198 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
of Judah a hundred years later. Buber skips over this century, avoiding the short
chapters of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, to arrive at the end of the story:
the twilight of Judah.
The context for Jeremiah is the revival of Hezekiah’s reform program by
Josiah, after the terrible interlude of Manasseh. Buber supposes that the book
“found” in the Temple, the core of Deuteronomy, which spurred Josiah’s reform,
was originally redacted out of disparate materials by a circle of priests and cult
prophets, disciples of Isaiah, in support of Hezekiah’s reform. They hid it away
during the reign of Manasseh to protect it, but imagined that Josiah might prove
a more receptive audience:
In it are fused into one a legal tradition, which had grown into an organic
whole, the spirit of the first writing prophets, a priestly organizational ten-
dency and a preaching style, schooled on great examples. It may be said of this
book that it is designed to bring the torrent of prophecy into a regular channel:
on the one hand the realization of the social demands had to be set within the
realm of the “politically possible,” and on the other hand the sacred domain,
which seemed menaced by the prophetic fight against the degenerate cult, had
to be at once purified and supported.^100One could almost read Buber as implying that this book read to Josiah resembles
the old Social-Democratic Party program. It seeks to co-opt the dangerous pro-
phetic power and reharness it to the benefit of the state and the sanctuary; that
is, it seeks “the closing of a social revolutionary movement.”^101 Yet just as social
democrats share fundamental values with radical socialists and anarchists, these
establishment reformers agree with Jeremiah on a wide range of issues. They see
themselves as empowered to act on his ideas and to realize them. Like Jeremiah,
their goal is “the fulfillment of God’s will for the order of the people and the
sanctuary as one, in a unity of ‘holy’ common life.”^102 Because of this, Jeremiah
confronts the difficulty of assisting the reform while at the same time maintain-
ing his status as outside critic. Buber holds that Jeremiah 8:8, a protest against the
“vain pen of the scribes,” is directed against Deuteronomy 12:4–12, a strong com-
mand for cult centralization which he imagines was inserted by the priesthood
into the original Deuteronomic core: “In these matters we can do little more than
conjecture, but the silence of Jeremiah, which extended so many years between
the reform and the death of Josiah, is best understood as meaning that he did
not wish, on the one hand, to oppose the action of the king, while, on the other
hand, he was no longer able to approve of it.”^103 As an heir to Moses and Samuel,
Jeremiah is most comfortable with a vision of God as one who “will be” where he
will be, unlinked to any particular place. He accepts centralization only insofar
as it includes removing foreign objects and rites, and he highlights the necessary
connection of cultic activity with righteousness and social justice.^104