Iii. The Idea Of Covenant In Judaism
c. Actual covenants
Before beginning our discussion of actual covenants recorded in the Old Testament we should notice that in recent years light has been shed on the concept of covenant by the discovery that there was a widely used pattern in covenants in the ancient Near East.135 The records that survive are mostly Hittite, but there seems no reasonable doubt but that the form was widespread. Especially valuable are the suzerainty treaties imposed by the great king on his vassals, for in these the terms are dictated by the superior authority. The inferior simply accepts them and agrees to perform the obligations imposed upon him. The resemblances to Yahweh’s covenant with Israel are plain. The Hittite records show that the form was widespread and they also shed light on some aspects of the covenant. But there is an important difference in that, in the covenant in the Bible, Yahweh is not simply a witness and guarantor of the covenant as are the gods in the Hittite documents. He is a party to it. He actually enters into covenant relation with His people.
When we examine the references to covenant in the Old Testament then we are dealing with a widely used and well understood concept. It was used of agreements between men as well as of those between God and men. It will perhaps be more logical to begin with the former.
(i) Covenants between men. Most covenants of this kind are between representative persons, such as heads of clans, or rulers, there being, in the opinion of Quell,136 only one covenant between purely private people in the whole Old Testament, namely that between David and Jonathan. This was a compact arising out of the mutual love of the pair, and its terms are not given, though David could say: ‘Therefore deal kindly with thy servant; for thou hast brought thy servant into a covenant of the Lord with thee’ (I Sa. 20: 8). Evidently it gave each of them at least a general claim on the other. Of the manner of making this covenant we know little; the only information being that, when the covenant was made, Jonathan gave David presents of his apparel and weapons (I Sa. 18: 4), a procedure which seems to have been widely observed in similar rites in other lands. That a religious element was involved, however, is evident from David’s statement, quoted above, that it was ‘a covenant of the Lord’.
This religious element is a prominent feature in other covenants, for example in that between Jacob and Laban (Gn. 31 : 44f.). Jacob is explicitly said to have sworn an oath, ‘by the Fear of his father Isaac’. There is also a sacrifice and a meal shared by the covenant brothers, evidently the sacrificial meal accompanying the peace offering. In this case the terms of the agreement are recorded, as is the fact that a heap of stones was set up as a witness to the covenant. The witness in the covenant between Abraham and Abimelech is a group of seven ewe lambs (Gn. 21 : 30, and cf. the reference to the tamarisk tree in verse 33). In the narrative of the making of this covenant the oath figures largely, though there is no mention of sacrifice or sacrificial meal. The omission, however, need not surprise us for, in fact, there are few if any places where we have the full ritual of covenant-making described. It is of interest in this connection that there is no mention of the dividing of the animals in pieces between the time of Abraham and that of Jeremiah, though we must hold that it continued throughout all those centuries. The men of antiquity knew quite well how a covenant was ‘cut’, and they did not write down unnecessary details.
Putting together the hints that we obtain from the various occasions on which human covenants are referred to we find that the following were important points in the making of a covenant: (I) The drawing up of terms of agreement. (2) The oath to keep the agreement. (3) The ritual slaughter of animals, including both the animal or animals to be divided and those to be offered up in sacrifice and consumed in the meal of fellowship. In addition there may have been other practices considered essential, such as the provision of witnesses in a heap of stones, a group of lambs, or a tree, each of which we have seen serving such a purpose.
(ii) Covenants between God and men. The use of the term ‘covenant’ to describe the relationship existing between God and men goes back to the story of the flood in which we read the word of the Lord to Noah: ‘But I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee’ (Gn. 6: 18). Not only is the initiative with God, the whole ‘covenant’ is His. Noah is not represented as doing anything in the matter, either by way of seeking a covenant, or of performing covenant obligations. Nothing is said here, or in subsequent passages which refer to this covenant, of the method whereby the covenant was established. There is, therefore, little we can say about the procedure of covenant-making adopted. But we may notice that the covenant was made with Noah as a representative man rather than as an individual (Gn. 9: 9, 10), that the terms were stated in the form of a promise (Gn. 9:11), and that there was a witness or sign that the covenant would be kept, namely the rainbow (Gn. 9: 12-16). An important point is that the covenant was one of grace. The Lord freely bestowed His blessing on His servant. He did not grant it as a return for services rendered.
