Buber: The Bible as Testament to Divine-Human Dialogue

        

        Martin Buber spent a significant portion of his life working with the Hebrew Bible. He wrote four major studies of the Bible: The Kingdom of God (1932), The Teaching of the Prophets (translated as The Prophetic Faith) (1942), Moses (1945), and Two Types of Faith (1950). The last of these included his most extensive interpretation of the Christian New Testament. (Ancient Greek was one of the strongest of Buber’s many languages.) He spent more than twenty years (1925-1938, 1954-1962) translating the Bible into a form of modern German that conveys the oral qualities of the original Hebrew. He regarded this project as one of his greatest accomplishments.

        In a number of essays Buber teaches us how to read the Bible as the testament of divine-human dialogue, most notably in his short 1951 lecture in New York, “The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth” (On Judaism, 214-25).

        Buber approvingly quotes words of Franz Rosenzweig his co-translator to express the intimacy of the divine-human dialogue that the Scriptures can evoke in the hearts in the hearts of readers:

Everywhere the human traits [of the Scriptures] can, in the light of a lived day, become transparent, so that suddenly they are written for this particular human being into the center of his own heart, and the divinity in what has been humanly written is, for the duration of this heartbeat, as clear and certain as a voice calling in this moment into his heart and being heard.  (Martin Buber, “The How and Why of our Bible Translation,” 215)

         Maurice Friedman eloquently sums up Buber’s view of the Bible as an instrument of divine-human dialogue with these words:

For Buber, the writtenness of the Bible lies on it like a light garment. In the moment when the psalms are prayed, the laws obeyed, the prophecies believed, they at once lose their monological muteness, find voice, and call the eternal Partner to dialogue. But the human partner, too, is constantly summoned to dialogue. Continually, the psalms awaken men to prayer, the laws awaken men to obey, the prophecies awaken men to belief. Even the epic is secret dialogue which, under the husks of its epic past, is carried over into full anecdotal presentness and what is awakened to deed, hope, love, becomes knowledge, teaching, revelation.  (Martin Buber’s Life and Work, 2.262)

 See my book Turning to the Other where Buber and the Bible is further discussed, especially on pages 17, 92, and 279-82.