The following piece (translated from the German by Maurice Friedman) will be included among the autobiographical fragments in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, edited by Dr. Friedman and Paul Arthur Schilpp and scheduled for publication in 1963 by the Open Court Publishing Company as part of the Library of Living Philosophers.

I once met on a journey a man whom I already knew from an earlier encounter. He was an observant Jew who followed the religious tradition in all the details of his life-pattern. But what seemed to me essential (and had become unmistakably clear to me at our first meeting) was that this relationship to tradition had its origin and its constantly renewed confirmation in the relationship of the man to God.

Now when I saw him again, we happened to fall into a discussion of Biblical questions: not indeed of peripheral questions but central ones, central questions of faith. I now no longer remember exactly in what connection we came to speak of that section of the Book of Samuel in which it is told how Samuel delivered to King Saul the message that his dynastic rule would be taken from him because he had spared the life of the conquered prince of the Amalekites. I reported to my partner in dialogue how dreadful it had been to me, even as a boy, to read this as the message of God (though my heart had compelled me to read it again, and certainly to think about the fact that it stood written in the Bible). I told my companion how even in my boyhood it had horrified me to read or to recall how the heathen king went up to the prophet with the words on his lips, “Surely the bitterness of death is past,” and was hewn to pieces by him. I said to my partner in dialogue: “I have never been able to believe that this is a message of God. I do not believe it.”

With wrinkled and contracted brow, the man sat opposite me and his glance flamed into my eyes. He remained silent, began to speak, became silent again. “So?” he broke forth at last. “So? You do not believe it?” “No,” I answered, “I do not believe it.” “So? So? You do not believe it?” he repeated almost threateningly. And I once again: “No.” “What . . . what”—he thrust the words before him one after the other—“what do you believe then?” “I believe,” I replied without reflecting, “that Samuel had misunderstood God.” And he, again slowly, but more softly than before: “So? You believe that?” And I: “Yes.” Then we were both silent. But now something happened the like of which I have rarely seen before or after in my whole life long. The angry countenance opposite me became transformed, as if a soothing hand had passed over it. It lightened and cleared, and was now turned toward me bright and clear. “Well,” said the man with a positively gentle tender clarity, “I think so too.” And again we became silent, for a long time.

There is, after all, nothing astonishing in the fact that this kind of observant Jew, when he has to choose between God and the Bible, chooses God: the God in Whom he believes, Him in Whom he can believe. And yet: it seemed to me at that time significant, and still seems so now. The man later came to the Land of Israel and here I met him once again, some time before his death. Naturally I regarded him then as the speaker of that word of the time before; but now the problem of Biblical belief was not touched on. It was indeed no longer necessary.

I, however, since that early conversation long ago, have repeatedly faced the question whether I then expressed precisely my true meaning. And again and again I answered: yes, and no. Yes, insofar as what was spoken of in that conversation was concerned; for there it was right to answer my partner in dialogue in his language and within the limits of his language, so that the dialogue should not come to nought and the common insight into one truth at times afforded to two men might fulfill itself, in no matter how limited a way. Insofar as that was concerned—yes. But no, when it is a question both of recognizing, oneself, and then pointing out to others, that man and the human race are inclined to misunderstand God. Man is so created that he can understand, but does not have to understand, what God says to him. God does not abandon the created man to his needs and anxieties; He provides him with His word. But man does not listen with faithful ears to what is spoken to him. In the very hearing he already confuses the command of heaven and the statute of earth, revelation to the created being with the orientations that he has himself established. Even man’s holy scriptures are not immune, not even the Bible.

What is involved here is, ultimately, not the fact that this or that form of Biblical historical narrative has misunderstood God; what is involved is the fact that in the work of throats and pens out of which the text of the “Old Testament” has arisen, misunderstanding has again and again attached itself to understanding, the manufactured been mixed with the received. We have no objective criterion for distinguishing between the two; we have only faith—when we have it. Nothing can make me believe in a God who punishes Saul because he did not murder his enemy. And yet even today I still cannot read the passage that tells this otherwise than with fear and trembling. But not it alone. Always when I have to translate or to interpret a Biblical text, I do so with fear and trembling, in an inescapable tension between the word of God and the word of man.

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