100 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
This Buber cannot accept, although he thinks he understands what misleads these
scholars. Because while YHVH, “according to His nature, has nothing at all to
do” with orgiastic Baalism, he “is brought into association [with molekh-ism] by
virtue of the very fact that He is a melekh-God, and the child-sacrifice, apparently
that of the first-born, is the fitting offering to the King as to the augmenter of the
tribe.”^64 Buber sees this perhaps as the supreme challenge for YHVH believers,
and as an intentional paradox in the biblical text.
According to Buber, the final text as redacted first admits the possibility of
human sacrifice as a logical response to the divine demand for exclusivity, but
then radically rejects it, thus allowing it to serve as an example of a spiritual and
logical error that remains a persistent temptation—most dangerous precisely to
those who most desire to take the divine demand seriously:
So long as God contends against the idols there prevails for the people a clear
demarcation: one’s own and that which is alien stand in opposition to one
another. It is a matter of withstanding the allurements of the alien and to keep
one’s vows to one’s own. But where God rises against the idolization of Him-
self the demarcation is clouded and complicated. No longer do two camps
stretch out opposite to one another: here JHWH, there Astarte!, but on every
little spot of ground the truth is mixed with the lie. The struggle of exclusive-
ness is directed toward unmixing, and this is a hard, an awesome work.^65Even the recognition of the problem and the determination to resist temptation
do not guarantee success against such a persistent and pervasive possibility.
Buber sees this understanding of Molechism as enabling him to resolve
one of the most perplexing verses for biblical commentators, Ezekiel 20:25–26:
“Moreover, I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could
not live. When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their
very gifts—that I might render them desolate, that they might know that I am
the Lord.”^66 The startling statement that God gave the Israelites an ungood law is
followed by the even more shocking proclamation of punishment for those who
obeyed this law! Buber points out that this threat of punishment also contains
“the only sentence of Scripture in which the deity Himself utters the predicate
malakh, to have kingship, to act as king, about Himself.”^67 Against scholars who
would chop up this section of Ezekiel, assigning different verses to different au-
thors, Buber argues that God’s use of emlokh (“I will reign”) at 20:33 unifies the
passage around its central point: the polemic against the pseudo-kingship, the
confusion of melekh and molekh on the part of those who made the idolatrous
mistake. The crux of Ezekiel 20:25 is explained by Buber as meaning, “I allowed
an ambiguity to exist in the law, namely that since I only mention the redemp-
tion of the first-born in some places that I command the sacrifice and not others,
it became possible to interpret this redemption as only allowed, and not com-
manded. This tested the hearts of the people; those who failed decided not to