Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 191as a compositional unity and appreciated for the underlying plan that lies at
the basis of its many vicissitudes. It oft en happens, however, that a particu-
lar juncture in the motion of the music “meets” us with a sudden, almost
transforming power. Something in the immediate and specifi c confi gura-
tion of sound strikes us and seems to shake us to our very being, releasing
a new perspective and changing our self-understanding. In Rosenzweig’s
aesthetic terms, a “lyric” aspect of the music will have been “revealed” at
that crucial moment.
As far as stories are concerned, Rosenzweig terms moments of mean-
ing such as this “anecdotal.”29 In an “anecdotal” situation, a person vividly
relates a story from his or her own immediate present directly to the im-
mediate present of another human being who is listening. Th e story is not
related as a considered, artistic composition but as the direct recounting of
an event that has “just now” occurred, a story whose course and outcome
directly aff ect the present of the listener. Such a story represents, for the
listener, either the answer to a question (whether conscious or dormant) or
a challenge that calls out for a response. Both Buber and Rosenzweig char-
acterize this kind of storytelling as a dialogical opportunity par excellence.
Th e theological and aesthetic dimensions that have just been briefl y
introduced form the background for Buber and Rosenzweig’s famous dis-
cussions of “leading words” in biblical narrative.30 Biblical authors and re-
dactors use “leading words” to unify and lend meaning to various story
sequences, as well as legal passages. Th ese leading words carry both the
epic and anecdotal dimensions of biblical literature. One the one hand, the
borders, character, and wholeness of a literary unit may be defi ned by re-
peated leading words that course through it. Th e repeated “doings” of God
and “separations” of things in the fi rst creation story give this famous nar-
rative defi nite parameters, as well as a discrete texture. Th e fi rst creation
story presents us with a harmonious whole: the systematic, intelligible un-
folding of the world as we know it. Both the world considered from this
perspective and the story can be beheld as a unifi ed, harmonious matrix,
as an epic. When we come, however, much later on in the biblical narra-
tive, to the story of the construction of the Tent of Meeting in the desert
(Exodus 36 – 40), we fi nd that words used to describe the sequence of God’s
“doings” in Genesis are used to describe human “doings” in Exodus. Th e
word used to indicate that God has “concluded” His work is used to indi-
cate that Moses has concluded, as supervisor, the work on the Tabernacle.
Th is comes as a surprise, since the minute details of the construction of
the Tabernacle seem so insignifi cant and mundane when compared to the