179Chapter 11
Concepts of Scripture in
Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig
Jonathan Cohen
Th e thought of Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886 –
1929) continues to exert a profound infl uence not only on theologians and
philosophers of religion, both Jewish and Christian, but on biblical schol-
ars as well. Th eir work has been foundational for readers who want not so
much to deny as to move beyond historical and philological approaches
that obscure biblical literature’s religious and humanistic vitality. Buber
and Rosenzweig bring God back into the picture and thus represent a ges-
ture of return to older modes of biblical interpretation. Still, their approach
does not simply restore medieval or midrashic approaches to scripture. It
rather shift s the locus of authority from the biblical text itself to a space
between the reader and the text, a space wherein the voice of the divine can
still be heard by contemporary readers.
Th e spiritual path of Buber and Rosenzweig moved from the univer-
sal, humanistic values of German culture and philosophy back toward the
intimate sphere of Jewish tradition. While Buber was raised for a time in
the home of his traditionally observant scholar-grandfather Solomon, and
although there are scholars who attribute an important spiritual infl uence
to Rosenzweig’s observant great-uncle Adam, for both Buber and Rosen-
zweig, the milieu of German thought and culture was a “native language,”
and it was the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish canonical texts that they of-
ten experienced as an “other.” Th is “other” had to be encountered, or reen-
countered, such that its message could once again “speak” to a fully devel-
oped, modern European sensibility. For this reason, Leo Strauss charac-
terized Buber and Rosenzweig, together with Hermann Cohen, as central