The next covenant referred to is that with Abraham. In response to the patriarch’s query as to how he should know that he would subsequently (in his seed) inherit the land of Canaan, Yahweh commanded him to take certain animals and divide them in two, after which, ‘when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him’ (Gn. 15: 12). The divine promise was then renewed to him, and ‘when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a flaming torch that passed between these pieces’ (Gn. 15: 17). There are some interesting features of this process of covenant-making, the outstanding one being that again we see Yahweh as taking on Himself all the obligations. He alone symbolically passes through the pieces, probably because Abram was not taking upon himself any obligation. The patriarch was the recipient of a boon, or a promise, rather than a partner contracting to perform certain duties. Again, as in the case of the covenant with Noah, the covenant is with a representative man (Abraham’s ‘seed’ are expressly mentioned), and the terms of the covenant are given in the form of the promise. On this occasion, however, there is nothing we can regard as a witness unless the smoking furnace and the flaming torch can be said to fulfil this requirement, which seems unlikely. Rather they symbolize the divine presence.
Later on we do find certain duties assigned to Abraham and linked to the covenant. ‘This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; every male among you shall be circumcised ... and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant’ (Gn. 17: 10-14). However, this hardly interferes with the principles of grace and of the divine initiative, for on the one hand circumcision is rather a sign, a seal, a badge of the covenant than a contractual obligation, and on the other it is a duty imposed by Yahweh and not assented to in free negotiation by Abraham. The absolute sovereignty of the divine will is apparent throughout the whole of this covenant.
From many such references in the Bible to covenants with Yahweh we must notice a third. In Exodus 24 we read of a covenant made, not with representative individuals, but with the whole people of Israel. Again the initiative is with Yahweh who called Moses and others to Him to the mount, Moses being assigned a position of privilege (see verse 2). Before they went, Moses told the people ‘all the words of the Lord, and all the judgements’, to which they responded: ‘All the words which the Lord hath spoken will we do’. On a specially made altar burnt and peace offerings were offered up, and this not by priests, but by ‘young men of the children of Israel’. The blood was collected and divided into two portions, one of which Moses proceeded to throw on the altar. Then he read from ‘the book of the covenant’, and again the people agreed to obey the Lord: ‘All that the Lord hath spoken will we do, and be obedient’. After this undertaking Moses took the other half of the blood and threw it over the people, saying, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words’. The ceremonies concluded with Moses and other representatives of the people going up into the mount where ‘they beheld God, and did eat and drink’, evidently an allusion to the sacrificial meal.
This ceremony was of the utmost importance for the later history of the people, for from this time the nation stood in a peculiar relationship to Yahweh, a relationship shared by no other.
