Carved in Covenant: Bronze Age Sinai and the Making of a People - Episode 133

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and welcome back to the podcast. Last week in episode 1 32, we started to talk about covenant in its ancient Near Eastern context.

[00:00:29] We talked about the covenants of the late Bronze Age, which would be about the time of Sinai, for instance, and we also talked about the covenants in the Iron Age laid out a few differences between the Bronze Age covenants and the Iron Age covenants. Particularly in the Bronze Age, we're talking about suzerain vassal treaties. These are national treaties between parties that particularly have to do with things like political boundaries and aid at wartime.

[00:01:05] But the Bronze Age treaties have some really interesting artifacts. There is a historical prologue that is attached to the covenant treaty, at least in written form. This leads up to what we have in the covenant. It suggests that there is a previous relationship between the parties, or at least that the suzerain, the giver of the covenant, we might say, although later on we're gonna challenge that a bit it. But the suzerain has proven themselves as powerful, mighty, able to protect. They are a national heritage with a lot of honor.

[00:01:50] Now, in these covenant treaties, we've been talking about stipulations and how it seems like those are arrangements that are written down in the treaty covenant, which lay out how the vassal in particular is supposed to act. And if the treaty covenant is broken, it is broken by not abiding by these stipulations. We tend to think of this as a very hard line. You have a treaty, it's like a contract. You break the contract and the contract is no longer valid.

[00:02:29] Now in this episode, we're probably not gonna be challenging that narrative too much. We're going to be taking what I call the traditional ancient Near Eastern view of treaties. And we are going to be comparing that with the biblical text and the treaties that we see in the Bible.

[00:02:49] One of our questions also is going to be whether or not we see a Late Bronze Age core to the Torah. Here's a couple of options that we have before us. Either the Torah was written by Moses entirely, which is a very common stance. Or the Torah has a Mosaic core, in which case the core of the Torah does stem from that Late Bronze Age context. But the Torah in its entirety may not stem from that time. And another option is that none of it came from the Bronze Age, or at least very little of it did.

[00:03:34] The fact that we have differences in covenant treaties between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age is gonna really help us out in dating this, at least in dating some core material.

[00:03:47] It might not help us prove that the entire thing came from the late Bronze age, but if there are elements in the covenants in the Torah that stem from the Bronze Age and that are not entirely set within the Iron Age covenant situation, then that is fairly good evidence that at minimum we have a core from the Torah that is from the Bronze Age.

[00:04:16] Okay, so that is kind of our trajectory for today. We're gonna be looking at what we talked about last week in episode 1 32. We're gonna be comparing that with what we have today. This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go back and listen to episode 1 32, but it might be helpful.

[00:04:37] Now, another thing to talk about in regards to covenant and the ancient Near East is this idea of covenant as relationship. But I want to remind you that when I say that covenant is like a relationship, I'm not talking about warm fuzzy feelings. I'm not talking even necessarily about ethics or the way that we should treat each other because an ancient Near Eastern covenant is definitely a political document. In the Bronze Age, there usually weren't any suggestions in the document of the covenant that if the vassal broke the covenant, that the suzerain would come and take them down militarily.

[00:05:23] The consequences in a Bronze Age covenant were left up to the deities who witnessed the covenant, but nonetheless even though I say it's not ethical, there is this suggestion that the gods are going to oversee the covenant and it should be done in righteousness and the covenant should be conducted in a righteous way with justice, and the gods are going to oversee that.

[00:05:54] But also with this blend of relationship, we have hierarchy, we have loyalty, and we have ritual. And frankly, we shouldn't forget the aspect of military might in this ancient context. Even a marriage arrangement back in the day could and probably would have overtones of political context. Marriages were often conducted to create peace and relationship between people groups.

[00:06:29] Okay, let's go ahead and get into the biblical context of covenant. Even though it's not the first covenant that we see in Scripture, we're going to be primarily talking about the Sinai Covenant. And why are we doing that? Well, the reason we're doing that is because it is the archetypical covenant. This is the central covenant for the reader of the Torah.

[00:06:56] Even if we take a Mosaic authorship of the whole Torah, what we have is the people reading the text or hearing it orally or being taught about it from the context of the Sinai Covenant. So any earlier covenant or a suggestion of relationship between peoples is going to be seen in light of the Israelites current situation at the time of the Sinai Covenant.

