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[First posted in 2015; part of a series, check out these related links:
What happened on Sinai? A lot. Not the least of which the Creator speaks to representative humanity —the mixed multitude —and cuts a covenant with the people He formed from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The wonder of this God is He condescends and goes down to the level and limitations of human understanding, within the times and culture of individuals and people-groups He deals with. In this case, He uses existing man-made covenantal traditions. That is the focus of this chapter from our current resource MUST READ which should always lead to MUST HAVE: Sinai and Zion by Jon D. Levenson. We recommend this book that belongs in the library of serious students of the original Sinai revelation.
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The traditions we have been discussing are of the infancy of Mount Sinai as a symbol in Jewish tradition. They present an image of a religion close to animism. YHWH is, in part, the genie of a scrubby tree, a desert deity who, in a quite literal way, dwells on a mountain, from which he ventures to wage war.
It may be dangerous to dismiss these primitive hierophanies too quickly, for there lies within them the germ of ideas which will prove of world-historical, in fact revolutionary import. It may be the case primitive men are in deeper contact with some truths than are their more advanced brethren.
It is essential, nonetheless, not to fall into the blunder known as the “genetic fallacy,” the idea that origins explain developments. Just as one would hardly grasp the greatness of Abraham Lincoln by discussing what he was at the age of six months, so would it be a mistake to take these earliest traditions of Sinai as definitive for what the mountain signified throughout biblical tradition.
For most of that tradition, Mount Sinai is remembered for something other than the manifestation of an arborescent wilderness deity. Rather, Sinai commemorates something that is alleged to have occurred on the plain of human history, but of an awesome and transcendant nature. In short, it is not Sinai in its prehistorical or somnolence which should claim the better part of our attention, but the Sinaitic event, what the traditions allege, in their varying ways, to have happened there.
The following text expresses that event in a particularly concise form:
3 YHWH called to him from the mountain, saying,
Thus shall you say to the House of Jacob, And declare to the Israelites:
4 “You have seen for yourselves what I did to Egypt, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to me.
5 Now, then, if you will obey me faithfully and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples—for all the world is mine.
6 You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to the Israelites.”
7 Moses came and summoned the elders of the people and put before them all the words which YHWH had commanded him.
8 And all the people answered as one and said, “All that YHWH has spoken we will do!” Moses took the words of the people back to YHWH. (Exod 19:3b-8)
These verses serve as a kind of introduction to the entire revelation on Sinai. In them, YHWH and Israel conclude a bilateral relationship: he will grant them a special status, one shared by none of his other people, if only they will obey him. This they agree to do, sending their assent up the mountain to God by way of the mediator of this new relationship, Moses.
The text above is significant for two reasons.
First, recent scholarship tends increasingly to recognize in this passage old traditions, in spite of telltale signs of literary reworking. Which of the old epic sources, J or E, is responsible for the larger part of these verses is not relevant here, but it is essential to note that some scholarship that has come out in the last several years is quite skeptical about the possibility that Exod 19:3b-8 is the product of a Deuteronomic source. Instead, the passage more likely reflects a relatively early phase in the religion of Israel.
My second reason for beginning here is that this text actually names the sort of relationship inaugurated on Mount Sinai. It is a covenant. If we can shed light on this term, we may be able to understand the basis of this special status conferred upon Israel and of the obligations that are inextricable from her identity.
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About three decades ago scholars, especially George Mendenhall in the United States and Klaus Baltzer in Germany, began to compare biblical literature with certain treaties whose structure had been known for about two decades. These treaties derived from the Hittite Empire, which occupied essentially what is now the eastern part of Turkey and whose language was of the Indo-European family, like Greek and unlike Hebrew, which is form the Semitic family. In the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.E.), the Hittite emperors were attempting to control the critical land-mass to their south, Syria, by entering into treaties with the kings of the lesser states of that region. The purpose of these treaties was to secure the allegiance of the smaller states to make sure that they stood faithful in alliance with the Hittites and did not pursue an independent foreign policy. Treaties, in the ancient world, were of principally two types, parity and suzerainty.
