Adam Kissel
Social Thought 326
Human Beginnings: Genesis I
Mr. Leon Kass
December 8, 1997
Arguably the two most important events in the Biblical book of Genesis, after creation, are the Flood and God's promise to Abraham to make of him a great nation. Each of these events is associated with a covenant given by God. This paper examines God's covenants in the generations of Noah and of Abraham. It compares the two covenants with particular regard to the nature of God's interactions with man as a moral being concerned about the future. One might begin by investigating why God uses covenants in the first place. The motivations behind each particular covenant, the content of each covenant, and the intended and actual effects of each covenant shall also become more clear.
God's Covenant in Noah's Generation
God tells Noah, about a year ahead of time, that God will establish a covenant with Noah (6:18). Noah's wait for the covenant is thus about a year longer than Abraham's wait of one verse (17:2-3). Why does God announce this covenant so far ahead of its establishment?
To understand God's covenant with Noah, we might first ascertain who Noah is. Noah is born to be the one who will free others, says his father, "from the pain of our hands resulting from the ground which God has cursed." [1] How is Noah to accomplish this? [2] Lamech must bring up Noah to be a tiller of the soil (cf. 9:20). Lamech teaches tillage for the sake of comparative leisure. But God sees the ways of Lamech and all other men and knows that any merely human scheme is "only bad all the time" (6:5). If Noah devises so much as one plan to improve his crops, toward living that life of leisure, he will no longer be righteous and blameless among his contemporaries (6:9); he will become just like his father. But Noah does not follow the ways of men; he walks with God (6:9). If Noah is to overcome the curse of the soil, he must do so on God's terms and in God's way.
What is most surprising to Noah, then, is not that God has suddenly started to speak with him, for Noah hardly has devised a single scheme on his own and without God. God has been present to Noah for half a millennium. When God begins to speak with Noah, however, God tells Noah several curious things. First, God is about to destroy all living flesh on earth (6:13). Second, the earth is filled with lawlessness; Noah is unique among all flesh (6:13 and then 7:1). Third, Noah is to build a huge three-tiered ark (6:14-16). [3] Fourth, God will accomplish the destruction via a great flood (6:17). Fifth, God will establish a covenant with Noah, another thing God has never done before (6:18). Sixth, all kinds of animals will join Noah and his family in the ark (6:19-20). Seventh, Noah is to bring all manner of foods into the ark (6:21).
Of these seven astounding things God has told Noah thus far, Noah has an instrumental need to know only that he must build an ark, that he must gather his family and wait for the animals, and that he must gather the foods. [4] It is a testament to God's favor for Noah (6:8) that God also gives him the logical reason for these commands. But what does the covenant have to do with it? God also chooses to respond to Noah's emotion. No one could fail to be moved upon hearing that God will destroy the world for its evil ways. The first time God had told him of this destruction, God followed the announcement merely with directions for building the ark (6:13-16). By the second time God tells him, this time emphasizing that all flesh will perish (6:17), Noah is likely to be deeply anxious to know his own fate. Recognizing this anxiety, God pledges to establish a covenant, God's covenant (again, not man's), with Noah. [5] "Establish" in Hebrew comes from the root meaning "to stand." To establish something is to imply a longstanding agreement. In this sense, God gives Noah a hope for something perpetual in the midst of a time of imminent destruction. [6] Not only that, what God will establish is a covenant ("covenant" comes from the root "to bind"), a voluntary movement to limit God's own range of choices or use of powers. In what might God limit himself? Noah may already see that God will choose to curb future urges to destroy the world so thoroughly. God does not yet need to explain what the content of the covenant will be, however; its future existence is sufficient. The promise of a covenant is, especially to the anxious but trusting Noah, nearly a covenant itself.
One would think that Noah is wholeheartedly behind this covenant, no matter how God will specify it. God establishes hope for Noah in the midst of destruction. While God prepares to destroy, Noah will construct the ark in God's way. Even if Noah is only wholehearted relative to his father and his own generation, Noah can trust God out of a uniquely understood hope.