[00:07:27] So here's our questions. Did the Sinai Covenant actually function like or look like a late Bronze Age suzerain vassal treaty? Or is it a later literary construct that mimics the form of that? Can we tell the difference? Well, I would suggest that if this writing came strictly from the Iron Age, we wouldn't see any of the earlier Late Bronze Age context.

[00:07:58] Now, of course, nobody really likes the idea of Sinai being a later narrative fiction, and personally, I don't think that's what we have. I do think we have plenty of Egyptian context and plenty of late Bronze age context in the Torah to at least at minimum say that it does have that Mosaic core.

[00:08:22] And again, I am drawing upon many different sources for my material in this episode, but I'm going to be quoting from Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary just like I did last week because it does a good job of summing up what I call the traditional ancient Near Eastern view, which they are going to align with the biblical text and show how it does or does not match up.

[00:08:47] Now to kind of foreshadow all of this, we do have the formal elements of the Late Bronze age treaties, like the the prologue, the stipulations, the blessings, the curses, the witnesses, a ratification ceremony, all in the Sinai Covenant tradition.

[00:09:09] There do seem to be some signs of creative adaptation, however. Now that doesn't mean that any of it has to originate later, but we can think of it this way: when you have an earlier text and it is being brought into a new context later on, we can have a little bit of revision to update the text to make it relevant to the people at the time.

[00:09:37] In other words, even if the Sinai account was shaped by or reshaped during the monarchy, that shaping absolutely used Late Bronze age covenant forms. And you have to think that maybe they were familiar with the ancient forms at the time, but it's not all that likely that they would do that very well and very obvious for our scholars today to understand this and to see it fully.

[00:10:10] Let me just go ahead and read this bit from Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary about this. It says, quote, " The ongoing scholarly debate concerning the relationship between the Late Bronze age suzerainity treaties and the biblical traditions depicting a covenant in Israel before the monarchy centers on one fundamental point, whether the Sinai covenant was indeed a historical reality known to the Israelite population in the pre monarchic period between 1200 and 1000 bc, or whether it was instead, nothing more than literary fabrication of the later monarchic period, an attempt to invent a fictitious past nevertheless replete with religious meaning. If the former applies, then the relationship between the Late Bronze age treaties and the Sinai covenant traditions are historically significant, and one could justifiably conclude that the Sinai covenant was conceived to be a type of suzerainity treaty establishing Yahweh as king and Israel as vassal.

[00:11:21] " If the latter applies, then any similarity between the Sinai covenant traditions and the Late Bronze age treaties is coincidental, and the real source of inspiration for the biblical idea of covenant must be sought either generally in the monarchic period, specifically at the time of the Assyrian Empire, or perhaps sometime in the post monarchic period after 5 86 bc.

[00:11:48] " Here it should be stated unequivocally that all of the various elements of the Late Bronze age suzerainity treaties in one way or another are either present or reflected in biblical traditions associated with pre monarchic Sinai covenant. But as will be noted below, these traditions also bear the marks of later creative writers who embellished and reworked the traditions from the radically different perspective of the monarchic period." End quote.

[00:12:22] Okay, so let's go ahead and dig into the text here. When we're looking at the Sinai covenant, one of the key texts we're gonna see is, of course, Exodus 20, with the 10 Commandments, otherwise known as the Decalogue. We can also look at Deuteronomy six for this context.

[00:12:44] What do we see here? First of all, we absolutely see a historical prologue, and if you think of the idea of setting this context, this is also why you have elements in the 10 Commandments such as a callback to creation. A lot of Christians want to see that as this element of historical reality, and indeed that is its purpose. The purpose is to show that Yahweh, who is the suzerain in the situation here, is a faithful and capable suzerain.

[00:13:23] Of course, when it comes to stipulations and covenant, the 10 Commandments are about as formulaic and as archetypical as you can possibly get.

[00:13:35] Here's an interesting quote from Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. It says, quote, the 10 words are not commands, nor are they couched in command IE imperative language. They are simple future indicative verbs that indicate the future action that is the expected consequence of the proceeding prologue." End quote.

[00:14:06] Okay. I know you're what you're saying here. You're like, wait a second. They're not commands? Of course they're commands! These are things that God was demanding that the people do. Well, here is where we have to step into our situation of nuance here.