Attention must be called to three features of this new arrangement, namely the participation of the people, the ‘blood of the covenant’, and the obligations resting upon the people. Concerning the first of these, it is important that this covenant was not made through some representative as had been the case with the earlier covenants, but with the principals themselves.137 This point is emphasized when Moses says: ‘The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The Lord made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day’ (Dt. 5: 2f.). On this verse H. H. Rowley comments: ’It is there implied that the Covenant with the patriarchs was not valid for the generation of the Exodus, but that only the Covenant into which they themselves entered could have validity and meaning for them. And by the same token their Covenant could not have automatic validity for the generations that followed.‘138 While we make no attempt to minimize the extent to which the fathers can claim the promise for their children, yet, in the last resort, there seems to be a principle of personal participation involved. No-one can live on the spiritual capital of his ancestors. As R. B. Y. Scott puts it, ‘The religious group which only carries on the momentum in belief and practice of an age which has passed away, and has not made its own the covenant of the fathers, will find that the covenant is no longer valid, and the living God has passed on to seek a new people for Himself.’139
The blood is seen by some as the means of entering into blood brotherhood, a point of view which is well expressed by Trumbull: ‘And now observe the celebration of the symbolic rite of the blood-covenant between the Lord and the Lord’s people, with the substitute blood accepted on both sides, and with the covenant record agreed upon.‘140 Or again: ‘When united Israel was to be inducted into the privileges of this covenant of blood-friendship at Mount Sinai, half of the blood came from the one party, and half of the blood came from the other party, to the sacred compact; both portions being supplied from a common and a mutually accepted symbolic substitute’.141 According to this view the blood is essentially the same as that used in the making of blood brothers. But whereas, originally at any rate, in the establishment of this bond the brothers shared each other’s blood, on Mt. Sinai a mutually acceptable substitute provided the blood for both parties (such a provision of a substitute is not unknown in other cases). This view stresses the closeness of the kinship between the two parties to the agreement, but it falls down at critical points. Thus there is nothing in the narrative to indicate that the blood was thought of by either party as a substitute for his or the other’s blood; the idea has to be imported into the story. Again, it gives rise to the concept of an equality of the partners which does not appear to be justified. M. Buber’s summary of the position is better when he says: ‘YHVH unites himself with Israel into a political, theo-political unity, “within which the two partners bear the relations towards each other of a primitive wandering community and its melek”.‘142 Throughout the chapter there is no question but that Yahweh is directing all things. It is His will that the covenant should come about, and it is established on His terms. There is no idea that the people are acting independently.
W. Robertson Smith regards the use of the blood as essentially the same as the division of the animal into two parts: ‘we see from Ex. xxiv. 8, “this is the blood of the covenant which Jehovah hath cut with you,” that the dividing of the sacrifice and the application of the blood to both parties go together. The sacrifice presumably was divided into two parts (as in Ex. l.c. the blood is divided into two parts), when both parties joined in eating it; and when it ceased to be eaten, the parties stood between the pieces, as a symbol that they were taken within the mystical life of the victim.‘143 But this does not seem to fit into the picture very accurately. There is no reason to think that the sprinkling of the blood which we see here was characteristic of Hebrew covenants; in point of fact it is mentioned nowhere else in such a connection. Again, there appears no obvious reason for equating a sprinkling of blood with a division of corpses; the two actions seem distinct. And as we have already seen, the thought of being taken ‘within the mystical life of the victim’ is not one which we can readily credit to the typical Hebrew of antiquity. Moreover, in regarding this incident as a typical example of the blood covenant, Robertson Smith seems to miss the fact that this is a unique rite. To quote Buber again, this rite, ‘though reminiscent of the Semitic custom of Blood Covenant, is nevertheless unique in character’.144
Others regard the rite as, in a measure at least, piacular. Thus Davidson cites Robertson Smith for the view that both parties have communion in the same blood, and comments: ‘This may be; but in the main the sacrifice, being an offering to J”, was piacular, atoning for and consecrating the people on their entering upon their new relation to J”.‘145 This would be supported by the general piacular character of the sacrifices.146 It has Jewish support, for G. Dalman remarks: ‘Onkelos and Targum Yer. I remark also that the second half of the blood was poured out towards the altar, “in order to propitiate the people”. They think thus of a propitiation of the blood.‘147 There is inherent probability in the suggestion, too, for men in their sinful state would not be suitable candidates for membership in a covenant with God, and the removal of sin by an atoning offering seems a logical step. The difficulty in the way of a full acceptance of this point of view is the treatment of the blood. Part is sprinkled on the people, which is very difficult to explain in an atoning sacrifice.
