Alliances in the Near East and in the Bible

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The Bible is full of covenant stories: the covenant between God and Noah after the Flood, the promise made to Abraham, the covenant between God and his people through Moses at Sinai, the promise made to David... The last lecture was devoted to the question of whether Near Eastern covenant practices and the "treaty" texts that have survived may have influenced the Bible. The importance of the notion of covenant in the Hebrew Bible is clear, even if modern commentators do not all agree on whether it is central or not, or whether it dates from later or earlier times. This theme of the covenant between God and his people is unique: nowhere else has the relationship between a deity and a people been formulated in this way. We need to find out why and how. Schematically speaking, we can consider that the search was marked by three stages.

Initially, it was the Hittite treaties that attracted the most attention. In a 1954 article, G. E. Mendenhall showed that the covenants of the Bible were written in a manner very similar to the Hittite form, which had six distinctive elements:

Introduction of the declarant.
Historical preamble.
Clauses (in the Bible, this is what came to be known as the Decalogue).
Declaration concerning the written document.
Divine witnesses.
Curses and blessings.

In a second phase, historiography placed greater emphasis on comparisons between texts from the Neo-Assyrian period and biblical texts. The 1958 publication of Asarhaddon's Vassal-Treaties was of course the catalyst for this shift in research, as was André Dupont-Sommer's 1958 publication of the Sfiré stelae. The most representative work of this trend is by Dennis J. McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant: A Study in Form in the Ancient Oriental Documents and in the Old Testament, Rome, Biblical Institute Press, coll. "Analecta Biblica", vol. 21, 1963, republished 1978. In a recent work [1], Kenneth Anderson Kitchen sought to return to a closer comparison between Hittite texts and those of the Bible, minimizing comparisons with Neo-Assyrian texts. The underlying aim is clear, when one considers the other writings of this author, who is also a distinguished Egyptologist: to date Yahweh's covenant with Israel to the turn of the ^2nd and ^1st millennia. Several reviewers have pointed out the methodological weaknesses of this approach.

More recently, the avalanche of publications of Paleo-Babylonian texts has - still timidly - led to comparisons with the Bible. These concern the rite of immolation of a colt, the etymology of the Hebrew word for "covenant"(^berît) and the obligation of sincerity. A new element, which does not yet seem to have entered the literature on the part of biblical scholars, is the role of blood in the conclusion of covenants. As we have seen, this element of the first half of the ^2nd millennium does not seem to have played such an important role thereafter. The practices mentioned in the Bible were therefore rooted in a distant Semitic past, and cannot be explained solely by the cultural world in which the authors of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods lived, or the last editors of the biblical books in the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods.