The Covenant Meal

Moses reports the words to the people and they answer with one voice: 'All the words that the LORD has spoken, we will do' (24:3). He writes the words down, builds an altar at the base of the mountain with twelve pillars for the twelve tribes, and sends young men to offer sacrifices. The absence of a priesthood is worth noticing; Aaron's ordination is not even commanded until chapter 29.

Then the blood is divided. Half is splattered on the altar, the side of the covenant that belongs to God. The Book of the Covenant is read aloud, and the people answer again, this time with the phrase Jewish tradition has treasured: na'aseh ve-nishma, literally 'we will do and we will hear', which the BSB renders 'we will do, and we will be obedient' (24:7). The Hebrew verb is shama, hear or obey, and the BSB has chosen the second sense. The order is odd enough in the Hebrew that the rabbis built whole discussions on it, since doing is promised before the hearing is complete; if shama is read as obey, the odd order softens, and a careful student should weigh which sense the context favours.

The other half of the blood is then thrown on the people, with the words: 'This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words' (24:8). One substance touches both parties. Whatever else a covenant is in this book, it is not a contract between remote signatories.

A Christian reader cannot hear that sentence neutrally, because Jesus says it over a cup: this is my blood of the covenant. Note the link, but do not let it swallow Exodus. The first job is to understand what the phrase meant on that mountain to those people, and only then to ask what it meant in an upper room a thousand years later.

Verses 9 to 11 are among the most startling in the Torah. Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu and seventy elders go up. 'And they saw the God of Israel. Under His feet was a work like a pavement made of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.' The description is careful to describe only what is beneath him.

Then: 'But God did not lay His hand on the nobles of Israel; they saw Him, and they ate and drank.' The narrator expects the reader to be braced for death, and reports its absence as the remarkable thing. The covenant is sealed not by a sacrifice alone but by a meal in the presence of God, seventy-four men eating on a mountain and going home alive.

This sits in obvious tension with 33:20, where God tells Moses that no one may see his face and live. The tradition has answered in several ways: that what was seen was a manifestation rather than the divine essence; that the vision was partial, which the text's attention to the pavement underfoot may support; that the tension is deliberately left standing to prevent any reader from concluding that God has been fully seen. The text does not adjudicate, and neither should a teacher who is trying to keep students in the presence of the passage rather than in the presence of a solution.

What the chapter establishes for everything that follows is the character of the relationship. Israel has been rescued, given words, bound in blood, and fed. The golden calf is seven chapters away, and it will be a betrayal of a relationship rather than the breach of a policy.

A survey module on Exodus owes its students an account of how these books came to us, and the honest account has moved in the last fifty years.

The traditional view holds Moses as author, a claim the Pentateuch makes for portions of itself (Exodus 24:4, Deuteronomy 31:9) and that later biblical writers, and Jesus, assume when they speak of the law of Moses. Even its careful defenders have long acknowledged later editorial work, since Deuteronomy 34 records Moses' death and burial and notes that no one knows his grave to this day.

The Documentary Hypothesis, given its classical form by Julius Wellhausen in 1878, argued for four principal sources, conventionally J, E, D and P, combined by editors over centuries. Its evidence is real and should be stated plainly: alternating divine names, duplicate accounts of the same event, differences of vocabulary and theological interest that correlate with those alternations, and the problem of Exodus 6:3. For a century it was close to consensus.

That consensus has fractured, and in an interesting direction. Some scholars, the neo-documentarians, defend a refined four-source model. Others argue for supplementary models, in which a core text was expanded in layers, or fragmentary models of many small units. Scholarship in the tradition of Rolf Rendtorff in Germany and John Van Seters in North America moved toward much later composition. Conservative scholars such as Kenneth Kitchen argue from ancient Near Eastern parallels that the material's forms belong to the second millennium rather than the first. There is no single reigning account today.

Two things should be said to a student at this point. First, the questions are legitimate and the evidence is in the text, not imposed on it; a faith that requires its adherents not to notice doublets is not worth the effort of defending. Second, the theological authority of these books has never rested, in Jewish or Christian practice, on the reconstruction of their prehistory. The Torah Israel read in exile was the Torah we have. The question of how it reached that form is a genuine historical question, and it is not the same question as whether it is true.

Stand at Exodus 24 and look back at where the module began. A nameless king, two midwives who lied to save babies, and a God who had said nothing for four hundred years. Between then and now: a name given at a bush, an empire's gods put on trial, a meal eaten in haste behind a bloodied door, a sea, a song, a mountain, and a covenant.

The movement has a shape worth naming. God hears, God acts, God speaks, God binds himself. Rescue precedes command at every stage, and the commands, when they come, are the terms of a relationship already established by grace. Israel does not obey its way out of Egypt. It is brought out, and then told how free people live.

That pattern governs the rest of the Hebrew Bible and, Christians would add, the New Testament after it. The prophets will indict Israel by it: you were slaves, you were brought out, and now you hold slaves. The Psalms will pray by it. And the next module takes up the question this one leaves open. Israel is bound to God and fed in his presence at the top of the mountain. Within seven chapters they will be worshipping a calf at the bottom of it, and the rest of the Torah has to answer how a holy God can live in the middle of a people like that without destroying them.