- Parity treaties were between equals;
- suzerainty treaties were between unequals, the great king whom we shall call the suzerain and the petty monarch, whom we term the vassal.
From now on, we shall be concerned with suzerainty treaties only.
The sequence of steps characteristic of these treaties has come to be known as the covenant formulary.
To be sure, the extant documents, even those from the Hittites of the Late Bronze Age which have proved so important to biblical studies, show a wide variety of forms. All that seems to have been essential to a treaty in the ancient Near East was a set of stipulations binding the vassal, and an oath sworn by at least the vassal and guaranteed and sanctioned by the gods. Nevertheless, despite this fluidity of forms, many of the treaties show a sequence of six steps, although not always in the same order.
I. In the first step, the preamble or titulary, the suzerain identifies himself.
II. The second step is the historical prologue or antecedent history. Whatever one calls it, it is a statement of the past relationship of the parties. Sometimes the suzerain stresses his benefactions towards the vassal. In one such treaty, the Hittite emperor Mursilis points out that he put his vassal, Duppi-Tessub on his throne, in spite of the latter’s illness, and forced an oath of loyalty upon his brothers (any new king fears his brothers) and upon his subjects, the land of Amurru. The covenant obligates the people of Amurru to recognize the kingship of Duppi-Tessub. In other words, the suzerain ensures the vassal’s royal status. The implication is that, left to his own devices, Duppi-Tessub would not have retained the throne. In fact, this seems to have been one of the central purposes of the historical prologue—to encourage a feeling of gratitude in the vassal so as to establish firmly the claim of the suzerain, and it is only right that he should respond to him out of a sense of obligation.
III. The historical prologue thus leads smoothly to the third step, the stipulations, the terms of the treaty.
The purpose of the stipulations is to secure the fidelity of the vassal, to insure that the centerpiece of his foreign policy is faithfulness to his liege lord. The stipulations are in the nature of direct address; they are in the second person. It is important to understand the difference between this kind of phrasing and that typical of a modern treaty or contract. The ancient Near Eastern covenant was not an impersonal code, but an instrument of diplomacy founded upon the personal relationship of the heads of state.
The essence of the covenant lies in the fact that the latter pledge to be faithful to one another. It is important to remember that even within one state, government was conceived as personal, as it emphatically is not in modern states.
Modern man wants a government of laws, not of men, one in which all legal relationships are described in abstract terms without reference to personalities—thus phrased in the third person only.
By contrast, in the ancient Near East, the king was thought to look after his subjects solicitously. In a ubiquitous metaphor, he was their shepherd and they were his flock. They loved him and feared him. In parity treaties, the two kings are “brothers”; in some suzerainty treaties, the greater king is the “father” of the lesser king, not in a biological sense, of course, but in a powerful metaphorical way. Thus, we find that the vassals are sometimes commanded even to love their suzerain. In one Assyrian (i.e., Northeast Mesopotamian) treaty drawn up by King Esarhaddon (860-669 B.C.E.) to insure that his vassals will be loyal to his son Assurbanipal, we read: “You will love as yourselves Assurbanipal.” And in another document, the vassals declare under oath: “…the king of Assyria, our Lord, we will love.”
The purpose of the covenant would be defeated if the vassal were allowed to enter into such a relationship with another suzerain as well, for that would undermine the great king’s control over the area ruled by his partner. Therefore, although a suzerain may have many vassals, a given vassal must recognize only one suzerain. “Do not turn your eyes to anyone else,” warns Mursilis. “Henceforth however,” another suzerain admonishes, “recognize no other lord.” This demand for exclusive loyalty is central to the stipulations. From it the others follow naturally. Without it, they make no sense.
IV. The fourth step in the covenant formulary is the deposition of the text. Any legal document should be deposited in some place agreed upon at the signing. In a society in which gods served as guarantors of the treaty, it was often deemed appropriate to put a public document in their temples, where they would be continually reminded of its provisions, lest a perfidious ally go unpunished. The formality of deposition need not occupy our attention.