[00:14:23] If you're familiar with the debate in how you even parse what the 10 words are, there's different numberings for them. And the reason for that is because well, it doesn't look like the first one is even a command, so it can't possibly be part of the 10 Commandments.

[00:14:44] So they go on later into the list and split two of them up that were combined by earlier traditions.

[00:14:51] We're so used to thinking of these as commands that it's really hard for us to kinda step back and see how they might not actually be commands, but future indicative verbs that indicate future actions. Is there a difference there? Now, some people might say that that's six of one and half a dozen of the other.

[00:15:15] But let's take a really quick look in Exodus 20.

[00:15:19] I'm just gonna start reading from Exodus 20 verse one, quote, "And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. For the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it. You shall not do any work you, your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's." End quote.

[00:17:18] Okay, so that is what we think of as the 10 Commandments. And like I said, different traditions will number these in different ways, and I'm not gonna get into that numbering today because we're trying to set this in context rather than really digging into the meat of the 10 Commandments themselves necessarily.

[00:17:39] But note the language. In English, I just read the ESV, we have, you shall not, you shall not, and so on and so forth, right?

[00:17:50] Now, I don't know if it's because so many of us today are so used to like King James Version English, even if we're not reading the King James Version, and that maybe we just kind of gloss over the shall not language.

[00:18:08] There's a difference between having a command and having a future indicative verb that indicates the future action of the people.

[00:18:18] Now, I'm not saying that this is not tied to any consequence of disobedience or anything. I'm just pointing out that there could be some grammatical constructions here that will help us to parse what a covenant is and what these stipulations, in fact, are.

[00:18:37] Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary continues by saying, quote, "The confusion continues with the interpretation of the statements themselves, which traditionally have been classified as three or four laws having to do with obligations to God from Exodus 20, verses two through eight, followed by seven or six laws of obligations to follow human beings from Exodus 20, verses 12 through 17. Although this classification is admirable in intention, it has nothing to do with ancient religious reality. All of the stipulations represent those characteristics of human behavior that constitute the definition of the will of God. They describe the highest value, the ultimate concern of the community formed by covenant. For they are the principles upon which the one God directs the historical fate of the community." End quote.

[00:19:43] Okay, so this last bit that it's said here, the principles upon which the one God directs the historical fate of the community. Are we presuming that these stipulations, if broken, will break the covenant?

[00:20:00] That's an important consideration. We're gonna take a little bit of time next week in order to get into what that is all about.

[00:20:08] We might think that the answer is obvious, but it might not be because there is a difference between a command and a law and saying, if you break this law, then the covenant, the contract, the relationship is broken, versus the idea that these are ideals and our highest values. And when you conduct yourself in this way, it shows that you are being a loyal partner.

[00:20:40] In other words, actions like these are proof that you want to be in relationship with me and that you are in fact showing that through your actions.

[00:20:52] Again, those might sound like six of one and a half a dozen of the other, but there is a very distinctive difference between those ideas.

[00:21:03] Alright, moving on to the idea of witnesses and enforcement of the covenant in the Sinai covenant. We don't have a divine pantheon. We don't have a list of gods. We do have a list of one God. As far as witnesses go, Joshua 24 22 shows that the community itself becomes the witness.

[00:21:28] That may possibly be different than the Late Bronze age treaties, although there's also the fact that when they put the treaty on public display, that might indicate that the people who are around to read that covenant are actually witnesses to the covenant as well. But that's not explicitly stated in any of the covenants, like what we have explicitly in the Bible.

[00:21:55] Joshua 24 also suggests that stone is a witness. That tends to confuse us. But when we look at, again, Late Bronze age covenants and we have gods and deities and natural forces, or what we would call natural forces and natural elements in the world as witnesses in the Late Bronze age covenants, probably because the natural world was so tied to the spiritual world, then what we see in the biblical context is not really all that strange at all. It's perfectly normal.

[00:22:35] It does seem like we have a shift from covenant enforcement that becomes, I don't wanna say less cosmic, but it becomes more communal. Instead of divine coercion, we might say we turn to social accountability.

[00:22:54] Now, part of the witness of a covenant was placing the covenant in a sacred place or on public display. Israel didn't have a temple to deposit the text of the covenant, at least at the time of Sinai, and so the tablets of the covenant were deposited in the Ark of the Covenant, which of course was to be placed within the tabernacle.

