Admonition and Curse: The Ancient Near Eastern Treaty/Covenant Form as a Problem in Inter-Cultural Relationships. By Noel Weeks. Pp. viii + 211. (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series, 407.) London and New York: T & T Clark International, 2004. isbn 0 567 08156 7. £60.

Abstract

This book is like a blast from the past, recalling a period just after the mid-twentieth century when Old Testament scholars were widely persuaded that a study of the form and content of ancient Near Eastern treaty texts, mainly those from the Hittite Empire of the late second millennium bce and from the Neo-Assyrian period of the first millennium bce, sheds significant light upon the nature and antiquity of the notion of a covenant between God and Israel. Such was the extensive literature devoted to the subject, beginning with G. E. Mendenhall's famous essay in The Biblical Archaeologist in 1954, that in reading this new study there is inevitably some degree of déjà vu. It is, however, much more than this, offering a perceptive review of the treaty form in its various manifestations from the third to the first millennium bce. Its main conclusion is that each of the different ancient Near Eastern national entities independently developed a common ‘original inheritance, for the whole Near East, of relationships guaranteed by oath’ and that this rather than any borrowing by one nation from another gave ‘rise to the later similarity of forms in different cultures by a process of parallel development’. Thus, a ‘diffusionist’ theory that the form originated in Mesopotamia whence it spread to other ancient Near Eastern states is rejected. Similarly, the covenant between God and Israel, though manifesting similarities to forms and features of treaties from other places and times in the ancient Near East, was an inner-Israelite development. The claim, so strongly advocated by Mendenhall and many others in the 1950s and 1960s, that a historical retrospect emphasizing the suzerain's past actions on behalf of a vassal with the purpose of inducing fidelity to a treaty was a chief feature peculiar to Hittite treaties as distinct from Neo-Assyrian treaties, which laid the emphasis upon the threat of curse in the case of infidelity, is also rejected, and thus the view that the Exodus narrative of the making of the Sinai covenant displays the influence of the former whilst Deuteronomy, commonly dated to the period of Assyrian domination of Israel/Judah in the first millennium, reflects the latter, is shown to be untenable. Rather, this distinction between Hittite and Assyrian treaties reflects much broader issues, and the sort of conclusion drawn by Mendenhall and others is simplistic. At the same time, Weeks agrees that there is certainly some ‘family resemblance’ between the texts narrating the making of a covenant between God and Israel and treaty texts of Israel's ancient neighbours. He also argues, against the conclusions of Lothar Perlitt in his challenging monograph of 1969, that the notion of the covenant between God and Israel pre-dates Assyrian imperial rule over Israel/Judah and was, indeed, the presupposition of the preaching of the pre-exilic prophets.