Covenant and Contract: A Framework for the Analysis of Jewish Ethics

Abstract

One way of describing the incarnate character of radical faith in the life of Israel is to say that for this people all human relations were transformed into covenant relations. Promise-making and promise-keeping were the essential elements in every connection between persons. Religion became such a matter of covenant.The fact that covenant played a central role in the religious life of ancient Israel has long been recognized by historians, theologians and other careful leaders of the biblical text. Walther Eichrodt's monumental Theology of the Old Testament remains perhaps the best known and most extensive treatment of covenant themes in the Hebrew Bible. But in recent years biblical scholars and theologians as diverse as Jon Levenson, James Muilenberg, Eugene Borowitz, Rosemary Ruether and David Hartman have increasingly devoted their attention to the concept of covenant, both its biblical roots and its persistence as a central category of religious life for Jews and Christians into the modern era.Yet, the implications of covenant for Jewish ethics have not received the attention they merit. To be sure, it is universally acknowledged that Jews, traditionally speaking, have understood their religious obligations within the context of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. And some have noted that, as a consequence of this, Jewish ethics are addressed to members of a covenanted community, rather than to autonomous individuals. Some have also explored the tensions within the covenant idea between particularism and universalism, while others have distinguished between the conditional and unconditional dimensions of the covenantal relationship. Still, there has been no systematic effort to correlate the category of covenant in all its richness and subtlety with diverse streams within Jewish ethics.