Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Propheten - historischer Moses: 4 Punkte; Implikationen der Erfahrung Gottes erfordern neue Symbole

Kurzinhalt: keine Propheten ohne Moses - kein Moses ohne Propheten;past and present in a continuum of living tension between time and eternity; the most serious problems of the prophets, however, ...: new symbols

Textausschnitt: 1/13 Without the revelations from the Thornbush to Moses and from the Sinai to the people, there would have been no messengers of the Covenant; but without the messengers we would probably know little about Moses and the events of his time. The great question of the "historical Moses," which agitates the moderns, must be considered of secondary importance compared with the real issue, that is, the prophetic effort to regain, for the Chosen People, a presence under God that was on the point of being lost. It was in order to re-establish its meaning, as constituted by the Sinaitic events, that unknown authors elaborated such traditions as were preserved in cult legends, poems, and prose accounts into the paradigmatically heightened dramas that we have studied in the preceding Chapter. From those scenes of the "middle stratum" of the Biblical narrative emerges the Moses who lived, in historical continuity, in the medium of prophetic experience in Israel. The Moses of the prophets is not a figure of the past through whose mediation Israel was established once for all as the people under Yahweh the King, but the first of a line of prophets who in the present, under the revelatory word of Yahweh, continued to bring Israel up from Egypt into existence under God. (428; Fs) (notabene)

2/13 If we distinguish, thus, between the "historical" and the living Moses and, furthermore, define the prophetic experience as the medium of his life, the problems of the prophetic movement, from the crisis of the ninth to the exile of the sixth century, will come more clearly into focus: (428; Fs)

(1) When prophetic authors recalled the work of Moses and heightened it paradigmatically in dramatic scenes, their work was not an end in itself. It served the purpose of awakening the consciousness of the Chosen People for the mode of its existence in historical form. The people had to be reminded, first, of its origin in the response of the fathers to Yahweh's revelation through Moses and, second, of the fact that its continued existence depended on its continued response to Yahweh's revelation through the prophets.

(2) The prophetic blending of past and present in a continuum of living tension between time and eternity, however, has its dangers. For precisely when the defection of the people has reached such proportions that repeated, energetic reminders of the conditions of existence in historical form become necessary, the recall of the past may have effects as unexpected as they are undesired. We have studied such an unwanted effect in the chapter on the Deuteronomic Torah, when we traced the line that led from the recall of the origins to the Myth of Moses. Far from resulting in a new response of the people to the living word of Yahweh as pronounced by the messengers, the prophetic effort derailed into a constitution for the Kingdom of Judah which pretended to emanate from the "historical" Moses. The past that was meant to be revitalized in a continuous present now became really a dead past; and the living word to which the heart was supposed to respond became the body of the law to which the conduct could conform. (429; Fs) (notabene)

... As a consequence, the struggle of the prophets for the historical form of Israel had to cope with two evils at the same time: On the one hand, the prophets had to bring Israel back from its defections to Canaanite and Mesopotamian gods, to the obedience of Yahweh; on the other hand, when in the first respect they were successful, they had to convert Israel from its chauvinism and reliance on external performance, to a communal life in the spirit of the Covenant. (429; Fs) (notabene)

3/13
(4) The most serious problems of the prophets, however, arose from the very nature of their work, that is, from their effort to clarify the meaning of existence in historical form. When the revelations of the Mosaic period were studied and relived by men of such spiritual sensitivity as the authors of the thornbush episode and the Berith drama must have been, implications of the experience would unfold which required symbolizations of a new type. The universalist implications, for instance, which could be suppressed on the popular level by the fierceness of collective existence, had to loom large in the souls of solitary spiritualists tortured by the sorrow about the destiny of the Chosen People. When the syncretistic defections raised the question in what sense Israel could still be regarded by Yahweh as "My People," the possibility of God's choosing another people had to be considered. Moreover, when the rising danger from the neighboring empires had to be interpreted as divine castigations, the foreign peoples became instruments of Yahweh in the execution of a historical plan; and consequently the features of Yahweh as the universal God of mankind became increasingly marked. The appearance of prophetic personalities, succeeding one another through the generations in opposition to the people, furthermore, had to raise the problem of personal existence under Yahweh, in his spirit, independent of Israel's collective existence. If Israel as a people was doomed, could not a remnant, consisting perhaps of the followers of the prophets, escape and be saved for a better future? Could the people of God not contract into a group of spiritual personalities in free association under God? Should those who were willing to walk humbly with their God suffer the fate of the defectors? Was Israel really identical with the "historical" people? The implications, unfolding in such questions, would raise the ultimate issue: Had the Kingdom of God, of necessity, to assume the form of a political Israel; and if that question should be answered in the negative, had it, of necessity, to assume the form of a politically organized people at all? If Israel relegated Moses and the Covenant to a dead past by transforming them into a constitutional myth, the prophets were about to relegate Israel to a dead past by transforming the Kingdom of God into something which, at the time, was no more than the shooting lights of a new dawn on the horizon. (430; Fs) (notabene)