271 - God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament

God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament

By Ernest W. Nicholson

Oxford, Clarendon, 1986. 244 Pp. $36.00.

Nicholson, who is Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford, chooses the image of a circle to characterize a century of discussion of the biblical covenant theme. The majestic arc begins in the work of Julius Wellhausen, who argued that "covenant" was a late feature of Israelite religion, growing out of the preaching of the great prophets. Reaction against this view was given impetus by fundamental pioneer works in the history of religion,

271 - God and His People: Covenant and Theology in the Old Testament

especially those of Max Weber, and culminated in the hypothesis of Martin Noth, in which the covenant, as a social institution and not merely as an idea, was central to earliest Israelite society, a league of tribes grouped around a central shrine. A third phase of study set in when scholars turned to comparative study of Old Testament covenant and ancient Near Eastern treaties. This period (from around 1950 to the present) has been an exciting era in which it seemed that a flood of fresh evidence washed over the field. Now the flood is apparently over, succeeded by a new age when scholars are asserting once again that covenant traditions were a late development in Israel's religion, thus effecting a return to Wellhausen's position of a hundred years ago.

As a way out of this apparent impasse, Nicholson asserts the importance of covenant in ancient Israelite thought, not history or society. The notion of a covenant with God is distinctive of Israelite thought, for no other ancient people viewed its relation to its gods in this way. Thus it is not as a social or historical reality but as a theological idea that covenant was so important. Covenant was a means for asserting that Israel was the people of Yahweh "by adoption and free decision rather than by nature or necessity."

It seems unlikely that Nicholson's solution to the problem of covenant will prove generally satisfying. In an earlier generation, Norman Snaith tried to present Old Testament theology in the form of a set of "distinctive ideas of the Old Testament." This sort of inquiry, if it is successful in identifying what is distinctive, has great difficulty, whether the enterprise is a history of Israel's religion or an Old Testament theology, in doing justice to "non-distinctive" elements-which inevitably outnumber the distinctive. Moreover, even if the covenant idea is especially characteristic of Israel, there is something inevitably unsatisfying about having it reduced to such an intellectual status, with no basis in the history or society of ancient Israel. We may learn to live with such a conclusion if we must, but will hardly take it as a call for fresh researches.

Nicholson's survey of covenant studies is admirably compact, detailed, judicious, and fair, but perhaps certain lines of research are dismissed too readily, too quickly taken to be refuted or mined out. The approach to covenant from the side of the sociology of religion, along lines inaugurated by Weber, and the comparative study of documents from the ancient Near East, especially treaty texts, have probably not come to an end. If we may anticipate a new period of study of "Treaty and Covenant," Nicholson's work may serve as a useful and frequently perceptive summary of a century of study.

DELBERT R. HILLERS

Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland