The origin and development of biblical covenants: Judaism

The Sinai covenant

Historical background

The 100 years between 1250 and 1150 bce saw the complete destruction, or reduction to virtual impotence, of every major political state in the eastern Mediterranean region and the beginning of a “dark age” that has yielded very few written materials from which historical conclusions can be drawn. The reasons for the universal catastrophe are far from clear, but the reversion of society to communities of peasants and shepherds with a subsistence level economy can be well illustrated archaeologically. The earliest biblical traditions illustrate the conditions in Palestine at this time, though it is a difficult task to distinguish genuine ancient traditions from the use of the past by biblical writers to give religious validity to social realities or institutions of much later date.

In view of the highly elaborate social structure of the old Bronze Age states—with its apex in the military aristocracy, a highly complex priesthood, and ritual—and the equally complex social structure of the many local enclaves and tribes—each with its particular god—the monotheistic and ethically centred religious ideology of early Israel has been regarded for millennia as a miracle of “revelation,” which cannot be explained on the basis of usual historical principles and concepts. Yet, ancient Israel was a historically existent community created, and precariously maintained, by a unity of which the religious ideology was the foundation for two centuries, until military considerations resulted in the formation of a political centralization of power about 1000 bce. The covenant tradition is the only instrument by which the effective functioning of that unity can be understood, and its importance is underlined by the biblical traditions themselves. The structure of the Hittite treaties now makes available an historical precedent that enables scholars to understand the structure of early Israelite thought and consequently its functional operation in history.

Post-Sinai covenants

Traces remain in the biblical traditions to indicate that the new community formed from a “rabble” at Sinai was in very short time joined by a considerable part of the population of Transjordan and Palestine proper. After the destruction (in the late 13th century) of the military chiefdoms ruled by Sihon and Og in the area east of the Jordan River, the Hebrews held a covenant ceremony at Shittim (northeast of the Dead Sea), which has been greatly elaborated upon in tradition as the “second giving of the Law,” Deuteronomy. Though it is true that the Book of Deuteronomy from the 7th century bce exhibits the same basic structure as that of the old covenant form, it is at present impossible to reconstruct the original form or content of the Shittim covenant. It may be presumed that entry into the community by covenant was followed by the allotment of land as tenured fiefs from Yahweh and the organization of the population into “tribes.” This organization probably was the last event of the Hebrew leader Moses’ life, and the sequel in the more important covenant at Shechem (northwest of the Dead Sea) took place under the leadership of Joshua, the successor of Moses.

Shechem evidently had had an important covenant tradition long before Israel existed. The name of its god, Baal Berit (“Lord of the Covenant”), presupposes some kind of covenant basis for the local social structure, just as a considerable segment of the population can be shown to have originated from Anatolia.

The Shechem covenant narrative has been preserved at least in part in the Book of Joshua, in which Joshua appeals to the family and clan heads to choose between the new dominion of Yahweh and the continuation of the old ancestral cults of the Amorite tradition “beyond the River.” As in the case of the Transjordan covenant at Shittim, this covenant followed the defeat of a coalition of petty kings and evidently the removal of many others according to the list of Joshua. Again, there ensued an allotment of fields and an organization of the population into administrative units called “tribes,” each under a nasi (literally, “one lifted up”).

The entire process from the covenant at Sinai to the unification of perhaps a quarter of a million people by a covenant involving a religious loyalty to a single deity took only a little over one generation. It began with a group of probably considerably less than 1,000 people who left Egypt with Moses.

The subsequent history of the Sinai covenant tradition is very complex. The Book of Deuteronomy preserves slight traces of a covenant-renewal ceremony held every seven years, which is inherently plausible and which would function as a means for obtaining the oath-bound loyalty to Yahweh and his dominion of those who had come into the community from the outside or who had come of age in the intervening period.

The covenants of the Israelite monarchy (1020–587/586 bce)

Since early Israel was a religious confederacy of tribes that bitterly rejected the old military chiefdoms and their religious ideology, which elevated a Baal, or local agricultural deity—the god with the club as a symbol of the supernatural power undergirding the king—to a position of preeminence in the pantheon, it follows that the authentic Yahwist traditions stemming from Moses could not furnish a religious ideology to legitimize the monarchy when it was finally established first under Saul (reigned c. 1020–1000 bce) and then successfully under David (reigned c. 1000–962). Furthermore, early in David’s reign, he had incorporated by military force most of the existing city-states of Palestine and Transjordan into his empire, and that population had never given up the old Bronze Age cults.