Furthermore, some treaties required that the text be periodically read to the vassal in a kind of liturgical reaffirmation of the pact:
Furthermore, this tablet which I have set [forth] for you Ala[ksandus], shall be re[cit]ed to you three times each year, and you Alaksandus shall know it.
Here, recitation has as its goal knowledge of the terms of the covenant. One must know the treaty in order to fulfill it.
V. The fifth item is the list of witnesses. These are the gods before whom the sacred oath is sworn. To violate the treaty, solemnly entered into, is to risk the wrath of these deities. The list is often quite lengthy, since the treaties tend to invoke the pantheon of each of the two parties. In addition, certain natural phenomena, such as mountains, rivers, heaven and earth, stand in witness. In a culture in which words were believed to have effects and in which one therefore did not utter the names of the deities lightly, the list of divine or cosmic witnesses served as a potent inducement to observance of the stipulations.
VI. The sixth and last element in the covenant formulary is called curses and blessings. Violation of the stipulations, perfidy and betrayal, will surely result in a cursed life. Conversely, compliance with the stipulations, loyalty and faithfulness to the suzerain, result in a state of beatitude. The curses include such things as annihilation, epidemic, sterility, drought, famine, dethronement, and exile. It is clear that the covenant contains within it a moral mechanism based on the principle of retribution, reward for the faithful, punishment for the faithless. The moral principle was thought to be implemented not so much by the workings of the human political order, as by a transcendent element, the trustworthiness of the gods to respond to an oath sworn in their holy names.
If we turn back to the passage in Exodus 19 that we have taken as indicative of the broad outlines of the Sinaitic traditions, we hear echoes of this covenant formulary. To be sure, Exod 19:3b-8 is not per se the text of a covenant. It is a proclamation to the people announced through a prophet, Moses, the prophet functioning as a mediator in the establishment of a covenant relationship. Such a mediating role does not appear in the classic Hittite covenants. Once one makes allowances for the context in which this vignette functions, however, it is difficult to deny the reflexes of the covenant formulary to be heard therein. V 4, for example, is a miniature historical prologue. V 5 voices the stipulation in the form of a conditional blessing. We should not be surprised or led to doubt the covenantal nature of the passage simply because the stipulative aspect of this latter sentence is cast in the most general terms, obedience to YHWH and observance of the covenant, for, in fact, the whole passage is embedded in a context which serves as an introduction to the actual stipulations of the Sinaitic covenant. It would have made no sense to present them in detail here.
There is a covenantal aspect to the next verse, which, although very important, has escaped the notice of other commentators:
You shall be to me
a kingdom of priests
and a holy nation. (v 6)
Here, as a reward for loyalty in covenant, YHWH confers upon Israel the status of royalty. Their special position in a world entirely God’s is the position of priestly kings. The analogy with the treaty of Mursilis and Duppi-Tessub is quite close. Just as the Hittite emperor insured the kingship of his vassal by taking “your brothers (and) sisters and the Amurru land in oath for you,” so does YHWH guarantee that his loyal vassal Israel will be the “kingdom of priests” among all the nations of the world, a special people consecrated in covenant to him. “The whole world” is to Israel as the Amurru land (including the royal siblings) is to Duppi-Tessub. In each case, the suzerain establishes the vassal as the royal figure in a larger community which is itself under the great king’s suzerainty. The commandments, which are the stipulations of covenant, delineate a service which is also a form of lordship, an aristocracy of humility.
Finally, in v 8, the people solemnly undertake to fulfill the terms of the covenant:
And all the people answered as one and said,
“All that YHWH has spoken we will do!”
The covenant is now in force.
In sum, we detect in Exod 19:3b-8 reflexes of the formulary first worked out for the Hittite suzerainty treaty of the Late Bronze Age. Behind v 4 lies the historical prologue. V 5b reflects the stipulations, which are syntactically linked to the blessings (vv 5b-6a). Not every one of the six steps appears here; only three are clear. But even in the Hittite texts, we cannot expect to find each item attested. Hence, Dennis McCarthy’s warning about our passage is sound:
“The covenant formulary is not a frozen form…To control a literary form is precisely to use it effectively and freely like this.”
