Theology Today - Vol 49, No.1 - April 1992 - BOOK NOTES

The New Covenant in Hebrews
By Susanne Lehne
Sheffield, JSOT Press, 1990. 183 pp. $48.00.

This study seeks to demonstrate that the author of Hebrews has creatively reinterpreted the idea of covenant in the Hebrew Scriptures. She argues that Hebrews portrays the death of Christ as the perfect fulfillment of the cultic heritage of Israel and, at the same time, as an event superseding that heritage, becoming something new, permanent, definitive, and superior. The emphasis in Hebrews on the newness of the covenant that Christ mediates is far more radical than the use of the term "new covenant" in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Paul, and Last Supper accounts. The author of Hebrews, thus, "has gone much further in his conscious articulation of the break with the cultic institution of Israel. . . ." To that end, the author's argument combines in novel ways Middle-Platonic and eschatological patterns of thought. The position set forth in this study is not new, but what sets it apart is the extraordinary skill with which scholarship on Hebrews is used and assessed and the remarkable balance in the judgments on issues of interpretation.

Lala Kalyan Dey,
Drew University,
Madison, N.J.