The clue to this sprinkling seems to be given in the only two other incidents in the Old Testament wherein men are sprinkled with blood, namely, the consecration of Aaron and his sons to the priesthood, and the purification of a man healed of leprosy. In the former case we have an explicit statement of the effect of the sprinkling: ‘And Moses took of the anointing oil, and of the blood which was upon the altar, and sprinkled it upon Aaron, upon his garments, and upon his sons, and upon his sons’ garments with him; and sanctified (wayeqaddēsh) Aaron’ (Lv. 8: 30). Here the blood is a part of a consecratory rite and the effect is to ‘sanctify’ those sprinkled. In the case of the healed leper we read that the priest is to take hyssop, etc., and he ‘shall dip them ... in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water: and he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times, and shall pronounce him clean’ (Lv. 14: 6, 7). The sprinkling of the blood clearly had a purifying effect, for it was immediately followed by the priest’s pronouncing the man clean. It is true that the cleansing here is from uncleanness rather than from sin, but in view of the close connection between the two in the Old Testament the use of the blood for such a purpose must be held to be significant.
From these two incidents, then, we get the principle that the sprinkling of blood is likely to signify the entry into a new state marked by cleansing from previous defilement and consecration to a holy purpose. Both these thoughts are probably present in Exodus 24. We should regard the blood as both piacular and consecratory. It cleanses the people from their sin and it sanctifies them for their part in the covenant. As F. J. A. Hort puts it: ‘the primary purpose of the sprinkling was to consecrate the covenant between Jehovah and the people, the invisible bond between them being indicated by the community of origin of the blood on the altar, as representing Jehovah, and the blood on the persons of the people ... the sprinkling of the people with this blood was regarded as a consecration and symbolic purification of themselves.‘148 W. Eichrodt notices these two passages concerning Aaron and the healed leper, but, strangely enough, dismisses them since there the blood sprinkling ‘has quite another meaning, namely that of consecration and cleansing’.149 It is curious that he does not notice that it is precisely these ideas of consecration and purification that make the passages relevant.
In passing we note that Psalm 50: 5 witnesses to the close connection between sacrifice and covenant with its ‘Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice (zābhaḥ)’, whether we are to understand this as referring to such an event as the establishing of the Sinai covenant,150 or whether it signifies that every sacrifice could be regarded as confirming the covenant.151 The ‘blood of the covenant’ is also referred to in Zechariah 9: 11, but the passage gives no indication as to the manner in which the blood was regarded and the significance that was attached to it. 152
The people’s promise of obedience next claims our attention, for, as we have seen, there is nothing like it in the earlier covenants. 153 The covenants made with Noah and with Abraham were covenants of sheer grace, with the promise of divine blessing upon the patriarchs and their seed but with no mention of corresponding obligations as resting upon them. At first sight it appears that in the Sinai covenant the principle of grace has been abandoned, and that it is now necessary for the people to earn the divine blessing. Merit, not grace, seems to be the criterion, all the more so since the passage speaks of the people’s obedience to Yahweh, but says nothing of any promise on His part. This last point, however, cannot be held to be significant, for in other places we have made explicit what is implicit in Exodus 24, namely, that Yahweh will be Israel’s God, and that He will give them His blessing (e.g. Ex. 19: 5, 6; Lv. 26: 9-12).
