COVENANT

a binding promise of far-reaching importance in relations between individuals, groups, and nations. Having social, legal, and religious ramifications, the subject is primarily concerned with its special religious sense in Judaism and Christianity. Probably deriving from the patterns of political treaties in the ancient world, the covenant as understood in the Bible came to bind the people of Israel to obedience to God and in so uniting that community religiously also forged a political federation of tribes. In general, the covenant agreement was made solemn by a ritual, typically the death of an animal, which symbolized the treatment of one breaking the agreement. Deities were invoked to oversee and enforce compliance to the terms. Beyond control of social and legal relations of individuals and groups, covenant came to be understood as the major way of conceptualizing religious community and its relation to God. For more than 1,000 years prior to the covenant at Mount Sinai recorded in the Bible, covenants concerned bringing new social relationships into existence. This practice possibly grew out of the forms of marriage commitments. Very early it came to be a prominent and important device for defining political relations. Of course, new political relationships were seldom, if ever, voluntary. Rather, when one social group subdued another by military force, the former extracted from the latter promises meant to formalize the relationship and end the need for force. But such covenants were unlikely to be reliable. Around 1500 BC, the covenant treaties of the Hittite Empire assumed a more uniform and clearly recognizable structure in the attempt to show that the terms were actually beneficial to the conquered people. The Exodus, the delivery in the 13th century BC of the people of Israel from their bondage in Egypt, is the central event of the Old Testament. The monotheistic and ethical religion of the nation of Israel that emerged from that event can scarcely be accounted for by the aristocratic and religiously pluralistic societies surrounding it. However, the unification of the community can be understood in terms of commitment to a religious covenant similar to the political treaties of the day. Indeed, the Ten Commandments, given as a covenant at Mount Sinai, exhibit the same structure as the Hittite treaties. In effect, this religious covenant in its form of a political treaty constituted the people of Israel as the Kingdom of Yahweh, the only God they were to worship, the only ruler they were to recognize. Thus the covenant provided a means for securing peace and cooperation among a large population. It went beyond the organization of society by force to seek the commitments of its members, and it became the source of much of the theology and ethics of Israel. As this new community expanded and conquered neighboring peoples, there were additional covenant ceremonies at Shittim and Shechem that essentially continued and extended the Sinai Covenant by gaining the commitment of the additional people. In slightly more than one generation, the community begun by the Covenant at Sinai included as many as a quarter of a million people bound to the one Yahweh. But when Israel copied its neighbors and became a monarchy, radical changes were enacted. While the covenant committed all the people to Yahweh alone, the new monarchy used pre-Sinai sources to justify the notion of an earthly king as a chosen ruler and to portray God as the one bound to Israel by promises. This eased the incorporation into the kingdom of various city-states that had not made a commitment to the covenant. But it interjected into the religion of Israel a confusion and conflict that was to last for centuries. One after the other, prophets arose to declare the necessity of the destruction of the kings. The few attempted reforms met little success. Only the destruction of the monarchy and its temple allowed the survival of the Sinai tradition. After the return from the Exile, a covenant was entered into, but it was understood in terms of obedience to the law and its members were identified as the descendants of Abraham. The Christian understanding of covenant centres in the New Testament upon Jesus, who at his last supper before his crucifixion identified the cup of wine as the new covenant. That is, the bread and wine were identified with his body and blood, and his death was for all those who were joined with him by partaking of the bread and wine. His death as a sacrificial victim was a punishment, as prescribed by the curses, for the community's violation of the old covenant. But since his death fulfilled the curses, it also completed and therefore nullified them. That is, his death satisfied and therefore set aside the old covenant and opened the way for a new relationship with God, as known in Christ. The new Kingdom of God was not governed by laws regarding external actions but instead had to do with the heart, the soul, or the self. In later Christian history, especially the Reformed churches, covenant continued to be a means of forming new communities. The religion of Islam appends to the Judeo-Christian covenants what it regards as the Last Covenant, made between God and the Prophet Muhammad. a binding promise of far-reaching importance in the relations between individuals, groups, and nations. It has social, legal, religious, and other aspects. This discussion is concerned primarily with the term in its special religious sense and especially with its role in Judaism and Christianity. Additional reading W. Beyerlin, Herkunft und Geschichte der altesten Sinai traditionen (1961; Eng. trans., Origins and History of the Oldest Sinaitic Traditions, 1966); G.E. Mendenhall, Covenant, Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 1, pp. 714723 (1962); R.C. Darnell, Idea of Divine Covenant in the Qur'an (1970); D.J. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant (1963); Egyptian and Hittite Treaties in J.B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pp. 199206 (1955); D.R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea (1969); Jonathan Bishop, The Covenant (1982), a look at covenants in the Old and New Testaments and an attempt to apply the concept to today's world.