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[First posted 2015. The “new”covenant claimed by Christianity as God’s covenant with the Church is found nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, even as Jeremiah 31:30-33 is cited as the ‘Old Testament’ prooftext. When you read those verses carefully and closely, you will discover that the same parties that cut a covenant at Sinai are named as covenant-partners: YHWH, and Israel. When you read further what the covenant is about, you will find out it is about the same “law” or Torah given on Sinai.
What is different is clearly stated, instead of the Law or Torah being written on tablets of stone, this is what the God of Israel says:
I will place My Torah within them
and I will write it onto their heart;
I will be a God for them
and they will be a people for Me.
They will no longer teach —
each man his fellow, each man his brother
—saying ‘Know YHWH!”
For all of them will know Me,
from their smallest to their greatest
—the word of YHWH —
when I will forgive their iniquity
and will no longer recall their sin.
Who is being referred to by ‘they’, ‘their’ and ‘them’? Vs 30:
‘when I will seal a new covenant
with the House of Israel and
with the House of Judah.
When?
‘Behold, the days are coming” and
‘For this is the covenant that I shall seal
with the House of Israel after those days’.
Who are YHWH’s ‘covenant people’?
The same chosen people with whom
the Covenant on Sinai was made and
renewed in the prophet Jeremiah’s time.
How long will this covenant between YHWH and Israel about His Torah last? Are His Laws to be done away with, replaced by ‘grace’?
vs. 35 If these laws could be removed
from before Me –the word of YHWH —
so could the seed of Israel cease
from being a people before me forever.
This is chapter 11 of Jon D. Levenson’s Sinai and Zion, our MUST READ/MUST OWN feature. It is downloadable as ebook from amazon.com for those who have gotten curious enough to want to read the whole book! It is worth not only the expense but more importantly the time spent on reading from beginning to end. Additional posts from this same source are:
- MUST READ: SINAI & ZION – 1
- SINAI AND ZION 2 – The Sinaitic Experience and Traditions About It
- Revisit: MUST READ: Sinai and Zion 3 – YHWH’S Home in No Man’s Land
- SINAI and ZION 4 – SINAI and the Covenant Formulary
Reformatting and highlights ours.—Admin1.]
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The renewal of covenant was a central aspect of Israel’s worship in biblical times. Psalm 81, chanted today on Thursday mornings, seems to have related the Sinaitic experience in some kind of regular liturgical celebration, also in its original setting. Although much of this psalm is obscure, v 4 would seem to locate its context in the celebration of the first day of the lunar month, on analogy with the celebration of New Year’s Day (Rosh HaShanah) so well known from later tradition, and comparable festivities for the day of the full moon, two weeks later.
What is most pertinent to us is that the liturgy for these holy days seems to have stressed the Decalogue. Vv 10-11 are a transparent restatement of the Second and First Commandments, according to the Jewish enumeration. Vv 6b-8, in which YHWH becomes the speaker, perhaps through the mouth of a priest or prophet, and v 17 restate the historical prologue, with its emphasis upon all that the suzerain, in his graciousness, has done for his vassal. The curses of covenant can be heard in vv 12-13, in which YHWH disowns a disobedient people, but in vv 14-16, the blessings balance this with their promise of victory if only Israel walks YHWH’s path. In short, Psalm 81 evidences a regular liturgical occasion in which the Sinaitic covenant and the great choice it entails were represented to the Israelite congregation.
In the case of the book of Deuteronomy, the book of covenant par excellence, this insistence upon the relevance of the covenant of Sinai (“Horeb” in Deuteronomy) to the present generation reaches a pitch of intensity:
1 Moses called together all Israel and said to them:
Hear, Israel,
the laws and ordinances which I am proclaiming to you personally today.
Study them,
observe them,
put them into practice.
2 YHWH our God made a covenant with us on Horeb.
3 It was not with our fathers that YHWH made this covenant,
but with us—us!—those who are there today, all of us, the living.
