210 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
- Ibid., 231.
- Ibid., 232 (original italics).
- The sections on Job and Psalm 73 are placed here because Buber holds them to have been
composed around the beginning of the exile, but they also stand alone, and somewhat inter-
rupt the narrative. - For Buber the material that eventually became the book of Deutero-Isaiah encompasses
Isaiah 40–55 (with the exceptions of 47, 49:14–26, and 50:1–3), as well as the fragments of 29:17–
23 and 57:14–19 and 61:1. He does not believe in a “Trito-Isaiah”; the remainder of our book of
Isaiah simply contains additions and accretions accumulated over time. - PF 260–261.
- Later, Buber sketches the further steps that transform DI’s vision into apocalyptic. DI
speaks of a figure who ascends to his task, rather than descending from heaven; the book
of Daniel then introduces “one like a son of man” who comes “with the clouds of heaven,”
and Enoch imagines the heavenly preexistence of this messianic figure. From here, Paul and
especially John begin the process of deification. Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P.
Goldhawk (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 102–113. - PF 262.
- Ibid., 259.
- Here there is finally an Israelite figure apparently concerned with the elaboration of a
“monotheist theology,” denying the existence of other gods and proclaiming them mere cre-
ations. - Here Buber dissents from a position taken by Hermann Cohen, whose interpretation
cast the collective Israel as under a stark obligation to suffer, rejecting the Zionist attempt to
create a privileged zone of Jewish safety and happiness; Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason
out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 229. - The “suffering servant” song is usually said to begin at Isaiah 52:13 and continue until
chapter 54, but there are many other references in Deutero-Isaiah to a servant of YHVH, and
Buber uses one of these, at 49:5, to argue that the servant cannot be Israel, since it is the role of
the servant “to bring back Jacob to Himself, that Israel may be restored to Him”; PF 270. - Ibid., 276.
- Ibid., 274.
- Ibid., 277.
- Ibid., 284.
- Ibid., 286.
- Ibid., 287.
- Ibid., 289.
- Ibid., 290–291.