The place of the duties which devolved upon the people in the covenant should not be misunderstood. They do not represent concessions freely made, and which might have been withheld. It is clear that this whole process of covenant-making is regarded as taking place under divine direction. It is not a compact freely negotiated by independent parties with the people determining just how far they intend to go. Their part is unconditional surrender to whatever might be the will of God, their absolute Ruler.154 As G. Vos puts it: ‘Notwithstanding all the emphasis placed upon the two-sidedness of the Berith, Scripture always so represents it that the Berith in its origin and in the determination of its content is not two-sided but based on the sovereignty of God.‘155 There is nothing in Exodus 24 to indicate that the reason for God’s choice of the people was their agreement to carry out His commands. Rather God in His free grace chose Israel to be His people, and having chosen them, imposed upon them His commands. But the choice is first and fundamental and in it we detect the element of grace. 156
The difference between this process and the conclusion of a bargain is readily seen if we compare a passage such as the one in which Jacob says: ‘If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God ... and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee’ (Gn. 28 : 20f.). Here we do find a process involving bargaining as its essence. Jacob’s attitude is, ‘If Thou wilt do these things for me, then will I do those things for Thee’. But the thought of Exodus 24 is different. There Yahweh has already been gracious to the people in delivering them from the power of Egypt: ‘ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself’ (Ex. 19: 4). The action of the nation is that of those who respond: ‘Thou, Lord, hast been gracious unto us. We acknowledge Thy goodness, and we pledge ourselves to be Thine, and to do Thy will.’
A. M. Stibbs has an interesting passage in which he compares the making of this covenant to a wedding: ‘In the wilderness at Sinai the Lord confronted Israel with His purpose for them and with His demand for their co-operating response. He said, “I .. brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people; ... and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation.” And all the people answered together and said, “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do”. This scene of covenant making was very similar to a wedding ceremony, and the more so when later the covenant between God and Israel was visibly sealed in sprinkled blood; just as in the wedding ceremony the ring given and received is “a token and pledge of the vow and covenant betwixt them made.” Like the bride answering, the Israelites solemnly said, “We will”.’157 The covenant does not represent the people’s endeavour to earn God’s favour by performing meritorious works. Rather it is the people’s acceptance of God’s proffered grace, with all that that implies.
The implications are not unimportant. The Israelites were now the people of God, and they must henceforth live up to the obligations inherent in this proud title. The position is well summed up in the words: ‘Keep silence, and hearken, O Israel; this day thou art become the people of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt therefore obey the voice of the Lord thy God, and do his commandments and his statutes’ (Dt. 27: gf.). They were not chosen merely in order that they might be the recipients of His blessings, but that they might do Him service. They were to be ‘a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation’ (Ex. 19: 6). Spiritual privilege and spiritual obligation are inextricably interwoven, so that those who refuse to obey the commandments of God place themselves outside the sphere of His blessing.
There is nothing automatic about the covenant, nothing which binds Yahweh to bless the nation henceforth irrespective of what they might do. It has often been pointed out that, among the other nations nearby, the concept of a physical kinship of the god with his people meant that the god rose or fell with his people, so that, in the last resort, he was bound to save them if he was to save himself, and that the concept of covenant delivered Israel from this error. If He chose them, He could also reject them; and the making of the keeping of His commandments integral to the covenant meant that He was insisting upon a certain way of life if the people were to receive His blessing. The keeping of the commandments of the Lord is thus not thought of as a peripheral thing (cf. Je. II: 1ff.), but as of the very warp and woof of the whole covenant conception. Failure to walk in God’s ways means the complete overthrow of the covenant, so that it may fittingly be described in terms of works, though this must not be understood in such a way as to overlook the element of grace which we have seen is so marked a feature.
Thus we reach something of a paradoxical conclusion. The covenant is of the free grace of God, but nevertheless, having chosen the people, God imposed upon them ethical demands, and these can be spoken of as the people’s part in the covenant without thereby derogating from the freeness of God’s grace. Over and over again we have the choice of the people explicitly said to be due to the love of God and not to anything in them, thus placing an emphasis on the unconditioned love of God. But without any apparent sense of contradiction we have passages in which it is said that the people have broken the convenant and thereby have drawn down upon them the wrath and the punishment of God. Both aspects are important for an understanding of Old Testament teaching.
