel to the psalmist. As he did
with Jeremiah, Buber describes the psalmist as both an individual and a
symbol for Israel, and the experiences the psalmist describes and what he
states about God and the world are true for both an individual and collective Israel. This means that Israel must purify its collective heart if it is to
know Gods goodness. Buber then turns to the psalmists description of
what the good receive, in particular his claim that he will be continually
56. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 201; Torat ha-neviim, 184.
57. Martin Buber, The Heart Determines: Psalm 73, in Buber, Good and
Evil: Two Interpretations (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997), 34.

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with God and that God will guide him. What can these mean, for the
individual and for Israel? It is impossible for a human being to endure
revelation as a constant situation: no man is able to be continually turned
to the presence of God: he can say it only in the strength of the revelation
that God is continually with him.58 Thus, Gods continual presence is
actually the continual possibility of Gods presence. Purity of heart must
be understood as an orientation toward God, one that, in post-prophetic
days, makes possible prayer, not revelation. The connection Buber draws
between Jeremiahs prophecylocated in a specific time and placeand
the psalmists more timeless prayer is yet another way in which his commentaries pursue both a historical critical understanding of the biblical
text and guidance for Bubers own day, even as they transform his concept of revelation from the wordless dialogue of I and Thou to the historical relationship between the prophet and God.
CONCLUSION

In these pages, I have attempted to expose and to explicate the central

arguments of Bubers three books of biblical commentary by highlighting
themes of history, myth/saga, and dialogue. Examining these themes in
particular suggests important links between Bubers commentaries and
his Early Addresses on Judaism, I and Thou, and his biblical translation work,
while highlighting the significant shifts that occur in his understanding of
history in each of these projects. A comprehensive treatment of Bubers
biblical hermeneutics or his philosophy of history would not be complete
without further consideration of all these projects. In concluding this
shorter study of Bubers commentaries, however, I want to turn back
briefly to Bubers discussion of Gideon in the opening chapter of Kingship
of God, where this essay began. As I noted, after identifying Gideons
refusal to be king as history and not saga, Buber reads it as a broad and
early statement of Israels political theology: Gideon refuses to be king
because he already knows that God is king. This political theology will
eventually be spelled out as part of the limitations placed upon Saul, the
first official human king of the Israelites, by the prophet Samuel.
But even beyond this political theology, Buber draws out another
implication from Gideons refusal to be king. He argues that if God is
already and always king, theocracy is separate from redemption: Gods
rule is not a hope for the future but a present reality. In this way, Bubers
definition of history is rounded out to be not just the opposite of saga (a
hermeneutic principle) but the opposite of eschatology as well (a philoso58. Ibid., 42.

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phy of history). Because it happened in history, Gideons refusal to be

king reveals to us that life must be lived as an attempt to realize Gods
rule and not as the antechamber to a redemptive theocracy. As he continues, Buber adds that Gideons own desire to realize the reality of divine
kingship allows, yes commands, us to recognize the will toward constitution (that is, to actualization) as an original constant in the dynamic of
this folk life, which functions in the historiography because it has functioned in history.59 The denial of an apocalyptic redemption, brought
into the picture with Gideons refusal to become a hereditary king, provides Buber with a final element for his understanding of history.60
If history is the struggle to actualize life under Gods rule, then myth
(or saga or legend) reflects moments in this struggle, even if we cannot
learn from them how to struggle ourselves with this challenge. If biblical
history teaches us about the essence of Judaism, biblical myth remains
the perspective of a person whose spirit is enlivened in the attempt to
realize this essence. As Bubers comment in the passage just cited indicates, historiography reveals to us the purpose of history in the sense of
mundane human life.
This aspect of history is further underscored by consideration of Bubers 1941 essay Hebrew Humanism, where he offers a reading of the
Bible that emerges from a very different hermeneutic. There, he writes
that
what [the Bible has] to tell us, and what no other voice in the world
can teach us with such simple power, is that there is truth and there
are lies and that human life cannot persist or have meaning save in the
decision in behalf of truth and against lies; that there is right and
wrong, and that the salvation of man depends on choosing what is right
and rejecting what is wrong.61
59. Buber, Kingship of God, 65; Konigtum Gottes, 12.
60. Later, in The Prophetic and Apocalyptic (1954), Buber develops these
same ideas through discussion of prophetic and apocalyptic models of living. He
describes the historical hour as one in which an individual is presented with a
decision and has the opportunity to choose and to act, as the prophet Jeremiah
does in calling the people to repent. The apocalyptic, in contrast, is removed from
human reality and denies the possibility of meaningful action in the present context in favor of an unstoppable future time. Martin Buber, Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour, in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. N. N. Glatzer
(Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), 17287; Prophetie und Apokalyptik, in Werke, vol. 2
(Munich, 1964), 92549.
61. Martin Buber, Hebrew Humanism, in Israel and the World: Essays in a
Time of Crisis (Syracuse, N.Y., 1997), 246; Humaniut Ivrit, in Ha-ruah. vehametsiut (Tel Aviv, 1942), 57.

