184 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
central feature of the new agricultural existence of Israel, the fertility of the
ground, seems to be a deep mystery; somewhere within the ground the baal
and the baalat (literally, the “owners” of the soil) would copulate and produce
the blessing of flowering and growth. Peasants had to placate these powers to
ensure a successful harvest. Human sexual pairing is seen as a sacral act that
can facilitate the pairing of the baalim. As with the household gods in the time
of Joshua, overt forsaking of YHVH is not at issue: “The baalim were accept-
ed by the people as a fact, but treated as the indispensable religious requisites
for the successful fertilization of the soil, for which YHVH, the wanderer and
warrior, was not competent. Even now they wished to acknowledge as a people
YHVH only; whereas the fertility deities they knew only, and this in a private
and intimate manner.”^40 Nonetheless, as with the family and household gods,
the separate worship of landowning gods threatened the unity of the people.
The idea that the fertility of the land lay outside the purview of YHVH, mean-
while, posed a threat to the unity and universality of the dominion of YHVH;
and the idea that sexual rites were holy, because connected to agricultural
fertility, called into question the distinction between YHVH and the natural
world over which he ruled: “YHVH by His uncompromising nature is alto-
gether above sex, and cannot tolerate it that sex, which like all natural life needs
hallowing by Him, should seem to be declared holy by its own power. There is
no place here for compromise. Whoever baalizes YHVH introduces Astarte
into the sanctuary.”^41
A YHVH considered a baal, a power accessible to the people, would no lon-
ger be capable of leading them. Elijah’s task, then, is to teach that farming, too,
is in YHVH’s power. But Elijah faces a new obstacle: a human king, betraying
his commission, encourages the idolatry. Ahab, the seventh king of the northern
kingdom of Israel, has instituted worship for Baal to please his Tyrian wife, Jeze-
bel (1 Kings 16:30–33).^42 By indulging in this worship himself, Ahab outdoes even
Solomon, who built altars to foreign gods merely as a diplomatic gesture.
Despite the fantastic stories in which he figures, Elijah “is perceptible
through the veil of legend as a great historical character, though he appears with-
out a parental name and disappears without a grave.”^43 This is another case in
which legend yields clues to its origins: “The stern theopolitical facts in all their
fullness stand opposed to every attempt of tradition to resort to legendary trans-
figuration.”^44 Buber pictures Elijah as a wild nomad, a “man of holy unrest,” who
comes from the desert to the city in a microcosmic mimicking of Israel’s col-
lective journey. He teaches the people that they cannot stand on two branches,
that either YHVH or Baal must be “Lord of heaven and earth.” For Elijah, this
phrase is not merely a euphemism for “Lord of everything”; it refers to the specific
agricultural powers attributed to Baal. As at Shechem, the people unite around
YHVH, indicated by Elijah’s use of the twelve stones representing the tribes in
his erection of the altar, and by his use of Jacob’s name Israel in his prayer.^45 This