4 Face to face YHWH spoke with you on the mountain, from the midst of the fire.
(Deut 5:1-4)
The concern in this passage is that Israel may come to think of themselves as obliged in a distant way by the covenant of Sinai/Horeb, but not as direct partners in it. Lest the freshness of the experience be lost, v 3 hammers home the theme of contemporaneity in staccato fashion, with no fewer than six separate expressions:
“with us”—
“us!”—
“those who are here”—
“today”—
“all of us”—
“the living.”
The goal of this speech, as of the covenant renewal ceremony in which it probably originated, is to induce Israel to step into the position of the generation of Sinai, in other words, to actualize the past so that this new generation will become the Israel of the classic covenant relationship (cf. Deut 30:19-20). Thus, life in covenant is not something merely granted, but something won anew, rekindled and reconsecrated in the heart of each Israelite in every generation.
Covenant is not only imposed,
but also accepted.
It calls with both the stern voice of duty and the tender accents of the lover, with both stick (curse, death) and carrot (blessing, life) in hand. But it biases the choice in favor of life (Deut 30:19).
It is conventional to trace the influence of the covenant renewal ceremony and the formulary until the time of the disappearance of the Dead Sea community (first century C.E.) and no further. The tacit assumption is that these institutions did not survive into the next phase of Jewish history, the rabbinic era. In this, there is a certain truth. The idea of covenant does not seem to have had in rabbinic religion the centrality it had held since at least the promulgation of Deuteronomy in the seventh century B.C.E., although its importance for the rabbis must not be minimized. There is no rabbinic ceremony in which the Jews are said explicitly to be renewing their partnership in the Sinaitic covenant, as the eight day old boy is said, for example, to be entering the covenant of Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14) during his circumcision. There is, however, a text which is central to the rabbinic liturgy, in fact arguably the central text of the rabbinic liturgy, which is composed of three Pentateuchal passages (Deut 6:4-9; 11:13-21; Num 15:37-41) expressive of the classical covenant theology.
The prayer is known as the Shma, after its first word. The first verse of the Shma is correctly rendered,
“Listen, Israel:
YHWH is our God,
YHWH alone”
(Deut 6:4).
Image from www.shemayisrael.net
It is manifestly an echo of the requirement of the old suzerainty treaties to recognize one lord alone. Since in the biblical case the lord is divine, the verse is a classic statement of covenantal monotheism, i.e., the prohibition upon the service of other suzerains.
In fact, we sense apprehension about the possibility of just such defection in each of the three paragraphs.
In the second one, we hear of the danger of seduction, in language that recalls the career of Hosea (Deut 11:16-17), and in the last paragraph, such defection is termed “whoring” (Num 15:39). It is the passage from Numbers which establishes the ground of obedience to YHWH precisely where we expect it, in the redemption from Egypt (v 41). This verse, like the First Commandment of the Decalogue (Exod 20:2), is a condensation of the historical prologue.
The central stipulation of the Shma is one familiar to any student of Near Eastern covenants,
the obligation to love YHWH,
which is inextricable from the requirement
to carry out all his commandments.
As we shall see, the rabbis, like the more ancient architects of covenant, saw in the acclamation of divine lordship and the love commandment of the first paragraph the basis for the acceptance of all other commandments.
The second paragraph, which stresses performance of the stipulations, derives mostly from the blessings and curses of the covenant formulary.
Fidelity to YHWH
and the exclusive service of him
will bring abundance;
defection will result
in drought, famine, and death.
Finally, we should note that the insistence that the “words” be—
- constantly recited,
- bound to one’s body,
- written upon one’s house,
- and the commandments symbolized in one’s clothes,
—is also a reflex of part of the covenant formulary, the deposition of the text and the requirement for its periodic reading. In short, the idiom and the theology of covenant permeate the Shma.
What is interesting in light of the putative disappearance of the covenant renewal ceremony is that the rabbis selected these three texts to make up one prayer, for the three are not contiguous in the Torah, and the first of them there, Num 15:37-41, appears last here. What links the three paragraphs is that they constitute the basic affirmation of covenant. They confront us with the underpinnings of the entire Sinaitic dimension of the religion of Israel. The link between them is theological, and it is that theology that the rabbis considered basic to their own appropriation and adaptation of the biblical heritage. For they made the Shma a staple in the liturgy they wove for Jewry.
