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.