Just as God's announcement of an established covenant probably served to allay Noah's anxiety and give him hope for the future, the aim of the covenant itself also is to address the future. For a year after the announcement, everything has gone as planned. Once out of the ark, however, Noah gives God cause to remember that man can be both constructive and destructive. [7] Noah's first acts are to build an altar to God and to kill a large number of animals as burnt offerings to God (6:20). Man is a paradox, good one minute and bad the next. Man is good when following God's way, bad when following man's way (8:21, recalling 6:5). Even if killing so many animals is justified [8] as a faithful response to the enormity of God's action in the Flood [9], God recognizes that man continues to be of ambiguous moral status.
Once God turns his thoughts to the paradox of man, we might conclude that God must reconcile a desire to keep mankind on earth with a desire to mete justice upon man when it is deserved. Why does God have any need speak to himself (8:21)? One reading of such passages is that God is registering an important paradox, such as how opposites may be reconciled. How terrible to regret one's own creation of beings with free will, to want to destroy what one has created (6:7)! How curious that man will try to live and make choices without God, choosing evil over good (8:21)! God responds to the paradoxes with a poetic couplet (8:22):
For all the days the earth continues, seed-sowing and harvest, and cold and heat,
And summer and winter, and day and night, will never cease. [10]
God seems to express here that since the simultaneous existence of opposites in nature is to be expected, why not extend the same natural right of doubleness to man? Here we may see the aim of God's covenant with Noah: in some way, God means to keep man on earth in all man's (usual) unrighteousness and (occasional) righteousness.
This aim leads directly to the content of the covenant. If God is to keep man on earth in spite of man's unrighteousness, God cannot continually start over. [11] God must temper the need for divine justice with a statement of divine mercy, a resolution not to start over. Nature will not cease to go through its changes; man's nature will not change; but God will pledge, unilaterally, to refrain from destroying all flesh on the earth. [12] Indeed this covenant does not just, as every covenant must, make reference to the future. This covenant establishes a future for the line of Noah and for all living flesh in the world. It is the quintessential covenant.
This covenant therefore is not just an agreement with Noah, but simultaneously one with Noah's sons (9:8) and even all of their unborn progeny (9:9)—even the animals, who cannot know and do not care whether they have a future! [13] (God addresses all those assembled with the plural "you.") Here is the expected content of the covenant: "no more will all flesh be cut off by waters of a deluge, and no more will there occur a deluge to bring the earth to ruin" (9:11, NWT). Covenant, as a kind of binding, may be either a specification of what will happen in the future (like God's covenant with Abraham, below), or an agreement to refrain from what might otherwise naturally happen. This covenant is expounded in terms of a repeated double negative (no more cutting off, no more ruin); it is of the latter kind. The future is completely open to Noah and his descendants, but the point is that God has established and promised a future.
God's promise is to preserve and sustain life on earth. God could be true to this purpose whether or not Noah knows of the covenant. Why does God tell Noah? When God had announced the covenant a year earlier, God had done so in order to assuage Noah's anxiety about the future. This time, God has just finished telling Noah and his sons that they are to be fruitful and to multiply so that their descendants swarm over all the earth (9:7, repeating 9:1 and hearkening back to God's similar command to the animals in Genesis 1). What good will it be to swarm over the earth without a future, if another flood might be on the way? Noah needs the inducement and hope of a perpetual future in which his progeny can flourish according to God's command. God again provides such a hope in describing the quintessential covenant, an everlasting covenant (9:16).
God actually has two responses to the moral ambiguity of man. In the most abstract, God establishes a covenant in order to give mankind a hope for a flourishing future. But practically speaking, God also establishes a law that shapes human justice. God will not merely leave man to his own devices in perpetuity, but will begin to legislate against man's natural inclinations. God's next logical step is to introduce law; this law is backed by the hope given later in the covenant. [14]
But why does the law precede the covenant? Although the covenant gives human motivation for the law, the covenant is neither a cause nor an effect of the law. Both proceed together out of God's reaction to the moral ambiguity of man. If the covenant were to come first, it would be simple to misunderstand God's purpose and believe that man is supposed to obey the law out of respect for the covenant. Rather, the respect commanded by the law goes much further: the blood of animals is to be respected as a kind of image of the blood of man; the blood of man is to be respected in that man is made in the image of God (9:4-6). The law precedes the covenant in order to be a set of rules that will apply whether or not another flood will come; the covenant follows in order to ease the anxiety that the law and the commandments to multiply might not be backed by the security of an established future.