[00:23:18] We don't have a suggestion directly in the Torah about periodic public reading, but it is implied in the ritual forms that we see in Exodus 23, in Deuteronomy 27, and that continue into Old Testament times and early Judaism. For instance, we have the recitation of the Shema as a covenant renewal.

[00:23:43] We can ask if these traditions didn't come from the Late Bronze age, then we'd need to find another explanation as to why they do experience and have these motifs.

[00:23:56] Moving on to the blessings and cursings. We have Deuteronomy 28, which is heavily tilted towards cursings, where we have a 14 blessings versus 68 curses. Now, this does seem to reflect an Iron Age influence and the Assyrian treaty styles, but it's shocking that blessings are included at all because they were not included in Assyrian treaties.

[00:24:26] So even though the cursings far outweigh the blessings, it kind of makes you wonder if they may have originally been a little bit more balanced and maybe they added cursings a little bit later. But either way, the fact that we have both suggests an earlier date for this text.

[00:24:47] Now of course, with the Sinai covenant, we have a ratification ritual. We see this in several places in Exodus 19, 24 and Joshua 24. They're slightly different there, but it's the same kind of idea. We have a verbal ascent, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do. We have a blood sprinkling ritual.

[00:25:13] I talked last week about the difference between blood in covenant sacrifice and blood in purification sacrifice. When it is said that blood is not applied to people in order to purify them, and then you come to this portion of Scripture and you say, well, what about this?

[00:25:35] Well, this is covenant blood, not purification blood. This may be a place where people are in fact identified with the animal. This again is representational theology. It is not legal substitution. Because if it was legal substitution, the people would then get off the hook for whatever they did. That is not the case. This is simply a ritual enactment.

[00:26:05] Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary tells us that quote, "In time the ratification ceremony simply became a ritual form signaling membership in the ritual society. IE circumcision. " End quote.

[00:26:22] Okay, so at some other point in the future, we will talk about the connection with circumcision and blood, and a very interestingly, circumcision and baptism are connected as well, quite definitely in the New Testament.

[00:26:40] And that's gonna bring us into a whole new level of confusion because here I am saying that covenant ritual and purification ritual are not the same thing. And yet we're gonna have some conflation of the two when we get to baptism.

[00:26:57] We might already have a little bit of conflation in the time of the Passover, in fact. Not that I think the Passover act is an act of purification, but on the other hand, they do use a hissop branch to apply the blood to the doorposts. And even though we don't have a whole lot of really detailed information about hissop and its purposes, it does seem to be tied to purification.

[00:27:27] So I'm sorry to say that none of this is super clear cut, and we should be really careful that even when we say that there is covenant ceremony and purification ceremony, that doesn't mean that we can't in some forms combine the two. This does also make sense because when you're doing something like a covenant and you have sacred space, then there is some level of purification that is going to accompany that.

[00:27:57] So even though these are two streams of traditions that seem to have developed separately, in most cases, there's a crossover there, right? And so like for the Passover, for instance, the blood is applied to the doorposts. And we might think that it's applied to the doorpost because the angel who is going by is going to then see the doorposts from the outside of the house and will not enter the house, right?

[00:28:27] But the threshold of a home was also seen as a kind of liminal sacred space. So because there is some form of sacred space going on, there could be that level of purification to the blood.

[00:28:43] Covenant ritual and purification ritual might be two separate things, but they're gonna be combined when the covenant ritual is attached to sacred space, which it often would be.

[00:28:56] Now we won't get too deep into this context of the covenant enactment in Joshua 24. There is some suggestion that this narrative is a bit anachronistic. It seems to be very similar to the reform of Josiah and the Iron Age loyalty oath that was characteristic of that time. Joshua is sort of a literary prototype of Josiah, so it would make sense for the redactors to kind of change things a little bit to make that connection more clear.

[00:29:28] There's also a suggestion that the incidents at Mount Ebal and Gerezim in Deuteronomy 27 may have something to do with what's going on in Joshua, but what we have in the text right now is a very distinctive difference between what we have in Deuteronomy and what we have in Joshua, because Deuteronomy is very strongly connected to Moses.