Exod 19:3b-8 is powerful evidence for the relatively early conception of the Sinaitic experience as the institution of a covenant between two kings, YHWH and the people Israel.
If in Exod 19:3b-8 there lurks a covenant ceremony beneath a text that is now a prophetic proclamation, in the last chapter of the book of Joshua (Josh 24:1-28) the covenant ceremony comes to the fore, and it seems that we can detect each of the six steps of the formulary, to one degree or another. This passage is not the text of a covenant, but it is the description of the negotiations which lead up to one and of the ceremony in which the covenant is concluded.
What about the formulary?
The first step, the preamble or titulary, is perhaps reflected in v 2: “Thus said YHWH the God of Israel.” I say “perhaps” because Joshua here, like Moses in Exodus 19, functions as a prophet, and “Thus said YHWH” (the messenger formula) is the most common way for a prophet to introduce his oracle. The most famous echo of the preamble, however, is the verse that Jews count as the first of the Ten Commandments, although it is technically no commandment at all:
I am YHWH your God
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery.
(Exodus 20:2)
The First Commandment is emphatically not a messenger formula, but the self-presentation of the suzerain followed by his recitation of his essential benefaction to the vassal.
Joshua 24, the historical prologue occupies the greater part of the divine address. It begins with the generation before Abraham and summarizes the three immediately succeeding eras in Israel’s sacred history—the patriarchal period, the Exodus from Egypt, and the conquest of the land (vv2-13).
The dominant theme of this recitation of history is the unceasing grace of YHWH toward Israel. He has given them more than they deserve. Time and again he has rescued them; time and again he has frustrated their enemies. Thus, at this moment at the end of the book of Joshua, as the great epic of deliverance and conquest draws to a close, Israel profits from victories that her own sword and her own bow have not won, lives in cities she did not build, and eats of vineyards and orchards she never planted.
The message is clear: God had benefited Israel beyond her deserts. Like the ailing Duppi-Tessub, whom Mursilis nevertheless put on the throne, Israel benefits from goodwill she has not earned. In this covenant, the suzerain, at least, has demonstrated that he is possessed of the fidelity and reliability such a pact required of its partners.
Awareness of divine grace sets the stage for the stipulations. These are expressed in the form of three imperatives:
- “hold YHWH in awe,”
- “serve him with undivided loyalty and in truthfulness,” and
- “banish the [alien] gods” (v 14).
This expression of the stipulations is quite minimal, as covenants go; Joshua 24 required merely that Israel acclaim YHWH as her suzerain. But these minimal stipulations are all that is required, as the text must presuppose some corpus of Sinaitic law already revealed in the lifetime of Moses. It should be noted that the people swear they will not abandon YHWH (v 16); this is a persuasive indication that they have already entered into a relationship of fealty with him. These are not newcomers to YHWHism, at least in the text as we presently have it. Instead of mediating a new covenant, Joshua is reinstituting the old one, reclaiming a wayward people for the essential relationship to God. Hence, his main concern is to insure that YHWH is her suzerain, YHWH alone. “Banish the gods” is the equivalent of Mursilis’ demand, “Do not turn your eyes to anyone else!…” But whereas Mursilis goes on to lay down detailed terms in which this exclusive fidelity must find expression, Joshua relies upon the stipulations of his predecessor’s time. By banishing YHWH’s rivals, Israel rededicates herself to him.
The deposition of the covenant text takes place in v 26, when Joshua records the terms of the covenant in a scroll which he appears to deposit by a boulder at the foot of the sacred tree growing in the (now YHWHistic) Temple at Shechem. Both the tree and the rock will serve as landmarks for the location of the treaty-text inside the Temple. There is no provision here for the periodic reading of the text, but we do find exactly such a requirement in connection with the covenant Moses drew up on the plains of Moab, for there Moses charges Israel to hear a Torah read every seventh year during the festival of Booths (Deut 31:10-13).