God therefore would not see the law as an intended effect of the covenant. Rather, human hope for a fruitful future is itself the intended effect. [15] This point can be made more strongly. Although the covenant is made unilaterally, God refers to it twice as a covenant between God and all flesh on earth (9:16 and 9:17). God here stresses that the covenant is for the benefit of all beings; God shows deep caring for both man and beast. All beings shall have a future, regardless of their cognizance of the law. The message of the covenant communicates everlasting hope to man. Its intended practical effect is that man will "abound on the earth and increase on it" (9:7).
Two actual effects of this covenant show both the success and the failure of the establishment of a certain future. [16] The line of Noah indeed abounds on the earth through his sons (9:18-19; ch. 10), [17] probably via hope, as God had commanded. But from God's promise of a future, Noah draws not only hope but also a sense of security. Noah has been brought up by his father to be a tiller in order to bring leisure. Without a certain future, there was no guarantee of leisure. With a future, however, Noah's training toward leisure gains a renewed importance. Noah plants a vineyard, and in his leisure tends to it and produces wine (9:20). Drunkenness and immodesty follow (9:21). Noah's sense of security tends to encourage him in complacency and vice. Fortunately this covenant, unlike the one with Abraham, depends not at all on man or on man's transmitting certain ways of life to his progeny. Each generation and every nation sees the rainbow and knows that God shall remember His promise (9:14-17). Each generation sees the sign of this covenant (9:18) [18] and can choose to follow hope and security into either virtuous flourishing or vicious complacency.
God's Covenant in Abraham's Generation
To understand God's establishing of a covenant with Abraham, we might first compare Abraham's position with that of Noah. To begin, it will be helpful to examine the minor covenant between God and Abram in 15:18. In Abram's case, God has already established not just a future but a specific future: Abram will become a household name and a great nation will be made of him (12:2-3); God will assign the land of Canaan to him and his progeny (12:7, 13:15, 15:7); his reward will be very great (15:1); his progeny shall be uncountable like the sands (12:16) and the stars (15:5). Abram seems perhaps to trust God about having progeny, even though Sarai is barren (11:30, 16:1). For some reason, however, Abram doubts that God will assign someone else's land to him: [19] "How shall I know that I will possess [the land]?" he asks God (15:8). In response God requests a sacrifice and sends the sign of a covenant (a flaming torch, 15:17) in advance of the covenant itself (15:18). This is a covenant not established but cut, [20] as a beast branded by fire bears a mark of ownership. We will see the same language of cutting when Abimelech cuts a covenant with Abraham (21:27). God specifies the content of this deal (for about the fourth time): "To your offspring I assign this land." [21] This kind of covenant is merely the recording of something already secured, rather than a voluntary limiting of God's or Abram's powers or choices. Here the assurance and the symbol are most important, for Abram's future has already been established. Noah was afraid that no future would exist; Abram is afraid that his future will not come to pass. [22] God again uses a covenant to assuage the anxiety of man.
The covenant about which we are most concerned, however, is the one that God initiates when Abram's son Ishmael turns thirteen. [23] Abram might assume that Ishmael is the heir to whom the promised lands will be given. God's action is particularly appropriate in this year, then, in order to specify the heir (and to specify that heir's mother and father) and to describe what will characterize the coming great nation.
Immediately we see that while God's covenant with Noah and his progeny applied to all flesh in the world, the covenant that God is to make with Abram is very specific. While God brought hope to Noah's generation, God brings a particular relationship to individual people in Abram's generation. [24] God appears and speaks to Abram but only speaks to Noah. God names Himself for the first time here, and God speaks figuratively of His own face ("walk before me," 17:1). The covenant announcement is not that a covenant will be established, but given (from Hebrew natan); if it is given, it must simultaneously be taken. This covenant is as much about the present generation as about future ones.