[00:29:55] Now, I'm not saying that there wasn't a covenant ceremony at the Trans Jordan at the time of Moses, but again, when you have these different texts from the past that people are carrying along with them or have preserved through time, and then they are later on compiling them into one form and they're doing some redaction, then a little bit of this conflation might be expected. Nobody's trying to pull one over on anybody or make something up.

[00:30:29] They're using their history and they're telling their history in a way that makes sense to them at the time of compilation and bringing things together.

[00:30:40] Joshua 24 also seems to preserve an element of covenant violation. We have in Exodus and the Numbers, quite a few illustrations of procedures against violators of the covenant, right, and that was during the lifetime of Moses.

[00:30:58] But there are some really strange artifacts as well in the text. Like in Exodus 15, the people complain about the lack of food and water. They're on their way to Sinai, and Yahweh seems to have a pretty favorable disposition towards them. But in Numbers, they complain about the same exact thing as they're leaving Sinai and Yahweh punishes them.

[00:31:24] And we might ask why the change? Well, one of the obvious things that has happened in that period of time is the enactment of the Sinai covenant. So from a narrative perspective, the people going to Sinai before they have ratified the covenant, God might treat them a little bit more gently, but after that enactment, Yahweh might put down the hammer a little bit more strongly because of that.

[00:31:54] What we have in the text here is there's a status change and a relationship change at Sinai. Before when they're headed to Sinai, they're going away from Egypt. They've just been rescued. And so the frame there is a people in distress who are fleeing for their lives, right? At Sinai, things change. At this point in time, the people can be seen as being in rebellion versus just being in distress.

[00:32:27] Everything leading up to Sinai might be seen as a historical prologue to the covenant, but after that covenant is enacted and ratified, then violations of the covenant are a big deal.

[00:32:42] And you might notice, of course, that we have two sides to things and that the Sinai narrative is actually a chiasm. That's why we have similar things happen before and after, because in the narrative structure, those are leading up to that high point of the covenant.

[00:33:03] In Bronze Age Hittite texts, grumbling against the overlord was a violation of the covenant and doing anything that would result in a curse also could be seen as a violation in the Late Bronze age. These are the little details that it would be hard for a later redactor to know about and insert into the text to make sure that it looked old, even if it was written later.

[00:33:34] So that in and of itself, because of the structure of the text, makes it really an interesting point because we tend to think that maybe the structure of the text is a later development that is primarily done by the redactors, perhaps.

[00:33:53] But if the much later redactors didn't fully understand Late Bronze age covenants, and yet the text is showing us Late Bronze age covenant aspects. Then what we can say is that more than just a core of the Torah came from the Late Bronze age, and that it was actually a very significant portion of this written text.

[00:34:18] Okay, what about the idea that biblical covenant is steeped in political reality similar to another ancient Near Eastern Covenant?

[00:34:30] Well, as far as Sinai goes, I don't think that should be much of a problem, right? They were escaping from Egypt. They were being formed into a nation that was going into the land for their inheritance, and by going into that land, they were going to be in conflict with other people groups.

[00:34:53] The interesting thing it seems to me about the Sinai Covenant is that you think of it in terms of the immediate reality, right? And the people are at Sinai. The people ratify the covenant. The people are in rebellion an awful lot between the period of the covenant and the entering of the land.

[00:35:18] So that's one piece of evidence where we might want to kind of nuance what we are thinking about as far as the stipulations. The mere act of violating a stipulation does not end the covenant itself. God is seen as merciful and long suffering. And the people do get consequences when they rebel, but those consequences are really not a break of the covenant itself.

[00:35:49] Now, of course, you might think, well, the reason that the covenant is not broken is because it wasn't a covenant of works like what we have with Adam. Adam's covenant was broken because he had a covenant of works. Well, that is something that we will talk about when we get to the context of what Walton is saying in his dissertation.

[00:36:16] I think that the context of Sinai not being broken by the people time and time again is probably why covenant theologians will look at that and say, well, that's still a covenant of grace, because they didn't end the covenant just by rebelling.

[00:36:36] Well, I would put forth that we need a whole lot more information about this supposed covenant of works from Adam's day if you really want to say that that is necessarily distinctively different.

[00:36:52] Now, I didn't mention this last time, but the transition from the Late Bronze age to the early Iron Age was a very tumultuous time in history, and historians don't entirely understand why. It's a very interesting time of the world.