It is not too much to say that the covenant conception came to dominate Israel’s thought about her relationship to God. She was Yahweh’s people; He was Israel’s God. And through the centuries the people have clung almost fiercely to this central teaching. Not that in Old Testament times this gave grounds for appealing to Yahweh for assistance in time of need. Very occasionally the covenant relationship was pleaded, but this is exceptional, probably because of the very obvious fact that Israel had not kept her part of the covenant obligation. Accordingly she could not very well insist that the covenant gave her grounds for a claim. Rather the tendency is for her to plead the nature of God Himself, and thus we come upon pleas that He will help of His great mercy, for His Name’s sake, etc.
But if Israel had no reason to feel that she had done her part in the covenant, she was sure, or at least her most spiritual minds were sure, that Yahweh had certainly kept His. ‘If we are faithless, he abideth faithful; for he cannot deny himself (2 Tim. 2 : 13) is a New Testament saying; but it represents an Old Testament thought. Thus Snaith speaks of ‘God’s sure love for Israel’, and goes on: ‘Because of this sure, unswerving love, the Covenant can never be finally and completely broken. It takes two to make a covenant, and it also takes two to break it. Israel may have rejected God, but God has not rejected Israel.’158He is a covenant-keeping God, and His unwavering love to faithless Israel is one of the great Old Testament conceptions.
This thought of a God who is faithful to the covenant, even though the people are not, should not, however, be so interpreted as to give the impression that Yahweh is indifferent to Israel’s moral state. It is characteristic of the Old Testament point of view that Yahweh never for one moment relaxes His high ethical demands. This for ever stamps the religion of Israel as something quite different from other religions of antiquity. It is not that Israel alone has the thought of covenant, for there is evidence that in other religions this conception found its place. We get a hint of this in the mention of Baal-berith (Jdg. 8: 33, etc.), and Quell cites a number of religions in antiquity where the covenant idea finds a place.159 But what gave the religion of Israel its peculiar quality is the fact that the ethical demands which Yahweh made upon His people were both stringent and rigidly insisted upon. There is no hint of toning them down when it became apparent that the people would not be able to measure up to them.
It is true that the Old Testament envisages a replacement of the covenant by a new covenant, a thought which receives its classical expression in Jeremiah 31:31ff (and is also found in other parts of the Old Testament). It is here said that the new covenant will be ‘not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord’. In its ethical demands, however, the new covenant was to be no less stringent than the old, for ‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it’. As the sequel was to show, the new covenant would in some ways be radically new, but in its ethical content there is no whittling down of the divine requirements. Throughout the Old Testament the covenant idea is one which demands from the people a strenuous morality.
It remains to notice that there are some Scriptures which look forward to an association of a Person with the covenant, which must be the new covenant. Thus we read concerning the Servant, ‘I the Lord ... will ... give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles’ (Is. 42: 6; the thought is repeated in 49: 8). T. K. Cheyne says: ‘ “A covenant of the people” means “the medium or mediator of a covenant between Jehovah and Israel.” As the Servant is called “a light” in person, so he can be called “a covenant” in person.’160 So also there is a reference to the ‘messenger of the covenant’ (Mal. 3:1). There is also a passage in Zechariah where in place of ‘As for thee also, because of the blood of thy covenant I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit’, etc., the LXX reads, 
αὶ 
ὺ ἐν αἴματι δ
αθήης oυ
ἐξαπέτελας δεμίoυς oυ ἐ λάoυ τλ, ‘and thou, in the blood of thy covenant, didst send forth thy prisoners out of the pit’, etc. The thought thus vaguely intimated in the Old Testament was to have a very full place in the New Testament reinterpretation of the covenant idea.