In the requirement to “recite them…when you lie down and when you get up,” they saw a mitzvah to recite the Shma twice daily, in the morning and evening every day of the year. The Shma thus became one of the pillars around which those two services developed.
What, precisely, did the rabbis think happened when one recites the Shma? We find an answer in the reply of the Tannaitic master Rabbi Joshua ben Korhah to the question of why Deut 6:4-9 is positioned before 11:13-21:
- so that one might accept upon himself the yoke of the kingdom of heaven first;
- afterwards, he accepts upon himself the yoke of the commandments.
“Heaven” in Talmudic language is usually a more delicate way of saying “God.” Rabbi Joshua sees the Shma, therefore, as the acclamation of God’s kingship. Only in light of such an acclamation do the mitsvot make sense. In light of the biblical ideas, we can say that one must first accept the suzerainty of the great king, the fact of covenant; only then can he embrace the particulars which the new lord enjoins upon him, the stipulations. If God is suzerain, his orders stand. But his suzerainty is not something irrational and threatening. It follows from his gracious character:
I am the Lord Thy God.
Why were the Ten Commandments not said at the beginning of the Torah? They give a parable. To what may this be compared? To the following:
A king who entered a province said to the people: May I be your king? But the people said to him: Have you done anything good for us that you should rule over us? What did he do then? He built the city wall for them, he brought in the water supply for them, and he fought their battles. Then when he said to them: May I be your king? They said to him: Yes, Yes. Likewise, God…
His past grace grounds his present demand. To respond wholeheartedly to that demand, to accept the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, is to make a radical change, a change at the roots of one’s being. To undertake to live according to Halakhah is not a question of merely raising one’s moral aspirations or of affirming “Jewish values,” whatever that means.
To recite the Shma and mean it is to enter a supra-mundane sovereignty, to become a citizen of the kingdom of God, not simply in the messianic future to which that term also refers (e.g., Dan 2:44), but also in the historical present. Thus, one can understand the horror a rabbinic Jew would have of failing to say the Shma, as exemplified in this story: There was a law that a bridegroom was exempt from the commandment to recite the Shma, probably because he was in no mental condition to give the prayer the concentration it required. But concerning one early rabbi, we read this exchange in the Mishnah:
It happened that Rabban Gamaliel got married and recited the Shma on the first night. His students said to him, “Our master, have you not taught us that a bridegroom is exempt from the recitation of the Shma on the first night?” He said to them, “I am not going to listen to you and annul the kingdom of Heaven from myself for even a moment!”
In other words, one who neglects the Shma when its recitation is due is rebelling against the sovereignty/suzerainty of God. Or, to put it positively, the Shma is the rabbinic way of actualizing the moment at Sinai when Israel answered the divine offer of covenant with the words—
“All that YHWH has spoken we will do” (Exod 19:8).
In short, the recitation of the Shma is the rabbinic covenantal renewal ceremony. It is the portal to continuing life in covenant.
There is, therefore, no voice more central to Judaism than the voice heard on Mount Sinai. Sinai confronts anyone who would live as a Jew with an awesome choice, which, once encountered, cannot be evaded—the choice of whether to obey God or to stray from him, of whether to observe the commandments or to let them lapse.
Ultimately, the issue is whether God is or is not king, for there is no king without subjects, no suzerain without vassals. In short,
Sinai demands that
the Torah be taken
with radical seriousness.
But alongside the burden of choice lies a balm that soothes the pain of decision.
- The balm is the history of redemption, which grounds the commandments and insures that this would-be king is a gracious and loving lord and that to choose to obey him is not a leap into the absurd.
- The balm is the surprising love of YHWH for Israel, of a passionate groom for his bride, a love ever fresh and never dulled by the frustrations of a stormy courtship.
Mount Sinai is the intersection of —
- love and law,
- of gift and demand,
- the link between a past together and a future together.
Image by Edward Lear, from www.wikigallery.org