Covenant — A Bible Word and Concept

We do theology on the concept level and not the word level alone. The Bible is not a dictionary in the sense of giving concise definitions to the realities that it described. If we want to understand the concept, we must gather the attributes of that thing. It is one thing to answer the objection concerning the Trinity that, “That word is not in the Bible!” Such cannot be done with the word covenant. It is a word that is voluminous in Scripture. However, what all constitutes a covenant and what one should call it more specifically—those larger phrases then have to be justified. Nevertheless, we begin with the word itself.

The Word in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures

The Hebrew בְּרִית is the principal word meaning “covenant.” There are several possibilities for the origin and significance. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the author of the most extensive work on covenant theology, Francis Roberts, reduced the candidates to five—“create” (בָּרָא) “purify” or “make clear” (בָּרַר), “firm” or “strong” (ברת), “choose” (בָּרָה), or else “strike” or “divide,” alternatives of two of the above spellings.1 The last has the support of often being associated with another word to “cut” (כָּרַת), as in Exodus 24:8,

“And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you concerning all these words.”

Modern studies have been led to believe the word can be traced to two potential roots in the Akkadian—either “birit, which related to the Hebrew preposition בֵּין ‘between’,” or else “baru, ‘to bind, to fetter,’ and the related noun biritu, ‘band’ or ‘fetter.’”2

We must also consider the Greek word διαθήκη. The LXX uses it everywhere—except with Deuteronomy 9:15—for the Hebrew בְּרִית; and the New Testament uses the same in every case. However, it is also rendered “testament.” It comes from “diatithemai, signifying to dispose, compose, constitute, or make; generally it signifies a disposition or a disposal, but yet such a disposal wherein a promise is contained expressly or implicitly.”3

It is important to note about its New Testament use that it is the same concept inherited from the Old. One mid-twentieth century scholar Delbert Hillers argued that the covenant concept was one of the things that passed away with the New.4 However, as Everett Ferguson has shown, three of the most extensive treatments of διαθήκη in the New Testament—2 Corinthians 3, Galatians 4, and Hebrews 7-11—are used,

1. to explain the significance of Jesus’s death;

2. to show the relationship between the Mosaic and Christian eras, and carnal and spiritual Israel; and

3. to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian economy.5

If the significance of the death of Jesus is unpacked by means of the covenant concept in the New Testament, then manifestly the idea of the covenant cannot only apply to God’s people prior to that time. In that second and third point, what we have is the balance between what is continuous and discontinuous, a very important key to understanding Scripture in general. Covenant theology alone grasps this continuity and discontinuity.

Defining the Biblical Concept of Covenant

One might begin with the Augustinian notion that is repeated in the Children’s Catechism, namely, that a covenant is an agreement between two or more persons; or even one slightly tightened up by J. I. Packer: “A covenant relationship is a voluntary mutual commitment that binds each party to the other.”6 When it comes to the biblical covenants, the concise definition offered by O. Palmer Robertson has become something of a standard. He says that a covenant is “a bond in blood sovereignly administered.”7 Here we have the two crucial points that God binds Himself to us by a most serious commodity, namely blood; but also that God is the unilateral Author of such.

Elsewhere Packer says,

Covenants in Scripture are solemn agreements, negotiated or unilaterally imposed, that bind the parties to each other in permanent defined relationships, with specific promises, claims, and obligations on both sides … When God makes a covenant with his creatures, he alone establishes its terms.8

For the early seventeenth century Archbishop James Ussher, a covenant was “an agreement which it pleaseth the Almighty God to enter into with man concerning his everlasting condition.”9 For Roberts,

God’s covenant (in the general notion of it) is his gratuitous agreement with his people, promising them eternal happiness and all subordinate good: and requiring from them all due dependence upon God, and obedience unto him, in order to his glory.10

The Bible uses the covenant word and concept in diverse ways. The broadest classification is given by Roberts, who first divides between 1. religious, 2. civil, and 3. sinful. Since the civil and sinful are extensions of the principle, I will briefly mention these. Of the civil, one may consult Malachi 2:19, Proverbs 2:17, Genesis 21:27, 32, Exodus 23:32, 1 Samuel 18:3 and 20:16. Of those sinful agreements about which this word is used, see Isaiah 57:8, 28:15, and 18.

As to the primary usage, the religious, there is the division of those agreements between God and his people, as to, first, those of God with his church and people, and second, of God’s people with God. Of those made by God with his church and people, these are used: 1. properly (Gen. 6:18, 17:4, 11, Ex. 34:28, Jer. 31:31-32, and Heb. 8:6-9), or else as some branch or addition, by synecdoche: Jer. 33:20, 33:25, Gen. 8:21-22, Hos. 2:18-23); 2. improperly, by a metonymy, either of Christ (Isa. 42:6, 49:8) or of circumcision (Gen. 17:13); and 3. more special and peculiar (Num. 18:19, Neh. 13:29, Mal. 2:4-5, 8, Num. 25:12-13, 2 Chr. 13:5).

Witsius discusses the first two of these as well.11 Of those where the people of God engaged themselves to some duty, there are 1. those more solemnly in public covenants for reformation (Josh. 24:25, 2 Kings 11:17, 23:3, 2 Chr. 15:12, 20:10, Ezra 10:3), and 2. those more secretly in private resolutions and promises touching points of sanctification (Job 31:1). 

