The Battle for YHVH | 177messages reflected in the books that bear their names, such controversy has not
resulted in any conventional wisdom. Nor is it particularly controversial that
these books were edited extensively before their eventual canonization. There
are doubts about the nature of this editing, and whether the prophets founded
“schools” of disciples, who assumed the right to modify their teachers’ speeches,
but these doubts rarely threaten Buber’s central theopolitical assertions. Thus,
The Prophetic Faith is much less of a polemic against the scholarship of its time
than Kingship of God or Moses. Its genre remains historical criticism, but of all
Buber’s works in that field it is the closest in character to his free-flowing religio-
philosophical essays.
Of the themes that typically concern the literature on prophecy, Buber de-
votes the greatest attention to the biblical standard for distinguishing true from
false prophecy.^7 Starting with the praise of Balaam that “there is no divination in
Jacob, nor soothsaying in Israel” (Numbers 23:23), Buber assumes that merely pre-
dicting the future correctly cannot be the criterion for determining true proph-
ets. The hearer cannot know whether a prophecy will come to pass. Moreover, a
true prophet can issue one unfulfilled prophecy after another, with his prophe-
cies unfulfilled precisely because he is successful—people hear him and repent.
Even the seemingly more sophisticated criterion suggesting that false prophecy
lulls the people into an unjustified sense of security, whereas true prophecy accu-
rately warns of approaching danger, only partially captures the situation: “It is not
whether salvation or disaster is prophesied, but whether the prophecy, whatever it
is, agrees with the divine demand meant by a certain historical situation, that is
important.”^8 True prophecy confronts the people with an alternative, consisting
only of possibilities actually available. The false prophecy against which Jeremiah
battles is pernicious precisely because it too takes on historical form but encour-
ages the people “to meet the historical danger with the usual historical action.”^9
Nothing about the situation makes obvious the truth of the prophecy; God will
not put his thumb on the scales for his spokesman:^10 “This God makes it burden-
some for the believer and light for the unbeliever; and His revelation is nothing but
a different form of hiding His face.” False prophets are not even necessarily mali-
cious; “certainly many of them are honest patriots,” but they are deceived by their
delusions, which are projections of their own desires. True prophets, however, en-
counter the word of God as something transcendent that subdues them.^11 Buber
discusses this latter phenomenon most powerfully in the case of Jeremiah, whose
arrogation of leadership to the prophets Buber contrasts with his priestly back-
ground; this is also the most “dialogical” of all the passages in his writings on the
Bible. In contrast to the perception of Buber’s dialogue as a mutual and reciprocal
process, here the dimension of imbalance between the parties cannot be effaced:
The divine word, which suddenly descends into the human situation, unex-
pected and unwilled by man, is free and fresh like the lightning.... He, Who
speaks, is incomprehensible, irregular, surprising, overwhelming, sovereign.