God against Messiah | 119- KG: “in which respect a potency is potent,” 94; “not earth-magic but social-magic,” 96;
“the power which... historicizes it,” 97; “sexual myths,” 51. - Ibid., 100.
- Buber cites numerous scriptural proof texts; perhaps the one that best encapsulates the
argument is Exodus 19:4: “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’
wings and brought you to Me.” The combination of “bore you” and “to Me” is the essential
thing, and Buber sees it as supported by the placement of “He who led us/caused us to go [mo-
likh] through the wilderness” as second in rank among YHVH’s titles of glory, behind only
“He who led us out from the land of Egypt” (Jeremiah 2:6; Amos 2:10; Psalms 136:16). - Ibid., 102. In the first edition, Buber also cites Micah 2:13 to demonstrate continuity
into prophetic images of redemption of the relationship between kingship and literal leading:
“Und so bleibt es auch in dem Bilde der künftigen Befreiung; wie der Leitwidder das Gatter des
Pferchs aufstößt, so »steigt der Durchbrecher vor ihnen, / sie brechen durchs Tor, ziehn heraus,
/ ihr König zieht ihnen voran, / JHWH ihnen zu Häupten« (Micha 2,13).” This passage is miss-
ing from later editions and the translation. - In a two-page footnote, Buber disputes the view of Gerhard von Rad that the ark is of
Canaanite origin and that it was conflated with the Tabernacle through a later maneuver of the
priestly editor. If von Rad were right, Buber would lose the ability to link the mobile ark to the
earliest form of the YHVH religion, as one more example of YHVH’s essential malk nature.
The arguments are technical, but in one Buber substantiates my claim about the targets of his
polemic: he accuses von Rad of misunderstanding the significance of the terms “bet JHWH”
and “aron JHWH” as genitive forms for the containment or possession of JHWH in perpetuity,
“as the Philistines apparently misunderstood it, in the same way as several modern historians
of religion have done so.” Ibid., 187. The direct equation of a faction from within the text to a
faction among modern interpreters of the text is evident. - This passage is an entry point for supporters of the “Kenite hypothesis,” which main-
tains that YHVH was foreign to the Israelites before Moses, who converted them to the wor-
ship of a Kenite god appropriated from his father-in-law, Jethro, priest of Midian. In the pref-
ace to the second edition of KG, Buber devotes ten pages to refuting Walter Baumgartner, a
supporter of the Kenite hypothesis, on methodological and textual grounds. Ibid., 27. - Ibid., 105. Buber reads this revelation in line with Freud’s Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit,
an advance in rationality and spirituality (despite Buber’s low opinion of Freud’s 1943 Moses
and Monotheism). Although the secret of the name was requested under the influence of a
magic-based culture that inculcated a desire for numinous power, its granting reveals the in-
sufficiency of the magical understanding that informed that request. The name means “you
do not need to conjure Me, but you cannot conjure Me either,” thus constituting “the ‘de-
magicizing’ of faith”; Ibid., 106. Such “de-magicizing” directly relates to the malk relationship
and the kind of trust the people are asked to place in a malk god. - “Unreserved completeness,” ibid., 117; “Molechization,” ibid., 111.
- KG 109. This passage marks Buber’s only explicit use of I-Thou language in the book:
“The uniqueness in ‘monotheism’ is accordingly not that of an ‘exemplar,’ but it is that of the
Thou in the I-Thou relation so far as this is not denied in the totality of the lived life.” Buber
also writes here that the believing Israelite is unable “to conceive seriously concerning his
divine Thou that it have only more power and not the power,” and “Whoever to his King and
God speaks this ardently singular Thou, cannot in the meantime remain in domains for which
He is not pertinent; he must subject them all to the One.” This theopoliticized “Thou” language
designates a demanding, hierarchical, militant relationship, in a way it does not in the dialogi-
cal philosophy (although Buber cites Ich und Du here).