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particular places or natural processes — hence the God who moves through
time (history) and space (geography) to accompany His chosen.
Th e Bible as a Locus for Encounter with God
If the encounter with God, for Buber and Rosenzweig, comes in and
through the events of life, how can the Bible itself be understood as a me-
dium of revelation? Why should God be encountered in the reading of a
particular book, if He is in principle accessible to all through the vicissi-
tudes of life itself? Buber and Rosenzweig believed that the Bible has proved
to be the historical harbinger of the possibility of this kind of encounter in
the thick of life. Further, they regarded the act of Bible reading itself, when
undertaken properly, as an orienting event. For Buber and Rosenzweig, the
Bible, by the very manner of its composition, directs us to the kind of dia-
logical reading that sensitizes us to the possibilities of dialogical encounter
with God and human beings in life.21
Th e Bible also represents a most striking example of what Buber has
called the “wondrous means of writing,”22 wherein the living voice of
God, carried through the events of meeting between God and Israel, and
the enthusiasm of the human response to that voice have been preserved
in a seemingly “frozen,” written medium. Th e biblical narrative has been
formed in such a way that, paradoxically, its written forms call forth its
original “spokenness.”
Sometimes this “spokenness” seems to be preserved immediately within
the text. A certain passage stands out and contrasts with the literary artful-
ness of its surroundings. A well-considered narrative or a well-constructed
poem is suddenly interrupted by a celebratory exclamation that, according
to Buber, could only have been preserved from the midst of a living event
— even though the biblical account may be covered over by layers of subse-
quent editing. One important example of this, for Buber, is the exclamation
“Let YHWH be king for the ages, eternity” (Exodus 15:18) — a spontane-
ous expression of wonder and loyalty that erupts from the intricate Song
of the Sea. Th is exclamation bespeaks what Buber calls a kind of “objec-
tive enthusiasm.”23 In borrowing this term from Jacob Grimm, Buber col-
lapses the conventional distinction, so dear to professional historians, be-
tween “objectivity” and “subjectivity.” Th is outpouring is certainly not a dry
chronicle. Neither does it represent the ravings of an overenthusiastic “sub-
jective” imagination (as Spinoza would likely have interpreted it). Rather,