The Battle for YHVH | 191commonly held to be a postexilic addition and reads it as predicting the return
of the true king and his legitimate representative. The promise is stronger than
anything in Amos; God will heal both the wounds inflicted in the course of the
turning away, and the turning away itself. In the meantime, however, the “many
days” prevail, until “in two days He will make us whole again, on the third day
He will raise us up” (Hosea 6:2). “The days are days of God,” Buber comments,
“and it is not known how long such are.”^70 Despite this apparent tinge of apoca-
lypticism, Hosea remains inside the true prophetic situation as Buber perceives
it, because the moment of this divine turning, “in which the wrath turns and
mercy awakes, YHVH makes known as a present one (11:8): ‘How shall I give
thee up, O Ephraim, and deliver thee, O Israel!... My heart turns within me, my
compassions boil up together.”
To Keep Still: Isaiah
The universalization of the divine message, the doctrine of the remnant, and the
turning to the future are completed in Isaiah, the prophet of kedushah, “holi-
ness.” Buber says of Isaiah, though not of Amos or Hosea, that there is a “tragic
contradiction in his prophetic way,” that his way can “only be a tragic way and
one full of contradiction,” which tells us that we are dealing here with a figure
of great significance.^71 Like no other prophet since Moses, Isaiah simultaneously
represents and chastises his people; unlike Moses, Isaiah has to act in the name
of the true melekh (and unlike many of the prophets Buber treats, Isaiah directly
refers to “the king YHVH of hosts” enthroned in heaven during the vision of his
call [6:1, 6:5]) against a human melekh.
That theopolitics is the central concern of Buber’s treatment of Isaiah has not
gone unnoticed.^72 It would be difficult to miss given that the heading of the sec-
tion is “The Theopolitical Hour” (Die theopolitische Stunde, השעה התיאופוליטית).
Buber refers to Isaiah 7–9:6 as Isaiah’s “political memoir,” focusing on this sec-
tion to the exclusion of most of the forty chapters attributed to Isaiah and his dis-
ciples.^73 Here Buber offers the primary definition of theopolitics in The Prophetic
Faith: “A special kind of politics, theopolitics, which is concerned to establish a
certain people in a certain historical situation under the divine sovereignty, so
that this people is brought nearer the fulfillment of its task, to become the begin-
ning of the kingdom of God.”^74
Holiness, Buber declares, is “the greatest” of the three concepts of divine-
human relationship in the early writing prophets; like the other concepts, this
one indicates that “YHVH wishes to work through the independence of man
created as independent and to continue His work on earth by this means.”^75
In its preexilic sense, before being limited by the priesthood to the objects and
actions of the cult, “holy” means “distinct but not severed, distinct and yet in
the midst of the people... distinct and radiating... detached and joined at