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The covenant form is essential not only for understanding certain highly unusual features of the Old Testament faith, but also for understanding the existence of the community itself and the interrelatedness of the different aspects of early Israel's social culture. Here we reach a clear watershed, so to speak, in historical research. Do the people create a religion, or does the religion create a people? Historically, when we are dealing with the formative period of Moses and the Judges, there can be no doubt that the latter is correct, for the historical, linguistic and archaeological evidence is too powerful to deny. Religion furnished the foundation for a unity far beyond what had existed before, and the covenant appears to have been the only conceivable instrument through which the unity was brought about and expressed. If the very heart and center of religion is "allegiance," which the Bible terms "love," religion and covenant become virtually identical. Out of this flows nearly the whole of those aspects of biblical faith that constitute impressive contrasts to the ancient paganism of the ancient Near Eastern world, in spite of increasingly massive evidence that the community of ancient Israel did not constitute a radical contrast to them either ethnically, in material culture, or in many patterns of thought or language. (en) |