[00:37:12] We have empires and we have states that seem to have been abandoned or destroyed. We have economic crisis, we have demographic chaos. We seem to have a lot of chaos at the time with a lot of death, a lot of war perhaps, or disease and pestilence. The Hittite Empire was almost entirely depopulated. And we can't really say why or how exactly. Did they all die? Did they all move? What was the deal? Of course, a lot of people have theories about it, and like I said, really interesting time in history. If you wanna go read up about it.

[00:37:59] At the same time, however, Palestine and the Trans Jordan actually rose in population. So whether that was because people were moving in, it's hard to say. We have some areas that were first settled at this time. This is where we get the talk of the Philistines and the Sea Peoples and where do they come from?

[00:38:23] Part of our difficulty in this is that we tend to think of really black and white things. Like a people group can't just have come together in different groups, right? If something happened to a population, they all either died or they left or something happened and they all went somewhere else together.

[00:38:46] But that's really not a very good way to look at history. It's too simplistic. So it's very complicated time politically and geographically and with all of these dynamics. And this is where we have the entrance in the land. Very interesting time.

[00:39:08] And really, you don't have this kind of chaos happening without religious change, economic change, political change. and as much as this kind of upheaval is not pleasant, it actually can form a really good spot in order to create something better. It can also form a place where somebody who is able to get together something strong can then tyrannize people, right? This is why we have the Assyrians in the Iron Age.

[00:39:45] All of that history can help us understand how we can have a lot of different changes and formulations and identity being undertaken here. I mean, obviously I'm not trying to remove God's hand from history by any means, but when we have God acting in real history, we also have to look at the real history and what's going on there.

[00:40:14] It's very interesting when you look at the 10 Commandments, because the laws are really very much in order to create a decent community in civilized human life.

[00:40:29] One of the things we can ask about in the Sinai covenant is to what extent that actually may have changed the people as a formative thing versus the other elements in the people's lives that actually worked to change them into what we might say is better people.

[00:40:51] Because it seems like that's part of what we're supposed to have with this covenant, right? You were a certain kind of people before. Now that you're in relationship with me, God says you can be a better kind of people and here are some ways that are laid out in order to live lives together amongst yourselves in a civilized fashion.

[00:41:16] I mean, of course we have the, you shall have no other gods before me laws, which are about that, what we might call the vertical aspect of people with God, but the fact that the laws are about human interaction and human community and how we relate to one another also speaks to the fact that it's not just God looking down from the clouds and telling people what to do just because he wants to tell them what to do. Right?

[00:41:52] The covenant is for the flourishing of the population. If the people are living their lives to oppress each other, then I think we can legitimately say that that is an offense against God, but it's also just going to break society down in general.

[00:42:12] Israel didn't get kicked outta the land during the exile simply because they didn't fulfill a list of commands. They got kicked outta the land because they worshiped other gods because they were violent. Because they oppressed other people. These were the reasons why they were kicked out of the land. They lost their moral compass and just obeying the letter of the law wasn't going to fix that moral compass. Right. And I think we understand that on a certain level.

[00:42:50] So it seems to me that it becomes helpful to us to look at the 10 Commandments in this light of human flourishing and the fact that God can't dwell in our midst if we can't even live with each other.

[00:43:06] All right. I know I've got a little bit more time and we could continue to deep dive into the Sinai Covenant, but I wanted to bring in the covenant with Abraham for just a moment as well.

[00:43:18] When I'm talking about the Abrahamic Covenant, I'm primarily talking about this strange incident in Genesis 15. You know the one where Abraham falls asleep and he sees that smoking fire pot and the torch pass through the split animals.

[00:43:37] That seems to be a story that is very situated in the ancient world, and again, here we have the representation of the deity who is identifying himself with the slaughtered animals as he passes through them. This is a guarantee of the reliability of the promise.

[00:43:59] Now I propose some caution here because it would be really easy to take this incident and this story and say, oh, this is foreshadowing Jesus's death and God pouring out his wrath on Jesus.

[00:44:16] Is that actually what we have going on in that story? And it's foreshadowing what's gonna happen in the New Testament?

[00:44:26] This is why I think it is very important to disambiguate some things and to nuance them. When we're thinking only in forms of law, breaking a covenant, and this idea that if you violate the covenant and the stipulations, then you will get this death and it is entirely deserved then you will get this death. And there's just no way of getting around it.