Covenant in Terms of Causation and Components

It is in the context of defining the word in its genus and difference that Roberts gives a brief causal analysis of God’s covenant. That is, while the genus of covenant is “agreement,” the difference is divided into the four causes:

the efficient cause being God in His grace; the material cause being eternal life given to His people, and dependence on, and obedience to, Him; the formal cause being God’s promising and their restipulating its conditions; and the end cause being His own glory.12

Note that both the material and formal aspects are reciprocal, a subject to which we will return. William Gouge made a similar analysis in his commentary on Hebrews, arguing that “God is the efficient cause. The material or procuring cause is God’s pleasure and will (Eph. 1:11). The formal cause consists in the binding of the two parties, God and man. The final cause, or the end, of the covenant is God’s glory.”13

Another way that covenants are analyzed is more foundational to the method question which we will shortly address. How does one know that he is looking at a covenant beyond knowing the basic definition? The seventeenth century Reformed theologian Patrick Gillespie wrote a book called The Ark of the Testament Opened, in which he drew out six defining characteristics of all biblical covenants:

First, that there are two parties; second, that there are agreements; third, that they have mutual conditions; fourth, the conditions are mutually binding; fifth, the terms are mutually satisfying to both parties; and sixth, they must be inviolable, that is, the covenant cannot be revoked and violated, which would mean the “highest breach and violation of the Law of God.”14

These basic elements were agreed upon in substance by contemporaries such as Gouge, Edward Leigh, and John Owen.

Covenant and Theological Method

Concerning the origins of a doctrine of the covenant in the Reformed tradition, Joel Beeke and Mark Jones write that, “Justifying the terminology cannot be separated from defining what constitutes a covenant, and seventeenth-century Reformed theologians were not unaware of this problem.”15

Ligon Duncan writes that, “Covenant theology is a blending of both biblical and systematic theology.”16 While biblical theology supplies the data of revelation, systematic theology is the process of summarizing the whole picture. They are, as Duncan says, “friends.” Covenant theology is the Reformed tradition’s answer to the best systematic summary of that biblical data.

On the other hand, “Covenant theology is also a hermeneutic.”17 One might ask at this point: Which is it? Are we proposing to gather covenant theology from the accumulation of biblical knowledge, or are we not cheating and using it as a lens, a priori, so that the data is made to fit the preconceived categories? It is a false dilemma. The student of Scripture grows in his conviction that in the Bible, God deals with His people by means of covenant. The covenant is their medium of personal relationship.

Packer put it in this way:

So biblical doctrine, first to last, has to do with covenantal relationships between God and man; biblical ethics has to do with expressing God’s covenantal relationship to us in covenantal relationships between ourselves and others; and Christian religion has the nature of covenant life, in which God is the direct object of our faith, hope, love, worship, and service, all animated by gratitude for grace.18

Packer went on to make three bold claims about the importance of a covenantal approach. Neither the gospel of God, nor the word of God, nor even the reality of God are “properly understood till [they are] viewed within a covenantal frame.”19 In our day of classical theological retrieval, it may be pushed back that it was precisely an inflation of the left-to-right element in the covenantal approach that has obscured several of the incommunicable attributes of God in Himself. Leaving that aside for the moment, we may still find basic agreement with Packer’s point.

The question of how the data of covenant theology is gathered and organized is not only about the relationship between biblical and systematic theology. It has also been informed by historical studies. By this I mean not historical theology—which we will look at next week—but rather Ancient Near Eastern (hereafter ANE) studies and various pieces of evidence that shed light on forms that the Scriptures utilized from the culture around them, just as the biblical authors utilized the languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

J. Nicholas Reid comments that, “The ANE material is frequently cited to explain the structure and content and even determine the date of the composition of the book of Deuteronomy.”20 One particular book was most influential at the beginning of this trend. George Mendenhall wrote Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1955), arguing from almost a century of research on Akkadian cuneiform that there are several similarities between arrangements in those neighboring cultures and the form taken by the books of Moses.

Where one dates the book of Deuteronomy is consequential:

“A major debate exists about whether Deuteronomy has greater similarities to the Hittite treaties of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries or the neo-Assyrian succession treaties of the eighth and seventh centuries.”21

The realities of land grants and treaties are seen to represent two fundamental kinds of social arrangements under a Great King (suzerain), and the features of historical prologue, stipulations, ceremonial meals, and the storing of the treaty in one’s religious temple—these are seen to be a pattern from which the author of the Pentateuch drew.

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1. Francis Roberts, God’s Covenants with Man: The Mystery and Marrow of the Bible, Volume I (Kansas, OK: Berith Press, 2023), 99-100.

2. O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1980), 5.

3. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:102.

4. Delbert R. Hillers, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 188.

5. Everett Ferguson, cited by J. Ligon Duncan, “Covenant in the Early Church,” in Covenant Theology: Biblical, Theological, and Historical Perspectives, ed. Guy Prentiss Waters, J. Nicholas Reed, and John R. Meuther (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 296.

6. J. I. Packer, Introduction to Herman Witsius, The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man: Comprehending a Complete Body of Divinity: Volume One (Escondido, CA: The den Dulk Christian Foundation: 1990), iii.

7. Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants, 4.

8. Packer, Concise Theology (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1993), 87.

9. James Ussher, A Body of Divinitie (London: 1645), 123., quoted in Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones, A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2012), 219.

10. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:105.

11. Witsius, Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man, I:42-43.

12. Roberts, God’s Covenants, I:105-08.

13. William Gouge, Epistle to the Hebrews, summarized in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 220.

14. Patrick Gillespie, summarized and quoted in Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 220.

15. Beeke and Jones, A Puritan Theology, 218.

16. Duncan, Covenant Theology, 24.

17. Duncan, Covenant Theology, 25.

18. Packer, Introduction to Witsius, iii.

19. Packer, Introduction to Witsius, 5, 6, 8.

20. J. Nicholas Reid, “Ancient Near Eastern Backgrounds to Covenants,” in Covenant Theology, 447.

21. Reid, “Ancient Near Eastern Backgrounds to Covenants,” in Covenant Theology, 454.