God against Messiah | 101choose redemption and instead to pass their children through the fire. These are
the ones I will punish.”^68 In addition to resolving the crux in a way that conforms
to Buber’s theological assumptions, this interpretation avoids implying that the
biblical author and editor intended for God to declare here that he meant to pun-
ish the people for something he himself had just commanded them to do.
From Abraham to Moses: Sacrifice, Covenant,
and Theopolitical Emergence
Buber seeks to establish the continuity of this interpretation of sacrifice from
Abraham through the prophets. The significance of the Akedah, the binding of
Isaac, is that God commands Abraham to sacrifice “that creature which the lov-
ing man, who presents it as himself, simply was not able to offer with lessened
reality of intention. Indeed the essential action is even more final than if one
had to offer only one’s own body.... [N]othing but the intention was demanded,
but the intention could only then become actual if the deed itself was demanded
in utmost seriousness.”^69 This deed symbolizes the wholeness of devotion that
YHVH demands from his tribe as their rightful melekh; the expiatory sacrifices
are intended in the same spirit. The prophets eventually decry the decay of the
intention behind such sacrifices, demanding the restoration of actual willingness
to sacrifice oneself for one’s true King.^70 Thus Buber finds an essential continuity
in the biblical description of the relationship between YHVH and Israel, one that
transcends all shifts of authorship and editorial complexities; this continuity is
contained in the demand of totality that JHWH as melekh makes on his people
as subjects: “The patriarchal narrative of Genesis is not ‘religious,’ but religio-
political... as soon as JHWH and Israel encounter one another in history, the
kingship of God as such emerges.”^71
The relationship symbolized in the Akedah is formalized in the brit, or cov-
enant, at Sinai. For Buber, the sacrificial ritual Moses performs at Exodus 24:5–8
constitutes a unique ceremony, to which “none of the parallels adduced by the
comparative science of religion offers a real correspondence.... The deciding
factor is here that both partners, the altar as representative of the deity, and the
people, are treated in the same way as the two parties of a sacral-legal act of reci-
procity.”^72 This ceremony is unique, not just because only Israel performs it (and
Buber rejects suggested parallels from other cultures), but also in its singular
occurrence in the Bible (Buber rejects the possibility of any analogous ritual).
Neither the brit with the patriarchs, which was not signified by a similar ritual
and did not establish a community that embraced a reciprocal duty to God, nor
the post-Sinaitic covenant renewal ceremonies, which only recall and recommit
the people to the existing covenant, can be compared to the Mosaic instance.
Etymologically, Buber argues, brit connotes confinement or restriction; ap-
plied to a pact between two parties, it links them and restricts at least one of