[00:44:58] Well, it just doesn't match up with the rest of the Old Testament text because people are constantly violating the covenant. They're constantly in rebellion with Yahweh.

[00:45:12] And we might point to this as saying, this is why they don't get punished, because God will punish himself.

[00:45:22] If, on the other hand, the covenant and the stipulations are not like set in stone laws that when they're broken, you're just gonna die, the story becomes much different.

[00:45:39] And this is hard because then you come to the fact that everybody who is reading the Bible is reading the Bible with a set of preconceptions. They're reading the Bible from a particular worldview with particular ideas. Different people are going to have different foundations of knowledge and different evidence. Slightly different hermeneutics even.

[00:46:10] It is so easy for us to say that there is only one way to read scripture and only one hermeneutic. But when you get down to it, it becomes much more complex than that. Because even when you are interested in a literal, historical grammatical method and you have all three of those things going on, well, you still have to decide what's literal and what does that mean. You have to fit the historical context in. And grammatical doesn't just mean the plain reading of the text, but you also have to consider genre and the way that people in the past have treated genre. We don't like the fact that people in the past have treated genre differently than we do.

[00:47:04] When you have a covenant enactment of this sort that we have in Genesis 15, the question that I will propose to you is to wonder whether or not this is a statement of law that is going to have an expected punishment? Or is it a warning? Because those two things aren't the same thing.

[00:47:30] We have to figure in God's justice and righteousness, which isn't just about punishing wrongdoing. It's also about mercy.

[00:47:41] A really strict reading of the law can't handle mercy. It just can't.

[00:47:48] Here's another thing to suggest. We've been talking about the ancient Near Eastern context of covenant. We've talked about the Late Bronze age treaties. We've talked about the Iron Age treaties. We've talked about biblical covenant and how biblical covenant spans a divide, right? The Sinai covenant is both very, very situated in its original context, so that it's not really necessarily all that different from surrounding covenants, but the people who wrote the Bible and redacted the Bible and compiled the Bible also did things like they took the past texts and made it relevant to their time.

[00:48:37] So the fact that we have different contexts of covenant kind of means that what you have really tells us that you can't lift up what we have going on in Genesis 15 and just plop it wholesale into the New Testament.

[00:48:54] That's not how any of this works. I know that's hard because we want the biblical text to mean the same thing through time and it simply doesn't because different people at different times had different contexts. And so what we have going on in places like Genesis 15, it might be a foreshadowing, it might be an allegory, it might be some sort of prophecy, even. It might be a law.

[00:49:27] Or it might just be part of the patterned understanding of Scripture. And a patterned understanding of Scripture doesn't mean that you pick up Moses from the text and you pick up Jesus and you mash them together as if they are the exact same thing. Nobody actually does that, right?

[00:49:50] The fact that you have foreshadowings and you have allegory, and you have a patterned aspect in Scripture, well, the patterns that you have in Scripture are not like a cookie cutter, right? It's not like you roll out the sugar cookies of Scripture and you take your cookie cutter and you make all of these cookies that are the exact same thing. That's not the kind of pattern we're about.

[00:50:20] The pattern of Scripture is not one where you have a length of fabric and each section is patterned exactly the same.

[00:50:30] It would maybe be a little bit easier to read and understand Scripture if that was the case, but it's not. Now you might have a modern covenant theologian who will come along and say, well, of course they're not the exact same. In covenant theology, the administration of different covenants are different, so it's like you have the same cookie cutter, but it's different every time you put it down, but it's functionally the same.

[00:51:05] A different way of looking at patterning in Scripture, however, is that, this is why I love biblical theology. At least certain strands of biblical theology will take these trends and patterns and types in Scripture, and it will allow each moment to be its own moment. Those moments all build up to a end time with Jesus and with the church and with the eschaton, but instead of a complete pattern of the cookie cutter that comes to one section and then slightly changes to another section, it's really the different pieces of things that can be brought forth and understood, right?

[00:51:55] Well, and here's another problem with the idea of Genesis 15, being a foreshadowing of God pouring out his wrath. Was that only happening to the Abrahamic people? Because there were a whole lot of other people in the world other than Abraham and his family. We don't see this kind of thing going on with Noah, who was another head of humanity, right?