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In this essay, the actions of the prophets become a call to the Jewish
people to oppose fascism, Nazism, and war.62 In contrast, in his three
commentaries, through his method of Tradition Criticism and the pursuit
of reliable historical reports in the biblical narrative, Buber presents the
biblical prophets as engaging in dialogical encounters with God within
their particular historical circumstances, and he presents biblical theology
as a teaching developed gradually over the course of many generations.
His emphasis on the situation of the individual prophets and the development of the prophetic teaching suggests that the words spoken by any
particular prophet were always partial truths addressed to the prophets
own situation. They are not timeless or boundlessly adaptable. With this
in mind, how are we to make sense of Hebrew Humanism?
I wish to suggest that the commentaries themselves and, in particular,
the mode of biblical reading Buber develops within them offer one way
of thinking about this tension. Bubers hermeneutic method, Tradition
Criticism, rests on the distinction between history and saga within the
biblical text: while history includes the report of events that can seem at
times mundane and are always well within the natural world and what
we know of it, saga refers to the records preserved from a perspective
oriented toward wonder and not straightforward factuality. In distinguishing between history and saga, Buber uses the biblical text to articulate an understanding of the nature and shape of Jewish history in its
earliest forms. Scripture, read according to this methodology, becomes
the basis for historical reasoning. But at the same time, he does not disparage saga, and his commentaries include passages of lyrical exegesis
that celebrate the saga-tellers perspective and recognize the power saga
continues to exert. Not only the original teller but the reader of saga can
be wonder-gripped.
For Buber, the Bibles historical passages give rise to philosophical
reflection and its sagas to feelings of awe. If the dense, footnoted argumentation of his commentaries belongs to mundane history, Hebrew
Humanism falls into the category of saga: stirring, moving, and inspiring
decisive action. Brought together, these two ways of writing about the
Hebrew Bible that we observe within Bubers wide-ranging oeuvre reveal
him to have been engaged in two different modes of hermeneutics and
two different modes of reasoning about and through biblical text, just as
the biblical text itself models.
62. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Nationalism as a Spiritual Sensibility: The Philosophical Suppositions of Bubers Hebrew Humanism, Journal of Religion 69.2
(1989): 15568; David Novak, Bubers Critique of Heidegger, Modern Judaism
5.2 (1985): 12540.

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I have stressed how, in developing the hermeneutic method that drives

his commentaries, Buber was addressing both the accessibility and the
importance of Jewish history. In reading as Buber reads, we discover the
foundations of Judaism, and we learn that these foundations emphasize
decisive action in the everyday world. If Hebrew Humanism may be
understood as Bubers own attempt at writing in the style of a contemporary saga, his insistence that biblical theology means that history is not
eschatology reminds us of the historical context of his commentaries: Konigtum Gottes, written in Germany as the Nazis rose to power, and Torat haneviim and Moshe, written in Palestine during the Second World War, the
Holocaust, and in the last years before the establishment of the State
of Israel. By interweaving hermeneutics and history, Buber addresses
questions relevant not only to the biblical text or the Jewish past but to
the needs of Jewish life of his own moment: a response to suffering found
in a renewed sense of responsibility to shape the future rather than simply
await its arrival. Hebrew Humanism pushes its reader toward this
response with gestures toward the biblical text, but as I have sought to
show here, it is Bubers commentaries that provide the hermeneutic and
philosophical underpinnings that teach us how to access its message.

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