98 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Sinai, Buber’s insistence on YHVH’s malk nature can be read as doubly directed,
as conflating his scholarly opponents with their ancient Israelite antecedents.
Buber simultaneously challenges both those among the ancient Israelites who
viewed YHVH as a baal and those contemporary scholars who treat the Bible
as though it concealed hidden traces of YHVH’s true or original baal nature,
whether in Canaanite cult places or Moabite shrines.^56
Perhaps the ultimate proof of YHVH’s malk nature, in Buber’s eyes, emerges
from the passages in which YHVH reveals his name. Both the Jewish exegetical
traditions and the modern documentary hypothesis attach great importance to
the names of God in the text, and in particular to the Tetragrammaton. And
much scholarship addresses the question posed to God by Moses in Exodus 3:13:
“When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent
me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” Me-
dieval exegetes worried about this verse—these are the descendants of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, so why wouldn’t they know the name of their own God? Biblical
criticism scrutinizes this apparent cleavage between the God of Abraham and the
God of Moses.^57 Buber, however, recalling the powerful ancient Egyptian belief
in name magic, cannot imagine that Moses is asking what he should do when he
comes to the people at the behest of the God of their fathers, and they ask him the
banal question “Well, what is he called?” Rather, they will ask for the meaning of
the name YHVH, the hidden truth behind the name that when learned will grant
assurance and power. “To t h i s,” Buber emphasizes, and not to a simple inquiry
about a name, “JHWH replies with his ‘ehye asher ehye,’ which discloses in the
first person what the name in the third person hides—hides, to be sure, since it
was out of the original ‘God-cry’ yah or yahu as the primeval name of invocation
... that the Tetragrammaton grew.” The secret of YHVH’s name is his malk na-
ture; it means “I will be there with you.”^58
But what distinguishes YHVH as malk from any other West Semitic malk
god, besides the fact that He is the god of Israel? Although Buber does not ask this
question, he answers it, by opposing a second contrast to malk, one simultane-
ously starker and more complex than the contrast with baal: molekh. Buber de-
fines the special melekh-hood of YHVH as a claim on all of life: “The melekh-ship
is undetachable from the characteristic demand by YHVH, among all melakhim,
of unconditionedness, immediacy, and unreserved completeness.” In taking se-
riously such a demand, one discovers how difficult it is to obey. Buber calls this
error “according to that transformation of vowels which makes out of ‘king’ a
‘pseudo-king’—‘Molechization.’”^59
The Faith of Israel: Theocracy and Idolatry
Buber elaborates on the distinction between true and false belief in the Bible,
especially concerning the concept of idolatry. True belief for the Israelite, accord-
ing to Buber, revolves around the “unconditionedness” of God and the awareness