Between Pharaohs and Nomads | 127way (and the sovereignty of the human monarchy). The social transitions that the
Bible narrates thus affect the editorial composition of the Bible itself, a fact long
emphasized by critical scholarship.
In what follows I trace the implications of Buber’s intertwined methodologi-
cal “conservatism” and theopolitical radicalism through the examination of two
of the main struggles he presents for Moses and his project. The first is the con-
trast with Egypt; the second, the contrast with what Buber calls “the contradic-
tion,” namely misunderstanding and idolatry on the part of the people. Together,
these form a common Buberian trope: the “narrow ridge” between two abysses,
which must be walked by the one who hears the divine call and seeks to answer it.
Against Egypt
The contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk sums up a discussion of
Régis Debray on the Exodus as follows:
The myth of exodus is tied to that of total mobilization, in which an entire
people transforms itself into a foreign, movable thing that abducts itself. At
that moment all things are re-evaluated in terms of their transportability—at
the risk of having to leave behind everything that is too heavy for human car-
riers. The first re-evaluation of all values therefore concerned weight. Its main
victims were the heavy gods of the Egyptians, whose immovable stone bodies
prevented them from travelling. The people of Israel were able to change into a
theophoric entity from that point on... because it had succeeded in recoding
God from the medium of stone to that of the scroll.^11Sloterdijk here captures one of the primary concerns of Buber’s Moses: the total
contrast between Israel and Egypt, in which Israel carries out a revaluation of
Egypt’s values, especially the relationship between mobility and divinity.^12
Buber thus stands in a long tradition of Moses commentary, critically as-
sessed by Egyptologist Jan Assmann, in which “‘Egypt’ stands not only for
‘idolatry’ but also for a rejected past. The Exodus is a story of emigration and
conversion, of transformation and renovation, of stagnation and progress, and
of past and future. Egypt represents the old, while Israel represents the new.”^13
Assmann’s controversial argument, especially his claim that the Exodus story
creates for the first time in history a so-called Mosaic distinction between true
and false religion, and as such could be held responsible for substantial intoler-
ance and violence, has formed a framework for subsequent discussion of the re-
lationship between Moses and Israel and Egypt, in history and memory.^14 Buber
himself rejects one of Assmann’s central categories, “monotheism,” as irrelevant
to his project in Moses: “It is a fundamental error to register the faith with which
I deal as simple ‘Monotheism.’”^15 As Paul Yorck von Wartenberg wrote to Buber’s
teacher Wilhelm Dilthey, such categories as monotheism, polytheism, panthe-
ism, and so on “constitute only the outline of an intellectual attitude; and only a