αὶ ὺ ἐν αἴματι δαθήης oυ ἐξαπέτελας δεμίoυς oυ ἐ λάoυ τλ, ‘and thou, in the blood of thy covenant, didst send forth thy prisoners out of the pit’, etc. The thought thus vaguely intimated in the Old Testament was to have a very full place in the New Testament reinterpretation of the covenant idea.III. THE IDEA OF COVENANT IN JUDAISM
The Rabbinic references to covenant are such as to shed light on the Old and New Testament conceptions at a number of points. We deal with the more important of these in order.
a. The blood of the covenant
The Rabbis sometimes take up the Old Testament thought that the blood of the covenant is piacular. Strack-Billerbeck bring this out by drawing attention to the Targums: ‘In order to emphasize the atoning power of the blood Targ. Onk. does not translate “Moses sprinkled the blood on the people”, but “Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the altar to make atonement for the people, and he said: See, this is blood of the covenant which Jahve has concluded with you on the basis of all these words”. Targ. Jerus. I is almost word for word the same.’161 This is, of course, later than the Christian era, but it is interesting as showing the accepted line of Jewish interpretation. However, in other places this thought does not seem to be prominent, and, for example, it is not mentioned in a long section in Leviticus Rabbah dealing with the blood at Sinai. An interesting interpretation given in this passage suggests that the significance of the blood is a symbolical calling down of punishment if the covenant were broken: ‘R. Isaac said: When a king administers an oath to his legions, he does so with a sword, the implication being: Whoever transgresses these conditions, let the sword pass over his neck. Similarly (at Sinai), Moses took half of the blood.’162
The blood of the covenant was sometimes interpreted in a quite different fashion, namely of the blood of circumcision whereby men were admitted into the covenant. Thus the Talmud reports a discussion between the rival schools of Shammai and Hillel: ‘Beth Shammai maintain: One must cause a few drops of the covenant blood to flow from him (i.e. that is born circumcised), while Beth Hillel rule: It is unnecessary. R. Simeon b. Eleazar said: Beth Shammai and Beth Hillel did not differ concerning him who is born circumcised that you must cause a few drops of the covenant blood to flow from him.‘163 Of this manner of interpretation Strack-Billerbeck say: ‘One commonly understands by “blood of the covenant” dm bryth, the circumcision blood.‘164 Not far removed in thought from this is the habit of referring to the ‘covenant of circumcision’165 and perhaps also of designating the Israelites as ‘sons of the covenant’,166 although this latter usage may well be explained otherwise.
b. The new covenant
In the New Testament the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah is enthusiastically applied to the new conditions brought about by the death of Christ, but there seems little interest in the conception in the Rabbinic writings. One passage in the Midrash on the Song of Solomon says that the Israelites learnt from God and did not forget, then they learnt through Moses and forgot, so they came to Moses and said ‘ “Our master, Moses, would that God might be revealed to us a second time ! Would that He would kiss us WITH THE KISSES OF HIS LIPS ! Would that He would fix the knowledge of the Torah in our hearts as it was!” He replied to them: “This cannot be now, but it will be in the days to come,” as it says, I will put My law in their inward parts and in their heart will I write it’.167 This passage evidently refers the new covenant to the messianic days in the indefinite future, which seems to be the usual way in which the Rabbis understood the fulfilment of this prophecy. There is an interesting passage which affirms the permanency of the covenant with Abraham, and is evidently a polemic against the Christian view.168 While this passage is late, it nevertheless indicates the typical Rabbinic interest in the first covenant, and unreadiness to pay much attention to the new covenant.
c. The covenant with Abraham
The passage just referred to stresses the permanence of the agreement between God and Abraham, and contains God’s assurance that He will see to it that this covenant is not superseded. This continuance of the Abrahamic covenant is seen also in most of the passages referring to the ‘sons of the covenant’ referred to above, as also to the ‘covenant of circumcision’. The unique place given to Abraham comes out in many places, for example: ‘Five possessions did the Holy One, blessed is He, take to Himself in His world; and these are they: the Law is one possession, and the heaven and earth are one possession, Abraham is one possession, Israel is one possession, and the Temple is one possession.‘169 There can be no doubt that, just as the Christians thought of Abraham as showing the right method of approach to God, and of the covenant with Abraham as being of continuing force, so also did the Rabbis, although they interpreted both these points differently.