[00:52:25] So is God's wrath only poured out on Jesus because of the people of Abraham and what's going on with everybody else who's not part of that family?

[00:52:38] You see, it's just too easy for things to break down when you want to pick something up, whole cloth and plop it down somewhere else.

[00:52:49] At any rate, let's go ahead and land the plane here in this episode with a brief mention of the idea of covenant as a reality that creates community by this top down approach, right? For instance, in a top down approach, you have Moses coming down from the mountain. He gives the people the laws and he says, this is what you guys better do in order to be in relationship with God.

[00:53:22] Is that what we have going on with Sinai? Well, it does seem like a covenant enactment ceremony changes things. There's something real that happens there. There's a formal ritual demarcation of the people before and after.

[00:53:43] But how far do we go with that? Because the people were rescued from Egypt prior to Sinai. They were in relationship with God in great form, up to the point of Sinai. It seems like perhaps there's an increase of responsibility. I don't know. There is a change here, but it's not the only change is my point. And there is definitely this relationship and this expectation of God with the people well before Sinai, in fact, well before they were oppressed in Egypt.

[00:54:27] And note also that with the covenant of Abraham, that came in Genesis 15, but Abraham was called out to be in relationship with God chapters before that.

[00:54:39] So it's just like when you start picking all these pieces apart, and what is my point in all of this? Well, my point is that systematizing the text is hard and maybe impossible, at least to the point that we often want to do it.

[00:55:01] When instead you look at the patterns and the themes and each individual's story and aspect, being able to stand on its own and still speak to that larger reality, that seems to be a thing that we actually can do with the text itself. That's very different.

[00:55:23] And look, I get it. When you see the patterns of covenant and you really wanna understand how they relate to one another, then it's really hard to allow each instance to stand on its own within the structure, but also see these patterns throughout. I get it. That's hard. You want some firm explanations, but unfortunately we don't always have firm explanations.

[00:55:54] But studying the patterns, studying the themes, studying the meaning itself in each individual context, absolutely will build a wider picture that leads to Jesus, that shows us what the church is and what the church is supposed to do, and what our hope is in the eschaton.

[00:56:18] It's not like we have to give up any of that when we're looking at things from a biblical theology perspective. It is more difficult to do though. It takes a little bit more study.

[00:56:32] But even when I say that, I'm not saying that you can't just pick up a piece and look at it and understand what's going on, because I don't think it's that complicated. The covenants that we see with Abraham, the covenant we see at Sinai, the covenant we see with David, the new covenant in Jesus are all similar enough that it's not like you don't get the point when you see it.

[00:57:01] Again, like I said, the patterned reality is not a stamp, but it is a structure. And that's why looking at things like covenant is so very helpful to us in understanding who God is and who we are in relation to him.

[00:57:22] Alright, if you guys have any questions about what I've been talking about, even if you have a question and it is like weeks or months after this episode has dropped, You can come and ask me. I wouldn't even mind revisiting things.

[00:57:37] I love the dialogue and I love the ideas that you guys have. So please come and converse with me about this if you have anything to say.

[00:57:48] We will be pressing deeper into the idea of covenant. I will finally be addressing J Harvey Walton's dissertation and some of the things he said in it. We'll be getting into things like circumcision, purification rites, and all of that will lead up to baptism and why the flood is a type of baptism .

[00:58:14] At any rate, I hope that you guys enjoyed this episode, and very soon I will be dropping some really exciting news that I am thrilled to share with you and that I hope you will be excited about too.

[00:58:31] I've got a new venture in mind that I really hope you guys are going to join me on and be excited about. Just like I'm excited about. It is about community. It is about relationship, so this is very timely and you should hear more in the future. Please be sure to sign up for my newsletter if you haven't. If you go to my website at genesis marks the spot.com, you'll see a little box there that has you put your name in, and has you put your email address in. And the only thing I'll use that for is emailing you newsletters. You'll get my blog posts, and you'll find out about all of the things I've got going on. At any rate, that is it for today. And a really big shout out to my supporters. Your help is a foundational aspect to this new thing that I'm trying to pursue that I think is going to be great and really helpful to people. So a deep, deep thank you to all of you. Thank you all for listening. I wish you a blessed week and we will see you later.