Covenant

What is a covenant?

A covenant is some kind agreement between two parties with terms which regulate the relationship or the exchange.

 

Are covenants important to our understanding of the Bible?

Covenants are extremely important to an accurate understanding of the Bible seeing that God uses covenants as His primary means of relating to His people. Rollock writes (p33):

Now, therefore, we are to speak of the Word, or of the Covenant of God, having first set down this ground, that all the word of God appertains to some covenant; for God speaks nothing to man without the covenant.

 

Where in the Bible do we find God relating to man by way of a covenant?

The first time we find the word covenant in the Bible is when God made a covenant with Noah:

And behold, I will bring floodwaters upon the earth to destroy every creature under the heavens that has the breath of life. Everything on the earth will perish. But I will establish My covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. (Genesis 6:17, 18)

 

Is this the first time that God made a covenant with someone?

It is not. We read that God made a covenant with Adam (Hosea 6:7) and that God the Father made a covenant with God the Son (Luke 22:29).

 

What word in the original language is used to refer to a covenant?

The Hebrew word is בְּרִית.  The usual word for covenant in Greek was suntheke συνθήκη.  When the LXX men translated the Old Testament into Greek, they chose the word diatheke or διαθηκη instead of συνθήκη.  The New Testament authors follow this practice.  Deissman claims (p341): “no one in the Mediterranean world in the first century AD would have thought of finding in the word διαθήκη the idea of covenant.”  Clearly, the LXX and the New Testament authors had some reason for going against the common word usage of their time.

 

What was this reason?

No reason is given in Scripture itself.  Ramsay explains (p358) the problem facing the LXX translators:

The Septuagint translators found themselves confronted with a difficult problem, when they had to select a Greek word to translate the Hebrew berîth. The Hebrew word, denoting primarily an agreement, private or public, among men, guaranteed and confirmed by weighty and solemn oaths on both sides, had become almost a technical term to denote the promises made, and confirmed by repetition, by God to the ancestors of the Hebrew people, especially Abraham, and, in a much less degree, Isaac and Jacob. As Professor A. B. Davidson says, it “had become a religious term in the sense of a one-sided engagement on the part of God”. This sense was peculiar and unique. Nothing like it was known to the Greeks, and therefore there was no Greek word to correspond to it. Accordingly, the translators were compelled to take some Greek word, which hitherto had denoted something else, and apply it to their purpose. The word selected must necessarily be encumbered by associations connected with its recognized meaning, and, therefore, must be to a certain degree unsuitable. The problem was to find the least unsuitable word.

The word συνθήκη was an obvious choice, but it implied that the two covenanting parties were equal.  Diatheke or διαθηκη sits more pleasantly with the idea of an agreement where one side is far superior to the other.  Owen writes (bottom of p531):

The word בְּרִית could not be more properly rendered by any one word than by διαθήκη. For it being mostly used to express the covenant between God and man, it is of such a nature as cannot properly be termed συνθήκη, which is a covenant or compact upon equal terms of distributive justice between distinct parties; but God’s covenant with man is only the way and the declaration of the terms whereby God will dispose and communicate good things unto us, which hath more of the nature of a testament than of a covenant in it.

Westcott agrees (p301):

The choice of διαθήκη to express the notion of a divine covenant is easily intelligible. In a divine ‘covenant’ the parties do not stand in the remotest degree as equal contractors (συνθήκη). God in His good pleasure makes the arrangement which man receives, though he is not passive (2 Kings 11:17). Such a covenant is a ‘disposition,’ an ‘ordainment,’ an expression of the divine will which they to whom it is made reverently welcome.

Behm says that διατίθημι is an agreement that is more focused on the legally binding character of the decision reached and συντίθημι on the reciprocal nature of the action.

 

Why wasn’t the word promise or επαγγελια used for this purpose?

The LXX translators never use the word promise for this purpose.  Paul does, however.  In Ephesians, he even speaks of the covenants of promise. (Ephesians 2:12)  Ramsay writes (p360):

The word ἐπαγγελία, promise, might also have been selected. It had the advantage of expressing strongly that the action and the initiative proceeded solely from one side in free grace. But it lacked entirely the idea of bond, of solemn guarantee, of the binding force of oaths and religious sanctity, which was absolutely indispensable.

 

Why is the word diatheke a better word to explain the biblical idea of a covenant?

Ramsay gives (p361) five reasons:

  1. In the first place, the ancient Diatheke was a solemn and binding covenant, guaranteed by the authority of the whole people and their gods. It was originally executed verbally before the assembled people as a solemn religious act, the people being parties to it; and even in Greek-Egyptian Wills of the late third or second centuries BC, when the Diatheke had become a private document, the reigning sovereigns were made parties to it, and named executors of it: this was, of course, a mere form, a sort of legal fiction, substituted for the old fact that the public authority was actually a party to the Diatheke. The word was therefore well suited to express the binding irrevocable solemnity of the word uttered by God.
  2. In the second place, the Diatheke was primarily an arrangement for the devolution of religious duties and rights, and not merely a bequeathing of money and property. The heir by Diatheke was bound to carry on the religion of the family, just as if he had been a son by nature, and was placed there for that purpose. The term was therefore well suited to describe God’s promise of a religious inheritance to His chosen people.
  3. In the third place, the maker of the ordinary Diatheke had full power in his hands; and the party benefited by the Diatheke exercised no authority in the making of it. The latter had only to fulfil the conditions, and he succeeded to the advantages of the Diatheke. The act of God was of the same one-sided type.
  4. In the fourth place, while the noun διαθήκη is confined almost exclusively to the sense of the disposition of one’s property and duties by Will, the verb διατίθεσθαι has a wider sense, and is used in the sense of “to dispose of one’s property by sale,” and in various other senses of the term “dispose” or “arrange”; but in every case the one single party disposes with authority.
  5. Finally, the central idea expressed in the word Diatheke fairly represented one important side of the Biblical conception. The Diatheke was the concrete expression of individual authority over property, and embodied the reaction against the former system of family authority. In a more primitive stage, property belonged to the family or the tribe, and the individual had no right to dispose of it: the development of Greek civilisation put ownership of property more and more into the hands of the individual. The tradition was that Solon passed the first law in Athens permitting the owner of property to bequeath it by a Diatheke, whereas previously the family to which the owner belonged inherited in default of children. Solon, however, gave the right of bequeathing only in default of male children, only under the form of adoption, and with the obligation that the adopted heir must marry the daughter, if there was one. Gradually the freedom of making Diatheke was widened, the individual became more and more master of his property, and its disposition and the claim even of his children became weaker. He was permitted to bequeath legacies to strangers without adoption; but these legacies seem to have been at first classed as presents or gifts (δωρεαί), not as inheritances, and were restricted in various ways: by common Greek custom and the feeling of society a son must inherit, and an heir was called a son.

 

What are the covenants about which we read in Scripture?

We read of God making a:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top