The Battle for YHVH | 189to bend the knee to Baal (1 Kings 19:18), Amos does not proclaim salvation; he
only hopes that perhaps some “remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15) will be saved. But
the destruction itself will come. “Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel,” Amos an-
nounces (4:12), and in connection with this verse Buber recalls that anyone who
sees God’s face cannot live.
To place Amos at the earliest point in the “turning to the future,” Buber
must contest any perception of Amos as a prophet of doom offering the people no
alternative road to salvation. This effort purports to divine the true chronology
of the disordered statements in Amos, producing a quieter version of his general
polemic with scholarship.^63 In the end Buber credits Amos’s prophecy of the res-
toration of the “fallen hut of David” as authentic, whereas many scholars assume
that the reference to the house of David is a postexilic addition. Buber sees Amos
as referring not to Judah here but to the whole Israelite community; the hut is a
shepherd’s hut, the only kind worth restoring in the eyes of the shepherd prophet.
You Shall Sit Solitary: Hosea
Hosea both develops and departs from Amos. His focus is on chesed rather than
tzedek, and on the idea of a love relationship between YHVH and Israel rather
than YHVH’s political leadership of the nations. Unlike Amos, Hosea knows
of a covenant that is also a teaching (6:7, 8:1, 8:12); Buber also credits him with
the correct understanding of the revelation of the Tetragrammaton to Moses.^64
Where Amos saw YHVH as Israel’s divine leader, repaid with ingratitude, Hosea
adheres to the Exodus tradition and conceives of the covenant as a reciprocal
event, in which Israel does right for at least one moment. Perhaps this is why
Hosea is more confident than Amos with respect to future redemption. On the
one hand, Hosea’s confidence interrupts any smooth trajectory from optimism
to pessimism or from prophecy to apocalypse. On the other hand, it continues
the progression, since Amos’s indecision and hope represent less of a claim to
future knowledge than Hosea’s confidence.^65 Hosea also experiences a call that
differs from that of any other prophet: he is commanded to speak God’s word not
only through his mouth but also through his entire life, by marrying a “wife of
harlotry.” Through the experience of this marriage he comes to understand the
relationship between YHVH and Israel on a personal, emotional level.
The focus on chesed and the imitation of God through marriage to a harlot
may suggest that Hosea lacks theopolitical concerns. Here too, however, “all the
time that it is still possible to come to political decisions, he calls to a turning
that includes the political domain,” particularly in the realm of foreign policy.
“They have made kings, but not from Me” (8:4) applies both to the man sitting
on the throne and to the Molekh, in the form of a bull, sitting in the sanctuary
at Bethel. Hosea lives at a time of extreme political turbulence; unlike Amos “he
does not prophesy in an hour of triumph about coming adversity, but he sees it