The Battle for YHVH | 187YHVH will fulfill their task; apocalypse emerges from despair that they will not.
But the “turning to the future” does not of itself transform prophecy into apoca-
lypse; additional steps are required, which will not take place until the Second
Commonwealth. What the “turning” does first is increase the willingness to de-
nounce the failed monarchy and the Temple; it also increasingly universalizes the
prophetic message and ties together the destiny of the chosen people of YHVH
with that of all the other nations. The symbol of Buber’s ambivalence toward the
turning to the future, the prophetic doctrine whose emergence he traces with a
mixture of interest and trepidation, is the idea of the remnant: the true part of the
people, the faithful ones, who will survive after the destruction.
The universalization of the prophetic message and the development of the
idea of the remnant are already found in Amos and Hosea. Buber imagines that
Amos was a great childhood influence on Hosea, his younger contemporary. The
two are discussed both as complementary, with Hosea’s focus on “lovingkind-
ness” (Liebe, חסד) balancing Amos’s focus on “righteousness” (Gerechtigkeit, צדק),
and progressively, with Hosea publicly teaching what Amos directs at a single
disciple: the future promise of the twofold covenant, a covenant of peace with
the nations and nature that is also a new marriage covenant with YHVH.^55 This
comes, however, only after a holy hailstorm of criticism, in which the “whole
history of Israel, beginning with the entry upon the settlement up to the time of
the prophet’s words, appears [in Hosea] as a succession of acts of desecration.”^56
Like Rolling Waters: Amos
The book of Amos begins with a festival at Bethel, with representatives from
many nations commemorating the reconquest by Jeroboam II of areas once held
by David. This festive gathering is disrupted by a stranger, “a sheep-breeder from
the extreme border of the Judean wilderness,” who dares to proclaim the judg-
ment of YHVH on all the nations present, not for their plots against Israel, or
even for their worship of other gods, but for their crimes against one another.
Amos’s ability to see YHVH in the gods of these diverse nations is a development
of the ability of the patriarchs to see each new El as a manifestation of their own
god; Amos goes on to declare that YHVH is the leader (9:7) and judge (1:3–2:11,
9:8) of these nations as well.^57 This does not imply, however, that the relationship
between YHVH and the other nations is exactly the same as the one between
YHVH and Israel. Buber’s explanation of the difference can be read not just as his
interpretation of Amos but as a manifesto on Israel’s chosenness:
Out of the depth of history one people appears in God’s eyes as another, where-
as only Israel he “knew[.]”... In revelation it was laid upon them to become
a true people, that is the living unity of the many and the diverse. With re-
gard to this, Israel was given the people’s statute, the “instruction” (torah). The
torah represses social wickedness and wards off the stumbling blocks liable