It is not surprising, therefore, that this double dilemma of the new political structure should have driven the royal bureaucracy to pre-Mosaic sources as a solution to the problem. One result was the reintroduction of the age-old pagan concept of the king as the “chosen” one of the gods and a radically different—and opposite—concept of covenant, in which it was now Yahweh, not the king or the people, who bound himself by oath. Possibly modelled after old royal covenants by which ancient pagan kings made a grant to their faithful retainers, the Davidic covenant introduced a radically different (and thoroughly pagan) element into the Mosaic tradition, and the two traditions contended with one another for the next 1,000 years.

Since the old Israel-Jacob (pre-Mosaic) traditions also could not furnish an ideological base for unifying the old Israelite and non-Israelite populations under the monarchy, pre-Mosaic epic traditions of Abraham (perhaps 19th–18th centuries bce) were appealed to to furnish the “common ancestor” symbol of unity, and the covenant tradition—no doubt, already a part of that epic—was readapted to bring it up to date. The deity (now identified with Yahweh) bound himself by oath to fulfill certain promises to Abraham, though the content of the promise, in the form now received, was by and large a description of the historical situation of the Davidic empire. Though it is difficult to see what the social or ideological function may have been, the covenant with Noah (the hero of the Flood) in Genesis exhibits the same structure. The result of all these radical changes in a very short time was a complete confusing of the religious tradition and structure and a permanent deposit of the pre-Mosaic pagan religious ideology into the biblical tradition. It seems virtually certain that the Sinai tradition was itself systematically reinterpreted in the so-called ritual decalogue of Exodus in which it is dogmatically stated that the Sinai obligations were entirely ritual in nature, rather than ethical-functional. The first tables of stone of the Ten Commandments, after all, had been “broken,” which in the ancient world was a customary phrase used to indicate the invalidation of binding legal documents.

The next several centuries illustrate the constant battle between the Mosaic and the reintroduced pagan elements. The prophets proclaimed and supported the disintegration (c. 922 bce) of the Solomonic empire into a northern (Israel) and a southern (Judah) kingdom as the divine chastisement of Yahweh for gross disobedience. Particularly in the north, which did not retain the Davidic dynasty, the prophets periodically proclaimed the necessity and inevitability of wiping out one royal dynasty after another. Elijah, a 9th-century bce rustic prophet, ridiculed the idea that the Israelites could limp along on both legs—i.e., observe loyalty to both the Yahwistic and the Baal cults. Reforms were carried out occasionally, but not until the time of Josiah, the young king of Judah (late 7th century bce), and the discovery of an old copy of the Mosaic legal-ethical tradition (the Deuteronomic code) in c. 621 was serious reform undertaken—and there with little permanent success. The preservation of the Mosaic tradition was a function of the destruction of the monarchical state and its religious symbol, the temple, which nearly all the pre-exilic (before 587/586 bce) prophets had predicted.

The post-Exilic covenant tradition

Though the prophet Jeremiah (late 7th century bce) had predicted a “new covenant” written upon the heart (Jeremiah), not until the time of the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah in the 5th century is there another biblical narrative of covenant making, this time one of incalculable importance for the future of both postbiblical Judaism and Christianity and perhaps even for certain aspects of political theory or practice in the West (e.g., “Covenant” of the United Nations, Mayflower Compact, and constitutions).

The account in Nehemiah is not so much that of a covenant as it is of a constitutional convention, the purpose of which was to establish as binding law the complex of traditions that had been preserved and recorded as the “law of God which was given by Moses, the servant of God” (Nehemiah). It is a one-party enactment by the authorities and representatives of the community, in which Yahweh appears only as the deity addressed in the long historical prologue in the form of a prayer. The content is a recapitulation of the Deuteronomic history (interpretations of the 7th-century bce document), narrating the benevolent acts of Yahweh and the sin and punishment of the people. In order to avoid the curses, and obtain the blessings, the community resolved henceforth to observe the “law of God.” From this time on, the dominant concept of covenant in Judaism identifies it with circumcision, the ritual by which on the eighth day of his life, the male Jew becomes obligated to obey the law of Moses, the berit (covenant). The Sinai covenant had become permanently identified with the accumulation of legal-ritual tradition, and the community was identified not as the complex variety of all those who wished and accepted the rule of God but as the ethnic group of those who were heirs of the promise to Abraham in direct lineal (and fictitious) descent.