The Battle for YHVH | 201erations of religious thinkers, who refer to this type of religiosity as serving the
world “for the sake of receiving a reward.”^115 They reject the notion of objective
comprehensibility as foreign to their experience. The increasing traces of apoca-
lypticism, however, remain, and what was once a clear prophetic alternative be-
comes harder to see through veils of obfuscation and mystery.
The anonymous prophet who lived toward the end of the exile, whose words
are bound up with those of Isaiah, and who is usually referred to in biblical criti-
cism as Deutero-Isaiah, is the last figure Buber discusses in The Prophetic Faith.^116
He could certainly have forged ahead into later Israelite history had he wished
to do so. Ezra and Nehemiah describe aspects of the postexilic situation; Buber
could have discussed the beginning of the Second Commonwealth while still
remaining within the purview of biblical studies. He ends the discussion here,
however, because this is the end of prophecy according to his definition (we hear
nothing about Malachi, the last prophet according to Talmudic tradition). In fact,
Deutero-Isaiah (DI) never explicitly claims to be the recipient of divine speech,
despite his frequent reporting of words of God; rather, he presents himself as a
limmud, indicating by his use of this unique Isaianic term that he is a disciple
of a prophet from centuries earlier, unfolding the hidden meaning of the words
Isaiah had sealed up. Yet “his conception of prophecy is different from that of
all the prophets that preceded him[;]... his God no longer sets before men two
possibilities, in deciding between which they may have a share; He has decided,
and man is only the object of his decision... his prophecy is in Israel the first
prophecy according to the accepted sense, that is to say, he has to foretell things
fixed and unchangeable.”^117 DI imagines a history divided into manifest and hid-
den things; God makes decisions about the hidden things in a way inaccessible to
human beings. So DI is unable to conceive the old idea that God actually gives his
creatures the power to obey or resist him, and that choosing to obey is the only
route to becoming holy.
Despite this movement away from the true sense of prophecy, however, DI is
still not an apocalyptist; he still directs his prophecy of comfort to the particular
time and place of his audience.^118 There is a substantive contrast between him and
the previous prophets, in that they foresaw danger amid complacency and false
security, while he sees comfort after years of suffering; however, the form of the
prophecy as one directed to God’s involvement in the particular hour still holds.
“He does not fix history from the sphere on the yonder side and strange to it,
He does not allow history to be unrolled as a scroll, but He Himself enters into
it, and conquers it in warfare.”^119 This message is expressed by his adoption and
refinement of Isaiah’s concept “The Holy One of Israel,” who also becomes the
“Redeemer of Israel” by buying it back from its bond service for debt (the original
economic sense of the activity expressed by the term geulah). Israel has paid, and
it will be brought out from Babylon by its redeemer, returned to its proper place,