The fifth step of the covenant formulary, the witnesses, presents a problem. In the extra-biblical treaties, the witnesses were mostly the gods of the two contacting states. But the suzerain in Israel being divine himself, to have him and them swear by another god would defeat the purpose of the covenant, for Israel would thus recognize another potential suzerain of the same status as YHWH. Instead of divine witnesses, therefore, Joshua first utilizes Israel as a witness against herself (v 22)—perhaps not very convincing legal procedure, but there is no good alternative. As if sensing that Israel would not prove most trustworthy in the role of witness against herself, the account then offers another adaptation of the old treaty formulary. In v 27, the large rock assumes the role of the gods as witness to the covenant,
“for it has heard all the words
YHWH has spoken to us.”
The only hint in Joshua 24 of curses and blessings, the last item in the covenant formulary, occurs in v 20. YHWH has brought Israel success up to now, but if she abandons him and serves another suzerain, he will in turn reverse himself and annihilate Israel. The blessings are simply the continuation, after the conclusion of a covenant, of the life of grace stressed in the historical prologue. Two passages in the Pentateuch, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, develop this theme of blessing and curse in great and , at times, horrific detail. It is hardly surprising that these curses are read every year in the synagogue in an undertone.
We have seen that in Joshua 24, it can be argued that each of the six steps of the covenant formulary is present to one degree or another. The historical prologue, the stipulations, the deposition of the text, and the witnesses are well represented. The curses and blessings appear in a very skeletal form, and the preamble may or may not be there at all. The correlation between these elements and the covenant formulary evident in the Hittite and other Near Eastern suzerainty treaties cannot be coincidental.
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Israel has become the vassal of YHWH;
YHWH has become the suzerain of Israel.
There can be no profound understanding of the traditions of Sinai without recognition of the source or analogue for the kind of relationship which YHWH was thought to have inaugurated there, a relationship of covenant in which he became their sole God, and they, his special possession, the dominium Dei. To be sure, it is difficult to be definitive as to the date when this conception took hold. As I noted in the Introduction, without fundamentalist presuppositions we cannot assume that a passage is synchronous with the events it purports to record.
The historical Joshua—is such there was—may have had nothing to do with a covenant ceremony of the sort that closes the book that has been given his name. One must, instead, date the passage by its literary features and its religious ideas. It is interesting in this connection that one of the greatest scholars of covenant, Dennis McCarthy, dated this material quite early, earlier, in fact, than much of the Pentateuch.
The book of Joshua is usually regarded as the product of reworking (redaction) at the hands of editors highly influenced by Deuteronomy. The core of Deuteronomy, in turn, is usually dated to the late seventh century B.C.E., since parts of it seem to be closely related to, perhaps identical with, the book of the Torah found in the Temple during the reign of King Josiah (2 Kings 22-23). If Joshua 24 is the product of a Deuteronomistic school, it is relatively late in the history of the religion of biblical Israel, and the old argument that covenant in Israel is late, an argument recently revived, gains in plausibility. McCarthy, however, notes the presence of some distinctly un-Deuteronomic elements in the chapter. For example, the “choice between gods as equal alternatives…is unthinkable” in Deuteronomic tradition, as is the nonjudgmental attitude toward a sacred tree and a Temple outside of the central shrine (v 26), elements of old tradition against which the reforming book of Deuteronomy polemicized uncompromisingly (e.g., Deut 12:2).
All this suggests that the Deuteronomistic historian has redacted, but not authored the account of the covenant ceremony at Shechem. In any event, the likelihood remains that the Sinaitic experience was conceived as covenantal relatively early in Israel and that the format of covenant served as the controlling metaphor for Israel’s relationship to God through most of biblical history. This covenantalization of Israelite religion was so thoroughgoing that we are almost reduced to hypothesis in our effort to reconstruct the prior stages.
The literary legacy of ancient Israel is incomprehensible apart from covenant theology.
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