178 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
Therefore it is the virtue of this word, and of this alone, to lead, that is to say,
to show the way.... Only Jeremiah of all the Israelite prophets has dared to
note this bold and devout life conversation of the utterly inferior with the ut-
terly superior—in such a measure is man here become a person. All Israelite
relationship of faith is dialogic; here the dialogue has reached its pure form.
Man can speak, he is permitted to speak; if only he truly speaks to God, there
is nothing he may not say to Him.^12A bit of Buber’s old Nietzschean vitalism returns here, with true revelation be-
ing “free and fresh like the lightning,” and he joins themes of sovereignty and
dialogue.
Buber treats the prophets chronologically, beginning with the legendary fig-
ures described in Kings (Elijah and Elisha), then the first writing prophets (Amos
and Hosea), concentrating on the eighth-century Isaiah, and last the preexilic
prophets (Micah and Jeremiah). The book concludes with Ezekiel and Deutero-
Isaiah, as well as several other texts Buber dates to the same period (e.g., Job,
Psalm 73). If we look at the placement of these discussions in the structure of
The Prophetic Faith as a whole, however, the plan of the book seems obscure.
The eight chapters roughly increase in length as the book progresses. The intro-
duction and the first few chapters (“The Song of Deborah,” “Origins,” and “God
of the Fathers,” fewer than forty-five pages combined, despite forming “half ” of
the book by number of chapters) trace the Israelite faith back through the gen-
erations to its origin, which Buber finds in its oldest extant form in the Song
of Deborah (Judges 5).^13 He then advances in time again, from the patriarchs to
Sinai (“Holy Event”), and from Sinai to the period of the settlement and the rise
of the monarchy (“The Great Tensions”), before finally addressing the prophetic
books themselves (“The Turning to the Future” and “The God of the Sufferers,”
more than half the book, despite comprising only two chapters).
The reason for this structure is not obvious. Buber’s movement through
these topics neither charts a simple decline nor describes a single development,
perhaps because he is mingling the original goal of Das Kommende (accounting
for the origin of messianism) with the new goal of describing the teaching of the
prophets. He blends fragmentary older material with new material to produce
The Prophetic Faith as a stand-alone work, not entirely smoothly, as evidenced
by his references in the introduction to “parts” of the book that are not extant in
the final table of contents.^14 Moreover, Theodore Dreyfus has shown that the con-
cluding part of the work, the section called “The Mystery,” which addresses the
transformation of the messianic idea in the suffering servant songs of Deutero-
Isaiah, already existed in a lecture Buber gave in Berlin on April 6, 1925, in honor
of the opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.^15 That lecture was called
“The Messianic Mystery,” and it seems significant that the final fragments of Das
Kommende, a work resulting from years of research with Rosenzweig, are com-
bined in 1942 with a position on the climactic moment of the narrative of Israelite