The Invention of Religion by Jan Assmann

Author:Jan Assmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

TREATY AND LAW

The Deconstruction of Kingship: Treaty and Law as the Constitution of God’s People

The original version of Deuteronomy dates from around a century after the prophet Hosea. Whereas Hosea had resorted to bridal and filial metaphors when describing the covenant between God and his people, Deuteronomy codifies the covenant in a formal treaty of alliance, thereby giving it the status of an institution recognized under international law. The covenant is now no longer metaphorical but the real thing. The first version of the Sinai pericope must have arisen around the same time and in the same tradition. In the context of the Priestly Exodus narrative, it “conveys the impression of an enormous parenthesis.”1 The guiding concern of the Priestly Source is compositional in nature. It sets out to provide a chronologically ordered narrative framework extending all the way from the creation of the universe to the consecration of the Temple. It also inserts older documents into this framework such as the Sinai pericope, which, like Deuteronomy, links the motifs of revelation, covenant, and law with the Exodus-Moses narrative. That accounts for the relatively abrupt shift from narrative mode to normative mode that occurs in Exodus 19 and continues all the way through to Numbers 10:10, where there is an equally abrupt switch back to narrative. At this point, as Lothar Perlitt remarks, “the people have no inkling of the great covenant made with God at Sinai” and start grumbling “just like they did before, that is, in Ex 17.”2

Today there is widespread acceptance that the two key elements that come together in the Sinai-Torah—the Exodus story and the idea of the law as Israel’s constitution—were originally separate. In the liturgical recapitulations of salvational history (Deut 26; Jos 24; Ps 78; Pss 105–107), the covenant and the giving of the law go unmentioned. Only in Nehemiah 9 and in Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7 are both elements, Exodus and the law, brought together.3 In Hosea, however, it is already clear from the outset that the motifs of departure, election, and covenant belong together, even if the idea of the covenant has not yet taken the form of a treaty of political alliance first given it in Deuteronomy.4

The authors of Deuteronomy borrowed the model of a political contract from Assyria. The loyalty oath that King Esarhaddon had his subjects and vassals swear to his designated successor, Ashurbanipal, in 672 BCE makes its influence felt right down to the wording of the biblical text. One of those vassals must have been King Manasseh of Judah, so it may be assumed that a copy of the succession treaty and oath was stored in the royal archive in Jerusalem.5 When applying this Assyrian template to the covenant between YHWH and the people, the biblical authors adopted and adapted it in two ways. First, God does not make this treaty with the king, in his capacity as the people’s representative before the gods, but directly with the people themselves; and second,

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