The Battle for YHVH | 185creates another fleeting moment of theopolitical unity: “Only now is there again
a people Israel. There is no Israel and can be none except as YHVH’s people.”^46
In a final note, Buber clarifies his view of Elijah’s theopolitical status and of-
fers another example of his characteristic way of applying an unchanging teach-
ing to changed circumstances. Elijah has taught the people that their nomad god
of old is also the lord of their agricultural endeavors. His own nomadic nature
sets him apart from the people and the king, establishing his credibility and his
connection to Israel’s past. This is not to agree with the claim that Elijah opposes
a “nomadic ideal” against the cities and the farms. The Mosaic vision accepted
the transfer of nomadic virtues to the settlement, replacing chaotic wandering
and settled hierarchy with a new form of life, in which an invisible king main-
tained order while the people appeared to live anarchistically. Elijah represents
this synthesis even in the monarchical period: “Elijah serves his god as a nomad,
but he has no nomadic ideal. He demonstrates the futility of the Baal, who merely
usurps the sovereignty of the settlement.”^47 By showing YHVH as lord of the land,
“the great nomad serves his God by occupation of land for him.” Shortly after Eli-
jah’s time, there arises a misguided nostalgic tendency to view a nomadic ideal as
the only possible form for serving YHVH. Yehonadav, who orders his sons “not
to build houses, nor to sow seeds, nor to plant vineyards, but to ‘sojourn’ in tents
all over the land,” leads this movement.^48 Scholars describe it “both as ‘reaction-
ary’ and ‘revolutionary,’” since it invokes the past in challenging the status quo;
Buber, however, faults its failure to sufficiently contest the nature of the baalim. It
tells its followers to eschew their seductions but without denying their role as fer-
tilizers of the soil; in fact, its rejection of agriculture relies on viewing farmland
as where the baalim dwell. This is an intolerable position for one who sees YHVH
as hallowing all nature and human activity.^49
Fearless: Micaiah ben Imlah before Two Kings
The Elijah story, concerned primarily with Ahab’s baalism, occurs on the “reli-
gious” side of the prophetic struggle. Eventually, however, Ahab’s offenses against
social justice (e.g., the seizure of Naboth’s vineyard) cause YHVH to decree
the destruction of the house of Ahab. Because Ahab initially repents in terror,
YHVH tells Elijah that he will delay this destruction until the next generation,
and he leaves it to Micaiah ben Imlah, Elijah’s younger contemporary, to proph-
esy Ahab’s death. If Buber says more about Micaiah ben Imlah, who is reported
only in 1 Kings 22, than about the prophet Elisha, one of the main characters in
the books of Kings, this is undoubtedly because “it is not enough for [Micaiah] to
proclaim the rejection of a single king, as Samuel spoke to Saul, but he ventures
to declare the kingdom as such to be rejected and annulled for the time being—a
word which not even Hosea will be able to surpass: ‘I saw all Israel scattered to
the mountains as sheep which have no shepherd, and YHVH spake: these have