Indeed there is not an interval of a year between the announcement and the giving of the covenant, as there was for Noah. The interval is only one verse, in which Abram responds to God personally by throwing himself on his own face (17:2). Abram at this point, in awe and reverence for God, agrees to be wholeheartedly behind the covenant (just as we surmised that Noah was); it is likely that he tacitly accepts the covenant that is being given even though he does not yet know its content. [25]
The content of this covenant is threefold, and its parts are closely related to each other. First, Abram is to become in some sense a new creation, symbolized by the changing of his name to Abraham. He has already been told to be wholehearted (tamim, "complete," 17:1), but this is not a requirement of the covenant. In fact Abraham is given no covenantal responsibilities yet, as Noah was given none. As it was for Noah, the command precedes and is separate from the covenant. The command is required whether or not the covenant is established. [26] This is God's covenant, rather, God's own limiting of His range of choices in singling out Abraham's line, and Abraham's new role is merely to become (or to trust anew that he really will become) "the father of a multitude of nations" (17:4-5). Likewise Sarai is to become a new creation as mother of nations, [27] renamed Sarah (17:15-16), even though God has not commanded here that Sarai be tamim.
Second, the covenant as a singling out by God is to be renewed in every generation. The introduction of the same verb of establishing (qam) as that used in Noah's covenant emphasizes that the covenant is not only for the present, but for Abraham's progeny "as an everlasting covenant throughout the ages" (17:7). [28] Whereas the covenant with Noah was once-for-all, and each generation could choose what to do under the conditions of hope and perpetual security, the covenant with Abraham and Abraham's progeny is to be continually reestablished. [29] There is to be a perpetual relation between the line of Abraham and God; El Shaddai will be God to Abraham and his progeny (17:7, repeated in 17:8). It is particularly appropriate that, by God's singling out of a line, the content of the covenant seems to be identical with the mode of its transmission by continual reestablishment with that line. [30]
Third, keeping (from Hebrew shamar, "to preserve," "to guard") the covenant is part of the very content of the covenant. Each generation is to accept God's covenant in the same way that Abraham accepts God's covenant (17:9). God's covenant with Noah is impossible to escape, for the sign of the covenant is kept by God in the sky out of everyone's reach. God's covenant with Abraham, on the other hand, may be broken or declined (17:14). The palpable expression of this keeping of the covenant is identical to its sign: circumcision of every male in the community (17:10-11). Again it is important to recognize that while righteousness is commanded and definitely part of the entire discourse of God in this chapter, this covenant and its sign refer to the community's acknowledgement that it has been singled out by God. [31]
Just as each rainstorm brings hope for a rainbow, each birth represents a chance to renew and transmit the people's acceptance of the covenant (17:12). The rainbow promises that the world will be sustained by God; a new birth represents the successful growth of a particular community.
Specifically, the intended effects of this covenant are obvious: Abraham and Sarah are to answer by new names; they are to accept their roles as parents of nations; all the males in Abraham's jurisdiction are to be circumcised; (not quite as obvious) the community is to recognize its special relation to El Shaddai as it becomes exceedingly numerous upon the earth. Generally, the intended effects of this covenant have to do with male circumcision's subsequent subtle effects on the parents and the community. Though it is Abraham who circumcises every male at first (17:23), we might presume that in general a newborn male's father will perform the circumcision. This act of the father cannot be understood by the infant; circumcision has meaning primarily for the leader of the family (and likewise for Abraham as leader of his household). The leader of the household is encouraged, right away, to treat the child not merely as his own but as part of a living tradition, cognizant that the child is ultimately not of the parents but of God. The father becomes not just a biological father but a cultural and spiritual father. The father is tied to the son (over against a possible inclination to ignore the son), and the son unwittingly is tied to the community. [32] The failure of the father to circumcise the son would break the covenant, implying no recognition that the son has been singled out by God, which would rend him (and likely also his father) from the community (cf. 17:14).
Since the mark of the covenant is part of the covenant itself, on one level the intended effect of this covenant is to bind Abraham's household into a community cognizant of the fact that it is under covenant, singled out by God. In fact, in one translation these are God's very words: "I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, in order that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what He has promised him" (18:19). [33] This is a circular, reflexive covenant in which the primary goal is to ensure that the whole community as it grows acknowledges its special relationship to God under God's covenant. This goal achieved, God would be able to bring about Abraham's blessing and reward (cf. 12:2-3, 15:1).
