Jewish Concepts of Scripture

Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 187

From his court he heard my voice,

My cry of despair was already in his ears.

And the earth shook, trembled,

Th e foundations of heaven quaked.

Rocked for he was fl aring up.

Th e smoke from his nostrils rose up high.

From his mouth fi re licked out

And glowing coals caught fi re.

He lowered the heavens, he descended.

Bleak weather beneath his feet

Riding on a cherub he fl ew on.

Came shooting down on the wings of the storm.

In this passage, the various details of the description of God’s characteris-
tics are not linked to one another to form a portrait. Rather, each individual
detail represents the beginning point of a line that runs either from God to
the supplicating human being or from the human being to God. Th e hu-
man’s call is met with a divine response — the image of the “ear” in which
the cry of despair was “already” found communicates the immediacy of the
divine response as experienced by the supplicator. God’s response shakes
heaven and earth — not as a function of God’s attribute of, say, strength but
as an expression of the intensity and totality of the manner in which the
supplicant’s sacrifi ce is answered. Th e details of the biblical description are
all intended to evoke an event of meeting and interchange, rather than a
portrait of the divine image.
Th e experience of God, then, as corroborated by the Bible — or, con-
versely, the biblical account of the experience of God, as corroborated
by the experience of human beings — is the experience of a relating yet
ephemeral God of challenge and response who appears when and where
He wishes and to whom He wishes in accordance with His purposes — pur-
poses that cannot be controlled or manipulated. Rosenzweig was particu-
larly concerned to show that the biblical God has no fi xed form. He has
no permanent attributes, and the fi gures by way of which His presence is
sensed cannot be assembled and fi xed to form a stable image. Buber, who
gave more theological weight to history and geography, was concerned to
avoid a diff erent kind of fi xation of God, the kind that identifi es God with