The Battle for YHVH | 183ears: “For four hundred years they come one after the other and take their stand
before the prince and reprove him because of the violated covenant, and finally
Jeremiah (22:6ff ), some time before the disaster, announces destruction for the
king’s house which had not been just, and therefore was no more justified.”^36
The prophets’ battle for the sovereignty of YHVH takes two major forms:
the fight for social justice and the fight against worship of other gods. Buber em-
phasizes that these struggles cannot really be separated. Both result from the
monarchy’s secularization: “There is here an acknowledgment of the Lord of the
heavens and of the Lord of the cult too, but there remains no place for God as
the leader of the people, and indeed Solomon did not need this. The functions of
YHVH are to be reduced so that they do not bind the king.”^37 The kings imagine
that they bargain with YHVH, leaving heaven to him so long as they can have
the earth. War, in particular, is an area in which the monarchy refuses to cede
authority to novices. Since none of the prophets are soldiers, YHVH is shut out
of war. Meanwhile, the public sacrifice, formerly offered by prophets in time of
crisis, is usurped by the kings as lip service to religion—David, Solomon, and
Jeroboam I all offer it themselves, and then it is delegated to priests under the
monarchy’s control. After Samuel, no prophet offers it again until Elijah, who
is the last to do so.^38 The king assumes a monopoly on earthly power. Of course,
this power is precarious; too much foreign influence in worship, or failure in war,
can provoke resentment and rebellion. But even this is “obviously only in order to
enforce the worship of YHVH against the Baal cult, and not in order to censure
God’s deputy for failing to guide the state in accordance with God’s justice. From
now on no one censures the king except the prophet, the man without appoint-
ment... a fact which the kingship naturally regards as a potential revolution.”^39
The proliferation of court prophets, then, represents the monarchy’s effort to co-
opt this powerful counterforce.
The Man of Holy Unrest: Elijah versus Ahab
Buber’s discussion of the legendary Elijah the Tishbite argues that Elijah’s strug-
gle against baal worship is also a struggle against social injustice. In a paral-
lel to Joshua’s covenant renewal at Shechem, Elijah opposes the baalim out of
a desire to unite the people around YHVH. Yet the problem with baal worship
goes deeper than the private worlds of family gods that Joshua forced the people
to abandon; the problem reaches back to Moses’ quandary at Kadesh, when he
wondered how a nomadic people would remain faithful once it began to settle.
In Kingship of God, Buber defined “Baalization” as an incorrect form of
divine worship in which one represented YHVH in order to “have” him at one’s
command; in Moses, he cited the golden calf episode as the prime instance of
this process. Here, he describes a later phase in the struggle between YHVH
and the baalim, during which the outer form of baal worship has changed. The