Let us next examine the actual effects of this covenant. Does the community, or Abraham in particular, acknowledge this special relationship? Abraham's first reaction once God disappears is to do just what God intended. He gathers all the males of his household together and circumcises nonstop for hours, leaving time only for practice and to sharpen the knife, on that very day and according to God's covenantal command (17:23). From this action alone, which must have been difficult to explain and more difficult to perform, we may surmise that Abraham recognizes the importance not just of the sign of the covenant but also of the intent of the covenant.
We also may interpret Abraham's next actions, in the scenes regarding the three strangers, in the light of Abraham's knowledge of his place in God's covenant. If the covenant requires him to acknowledge that his household is in a special relationship to God, he quite easily could succumb to pride in relation to others, thinking that outsiders are of less worth than those in Abraham's household. But Abraham hurries to serve the strangers lavishly (18:2-8). [34]
Abraham also might succumb to pride in relation to God, thinking that he may be able to approach God in a way that others cannot. It seems as though this is exactly what happens when God tells Abraham that He probably will destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and then Abraham confronts him. [35] God had told Abraham to walk before Him (17:1, cf. the walking in 18:16), but in this scene Abraham stands before Him, almost defiantly. [36] Abraham approaches (from Hebrew nagash) God, assuming a much greater intimacy with God than that with which he served the strangers, having stood patiently before them while they sat and ate (18:8). Abraham's pride in his own relation to God must have been unthinkable to Noah, who was probably more blameless but who kept quiet when God explained the destruction of all flesh on earth! Abraham confronts God no fewer than six times, sometimes even trying to hide behind formulations such as "I who am but dust and ashes" (18:27), but his pride before God is as unmistakable as his cause is worthy.
Third, Abraham, having such a sure covenant regarding his future success and glory, may become as complacent in his circumcised state as Noah had become complacent after the Flood. In fact, Abraham's future has been promised to be quite rosy (notwithstanding the dark dread of 15:12), and he has even more reason than Noah to slouch, sitting in an armchair while he waits trustingly for Sarah to conceive and give birth in a year. Instead, however, Abraham travels around the Negeb and sojourns in Gerar (20:1).
But when Abraham takes the risk of losing his wife to Abimelech (20:2), we might wonder whether Abraham has become so sure of God's provision that he may decide to do whatever he wants with himself and his wife. Of course this action is an example of the evil ways of man, which are "only bad all the time" (6:5), rather than an example of following God's way, as Abraham soon discovers. Abraham surely recognizes, as God had most likely desired him to recognize, that God has singled out Abraham and his household for a special relationship, but in his confrontational dealings with God and his treatment of his wife in Gerar he shows that he does not fully understand how to act responsibly as a leader of God's chosen people.
God's Two Covenants
God's covenants in the generations of Noah and of Abraham are both very special kinds of covenants. With Noah God establishes hope for a flourishing future, the quintessential covenant which makes possible all future covenants. With Abraham God establishes a people whose mission is to perpetuate their special position in relation to God, a covenant which calls for its own perpetual renewal in each generation. God's covenants with these men are actually covenants with whole societies: the postdiluvian covenant is made with all living flesh on earth, while the second covenant applies only to those who will become the Hebrews. The sign of the first covenant is, appropriately, fully public, universal, and beautiful. The sign of the second is, again appropriately, private, oriented toward a specific role for the males and male leaders in a community, and engraved into the very flesh of the chosen ones.
Both covenants are initiated by God. Both are closely associated with law and righteousness, although the law stands regardless of the covenant, in one sense because God's law of justice may be seen as natural while God's covenanting to limit Himself or His choices may be seen as a kind of artificial convention or even, sometimes, cutting a deal. Both covenants encourage man to follow God's way rather than his own.
God announces these covenants for man's own benefit, both to give man a sense of his future and to remind man that God is always nearby. But too sure a knowledge of man's good future and his special place under God (and over the animals) leads him to pride and complacency, and he returns to the evil ways of his heart rather than the good ways of God. These unintended effects mix with the intended effects, and the result is a human race that continually needs the help of God to be set aright.
NOTES