The Battle for YHVH | 179messianism that had already been developed before the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible
translation work began in earnest, and before Buber began to compile the notes
for Kingship of God. The inclusion of “The Messianic Mystery” at the close of The
Prophetic Faith complicates the alliance between the theopolitical and the pro-
phetic that otherwise prevails throughout Buber’s biblical works. Buber stretches
his categories to include Deutero-Isaiah, costing him theoretical coherence.
Given the odd structure of the book, one fruitful way to discuss it, without
retreading ground, and following Buber’s own suggestions, is to see it as divided
into three main sections according to the focus of Das Kommende. In this light,
The Prophetic Faith traces the historical path of the relationship between Israel
and YHVH, a nonmessianic faith at its inception, to the point of accepting its
first messiah (the flesh-and-blood king, who will deliver the people from military
threat), the second messiah (the hoped-for king, perhaps still imminent, who will
rule according to God’s will), and finally to Buber’s unique interpretation of the
third messiah, a suffering redeemer of the uncertain future, who is still not yet
the cosmic figure responsible for healing nature and ending time.
The First Messiah: A King Like All the Nations Have,
to Fight Our Battles
The introduction to The Prophetic Faith is noteworthy for the way it employs
language that Buber often shuns. He declares on his first page that his purpose
is “to describe a teaching [Glaubenslehre/תורה] which reached its completion
in some of the writing prophets from the last decades of the Northern king-
dom to the return from the Babylonian exile.... [T]his is the teaching about
the relation between the God of Israel and Israel.” It is important to keep this
description in mind when faced with Buber’s repeated emphasis on the dyna-
mism and unpredictability of this relation in the light of God’s freedom, and
when considering his repeated insistence that he himself has no “teaching.”^16
Insofar as Buber adheres to his stated purpose, the changes in the “teaching”
he describes give his narrative an overall mood of decline and disappointment,
albeit with some complications. The “teaching,” wherever it arises, is connected
with figures designated as navi. As we have seen, the navi for Buber is not one
who “predicts,” but one who wishes “to set the audience, to whom the words
are addressed, before the choice and decision, directly or indirectly.”^17 The com-
munity—and the agent of teshuva, or “return,” demanded by the navi is always
a community, even if an individual is sometimes addressed—determines the
future through the choice it makes in response to the call of the navi. Buber
insists on this essential form of prophecy to such an extent that any step away
from it is necessarily a distortion, even if he endeavors to maintain scholarly
objectivity in describing the evolution of a social role in response to changing
conditions.