The Battle for YHVH | 181condenses the separate discussions in Moses about the Passover (“A nomadic
feast... transformed by the holy event into a feast of history”), the Sabbath (“a
day... freed of all authority of command except that of the one Lord... [it] binds
together the deity and the tired, exhausted slave”), the divine demonism, the cov-
enant (“no legal agreement, but a surrender to the divine power and grace”), and
God’s ownership of land (“The divine ownership of the ground and the whole
people’s possession of it originate in a unity meant to last forever, whereas the
rights of the individual are only conditional and temporary”).^24 Buber cites Al-
brecht Alt’s work Die Ursprünge des israelitischen Rechts in support of his own
basic idea: “In Israel’s apodictic law an aggressive, as yet unbroken force oper-
ates, a force which subjects every realm of life to the absolute authority claim
of YHVH’s will for his people, and therefore cannot recognize any secular or
neutral zone.”^25 The “social” laws are not a result of deliberations by wise men
with expertise in a special realm, called “the social,” but rather look toward “es-
tablishing a true people, as the covenant partner of the melekh, according as the
tribes are a people as yet only by God’s act and not by their own.... The melekh
YHVH does not want to rule a crowd, but a community.”^26 Thus, Buber claims
that the prophets are conservative in their social preaching, echoing the original
intention of the covenant.
The discussion of Joshua and the covenant renewal at Shechem fleshes out
Buber’s earlier statement that “for the expression of the theocratic idea the book
of Joshua is indeed only a trough between Moses and Judges-Samuel.”^27 Buber
rejects claims that Joshua 24:1–28 represents the earliest covenant report, and
that the later Sinai account was intended to provide a precedent for events at
Shechem. However, here Buber gives Joshua more credit than in his other works:
Joshua extracts from the people a commitment to recognize what their previous
oath of fealty to YHVH entails: not only do they as a people serve YHVH alone,
but also each individual family must cast out its subsidiary deities and private
gods—something that might not have even occurred to them as interfering with
the public worship of YHVH.^28 Again, this is not about enforcing cultic propri-
ety: “Because these subsidiary private deities weaken the collection of the people
around YHVH, they hinder the establishment and manifestation of a united ‘Is-
rael’ acting historically as such.... Hitherto the conquest of the land has only
partially succeeded, because there was not... any actual and vital unity of the
people.” Elimination of the family deities is a theopolitical intervention aimed
at increasing cultural unity and military effectiveness. Joshua’s effort, however,
achieves only partial success, because the establishment of a cult center is actu-
ally the first stage in the process of reducing direct divine sovereignty, to the
point where the prophets’ invocations of it are experienced as new ideas.^29 The
increasing difficulties of the conquest, meanwhile, give rise to the group Buber
refers to here explicitly as “a ‘realist-political’ movement,” “in opposition to this