The covenant, and the night God walked alone

The word behind everything this volume has studied is berit, covenant — a binding agreement, ratified by a ceremony, with terms that were written down.

The Hebrew idiom is not to make a covenant but to cut one, because of what the ceremony involved.

Genesis 15 shows the ceremony in full, and it is strange enough that most readers hurry past it. Abram is told to bring animals, cut them in half, and lay the pieces opposite each other. Birds of prey come down and he drives them away. The sun sets, and a terrifying darkness falls on him.

A smoking firepot with a blazing torch passed between the pieces.

In the ancient ceremony, both parties walked the aisle between the halves. The meaning was a self-curse: may it be done to me as it was to these animals if I break this.

Abram is asleep. God walks it alone.

The thread runs forward through covenants that are all cut and all written. Noah and the bow in the cloud. Sinai, where Moses wrote it down, read it aloud, and threw blood on the people — the Book of the Covenant from Week Six. David, and a promised house. And then a prophet writing in the ruins says the arrangement will be replaced.

Not like the covenant I made with their fathers — the one they broke. And the new terms: My law within them, written on their hearts, which is Week Eighteen’s engraving word with the surface changed.

Then a room with a table in it, on the night before the penalty was paid.

The new covenant in My blood. He says it holding a cup, quoting Jeremiah, hours before the halves.

And Hebrews, quoting Jeremiah 31 at greater length than any other Old Testament passage in the New Testament, draws the conclusion that everything in this volume has been circling: by calling this covenant new, He has made the first one obsolete.

A man asleep while God walked between the pieces. A nation splashed with blood at a mountain. A promise that the writing would move to hearts. A cup on a Thursday night.

And one detail in Genesis 15 keeps the picture from being merely solemn. Abram spends the daylight hours driving birds of prey off the carcasses — an old man with a stick, keeping the ceremony intact while nothing happens. Then the sun goes down and God does the part that counts.

One party has been liable the whole way through.

Trace it: Genesis 6:18; 9:8–17; 15; 17; Exodus 19–24; 34; Numbers 25:12–13; Deuteronomy 29–30; 2 Samuel 7; Psalm 89; Jeremiah 31:31–34; Ezekiel 36:24–28; Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25; Hebrews 8:6–13; 9:15–22; 12:24; 13:20.

The self-maledictory ceremony behind Genesis 15 is attested in ancient Near Eastern treaty texts, and Jeremiah 34:18–20 describes it directly: the men who walked between the pieces of the calf and then broke the covenant will be treated like the calf. The idiom of cutting a covenant is not decorative.

Hebrews 8:8–12 quotes Jeremiah 31:31–34 in full — the longest single Old Testament quotation in the New Testament — and then repeats parts of it again in chapter 10. The whole argument of the letter turns on that passage.

The Greek diatheke, used for covenant throughout the New Testament, can also mean a will or testament, which is why Hebrews 9:16–17 turns on the fact that a will takes effect only at death. English Old and New Testament comes through that word.

Ezekiel 36:24–28 gives the same new-covenant promise in different vocabulary: a new heart, a new spirit, a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone, and My Spirit within you. Jeremiah changes the writing surface; Ezekiel replaces the organ.

Look it upH1285 בְּרִית berit, covenant · H3772 כָּרַת karath, to cut (a covenant) · H2617 חֶסֶד chesed, covenant love, loyalty · G1242 διαθήκη diatheke, covenant, testament

Where this touchesGenesis 15 · Exodus 24:3–8 (Week Six, Day Four) · Jeremiah 31:31–34 · Jeremiah 34:18–20 · Luke 22:20 · Hebrews 8:6–13; 9:15–22. The seed, lamb, blood, tree, bread, water, the Name, the dwelling, the Shepherd, the city, the marriage, the mountain, the light, the vine, the exodus, the priesthood and rest were the earlier threads.