How to Study the Bible: “Covenant” Defined; Adam; Noah

“Covenant” defined

First, we need to cover generally the Bible’s history of covenants. These don’t line up quite with the old Scofield Bible dispensations, but that’ll be okay. It’ll be a little unfamiliar, but it will make so much more sense when we’re done.

Relying on John Walton’s work (and the work of many other theologians), we begin with the Creation as God’s creation of a cosmic temple in which he rests, in which Adam and Eve serve both as the images of God and as priests.

Now, when we speak of “covenants,” we should not confuse an Ancient Near East (ANE) covenant with a modern-day contract. Contracts are negotiated. Both parties must agree. But in the ANE, covenants were often imposed by someone in a position of greater power on a person of lesser power. Thus, when Egypt was the supreme power in the region, it made treaties — a form of covenant — with nearby nations simply by declaring what their relationship must be. The lesser power might be resentful or might be grateful, but it had no real choice in the matter. Egypt had a better army with better chariots.

When God makes a covenant, it’s not a bargain, a contract, or a negotiated deal. Rather, it’s a unilateral decision by God — but nonetheless a decision by which God is absolutely bound. This idea is foreign to modern law, but it’s how the ANE operated. The higher power was free to make up the rules, but once made, the higher power was bound by honor to honor the covenant it made.

In the OT, the Hebrew word translated “covenant” is berit. The term probably derives from the verb bara, “to bind.” The noun berit originally denoted a binding relationship between two parties in which each pledged to perform some service for the other. The NT, following the Septuagint, uniformly uses the Greek word diatheke for the covenant idea, avoiding the similar term suntheke, which would wrongly portray a covenant as a mutual contract or alliance rather than an oath-bound promise. This does not mean that a covenant may not, in some cases, take on characteristics common to a mutual agreement or contract, but the essence of the covenant concept is clearly that of a binding pledge.

Steven B. Cowan, Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 2003, 355.

Now, when God makes a covenant, it’s no imposition. It’s always an act of grace. God always covenants by giving of himself to someone or to a group of people more than they deserve, more than is fair. It’s always chesed — faithful, loving kindness. In fact, for the scriptures to refer to God as having chesed is to credit God with being faithful to his promises, to continue to love Israel despite her transgressions and to be faithful even when Israel is not.

But “faithful” doesn’t mean “enabling covenant violations.” Covenants often have negative terms. The Law of Moses lays out clearly the penalties for Israel’s violations. When God sends Israel into exile for their idolatry, he is being faithful to the covenant. He’s keeping his promises — negative promises though they are.

Now, quite obviously, a covenant is not quite the same thing as Scofield’s dispensations because covenants aren’t easily repealed. They don’t just go away when one party decides he wants a new one. Rather, they compound. Make a second covenant and now you have two covenants, not a repealed covenant and a new replacement covenant. But the new covenant can moot or fulfill the previous covenant, as we considered in the last post of this series regarding the Law of Moses.

Adam

So the Bible begins in covenant —

The biblical covenant that appears first is the Edenic covenant or covenant of works which God made with Adam in the garden of Eden (Gen. 2:15–17). Hosea 6:6–7 states plainly that this arrangement was a covenant. God promised man in his state of innocence that he would give him everlasting life on the condition of his perfect obedience. Obedience would be measured by whether he kept God’s command to refrain from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, thus breaking this covenant and falling under its terrible curse: “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

It is important to note that the covenant of works provided no method of restoration. Since it demanded perfection, this covenant, once broken, left Adam and his posterity without hope. It is in this context that we find the inauguration of another covenant, the covenant of grace. After the fall, God cursed the serpent and promised the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head, though his own heel would be bruised (Gen. 3:15). This promise was an unconditional guarantee that God would graciously rescue fallen man from the curse of the covenant of works.

The NT makes clear that the “seed of the woman” who fulfills this promise is Christ (Gal. 3:19; Col. 2:13–15; 1 John 3:8). The covenant of Grace, then, is God’s promise to save sinful humanity from the fall’s curse by grace alone through the redemptive work of Christ. This redemptive work is foreshadowed even in Gen. 3 where God apparently slays an animal to provide coverings for Adam and Eve’s nakedness (v. 21).

Steven B. Cowan, Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 2003, 356.

Noah

The next covenant was made by God immediately after the Flood.

The covenant was elaborated only after the flood, when Noah had made an offering to God (Gn 8:20–22). The covenant with Noah was in fact a universal covenant with humankind and all living creatures (Gn 9:8–10). God promised never to send such a flood again as judgment on the world. The sign of that covenant was the rainbow.

The covenant with Noah affords some perspective for understanding the “covenant God.” Although human beings may deserve destruction because of their wickedness, God withholds that destruction. The covenant of Noah did not establish an intimate relationship between God and each living being; nevertheless, it left open the possibility of a more intimate covenant. Human beings, in spite of their evil, are allowed for a time to live in God’s world; during those years they may seek a deeper relationship with that world’s Creator.

In the Jewish tradition the “Laws of Noah” were understood from the time of the ancient rabbis to be laws binding on all peoples. To the reverence for human life demanded in Genesis 9:5, 6 the rabbis added such matters as prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, and theft. They affirmed those prohibitions to be universally binding, reflecting the theme of justice that was central to the covenant with Noah. The flood which preceded the covenant was an act of divine justice; God judged a sinful world.

Yet God’s grace balanced his justice; God made a covenant with Noah for all humankind. The demand for justice, particularly with respect to life, was expressed clearly at the heart of the covenant: “For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning” (Gn 9:5). Justice is essentially the negative aspect of the moral law regulating the lives of human beings with each other and with God. Justice is corrective rather than creative. On the other side of the covenant “coin” from justice is righteousness. That quality was first articulated in God’s covenant with Abraham.

Walter A. Elwell and Barry J. Beitzel, Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, 1988, 532.

Up to this point, God’s covenants set standards for human behavior, but no relationship with God was formed, and no redemptive work was in process. More importantly, God was not yet revealing his nature through his covenants. Rather, in the narratives of Noah, the Tower of Babel, and Cain and Abel, we see a world instructed by God but without God’s redemption, and it’s a mess.

We started with Adam and Eve representing God as his very image, priests in his temple, the Creation itself. We end with Noah drunk and naked, the citizens of Babel building a ziggurat in hopes that God would descend to earth to be with his people (treating YHWH as a pagan god who must be induced by a great human work to care about humans), and Cain hiding from avengers of Abel’s blood.

God is nonetheless gracious. Cain doesn’t die for his murder. God protects him. The world isn’t destroyed for its sin — not entirely. Rather, because of man’s sin, man becomes divided by language, scattered across the globe, and soon man has nearly forgotten God altogether. But God hasn’t forgotten his earlier promises.

But with Abram of Ur of the Chaldees, everything begins to change.