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On the Bible: Eighteen Studies (Martin Buber Library)

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This volume contains eighteen essays by Martin Buber on the Bible.Some of the essays are excerpted from works of previous works of his on Biblical themes, such as " Moses' and " The Prophetic Faith". The work has an extraordinarily rich introductory essay by Harold Bloom in which he often compares the work of his mentor, Gershom Scholem to Buber both on Hasidism, and on Biblical study. It has an afterword by a pupil of Buber, the volume's editor Nahum N. Glatzer.

Bloom contains among other things that Buber is one of the greatest of all writers on illuminating the literary greatness of the Biblical Text. For Buber though, Biblical Literature is not about the creation of Character or the development of plot, but rather about the Encounter between Man and God.

Among the essays in the volume are : The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible The Tree of Knowledge Abraham the Seer

The Burning Bush (Exodus 3) Holy Event ( Exodus 19-27) The Election of Israel The Words on the Tablets (Exodus 20) What are we to do about the Ten Commandments? The Prayer of the Frist Fruits Samuel and the Ark Biblical Leadership Plato and Isaiah Redemption( Isaiah and Deuteroro- Isaiah) False Prophets ( Jeremiah 28) Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour Job The Heart Determines (Psalm 73) Biblical Humanism.

I will just cite one passage to give a bit of the flavor to this very deep and instructive work.

In his essay on leadership he writes, " The biblical question of leadership is concerned with something greater than moral perfection. The biblical leaders are the foreshadowings of the dialogical man , of the man who commits his whole being to God's dialogue with the world, and who stands firm throughout the dialogue. The life of those people .. is absorbed in this dialogue, whether the dialogue comes about through an intervention as in Abraham's talk with God about Sodom, or Moses after the sin of the Golden Calf: or whether it comes about through a resistance they offer against that which comes upon them and tries to overpower them.(as in Jeremiah and Moses)....... or whether the dialogue comes about through the struggle for a purpose and a task , as we know from that dialogue which took place between David and God. Whatever the way, man enters into the dialogue again and again; imperfect entry, but yet one that is not refused, an entry that is determined to persevere in the dialogical world. All that happens here is here experienced as dialogue; what befalls man is taken as a sign; what man tries to doand what miscarries is taken as an attempt and failure to answer, as a stammering attempt to respond as well as one can.