Doing form Criticism with Slippery Genres a Review of Treaty, Law and Covenant

In the past two centuries, biblical studies have generated a mind-numbing amount of literature around the genres of treaty, law, and covenant. Not only is there a plethora of secondary texts concerning these genres, but archaeology has also uncovered many primary sources over the past two centuries that necessitate ongoing consideration in scholarly research. The snowball effect of all this leaves newcomers to the field stymied when they ponder how much they must read before being able to say anything. On the level of primary source material, one problem is that the documents are scattered across so many different collections, sometimes under different titles, which makes it easy to miss important texts. On the level of secondary source material, the problem is that many of these do not reproduce the documents in question, leaving the reader at the mercy of the author when it comes to providing a responsible appraisal of the source data.

Into this situation comes the massive work of Kenneth Kitchen and Paul Lawrence. Treaty, Law and Covenant is a three-volume text that surveys what the authors call a “triple grouping of ancient Near-Eastern documents, governing human relations in that world” (p. 2:xiii). Kitchen alluded to the need for such a study in his tome On the Reliability of the Old Testament (hereafter, OROT), and he has now filled this gap in scholarship.¹ In fact, in certain ways, Treaty, Law and Covenant is a robust expansion and execution of Kitchen’s argument about these genres in OROT.²

The reviewed publication includes 106 documents that range geographically from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Anatolia and chronologically from the late third millennium to the first century b.c.e. Kitchen and Lawrence divide these documents into three categories: laws (i.e., law collections), which govern life in a given community; treaties, which govern relations between communities; and covenant, which is “used by or between individuals or them and groups or in dealings with deity” (p. 1:xviii). In evaluating this titanic project, we will first consider the contents of each volume and then turn to the argument of the work as a whole.

1. Treaty, Law and Covenant: The Contents

1.1. Volume 1: The Texts

With over 1,000 pages, volume 1 is by far the largest of the three. It contains “Part 1: The Texts,” which primarily consists of transcriptions and translations of 106 ancient documents. They are arranged in approximate chronological order ranging from an Old Sumerian treaty between Eannatum of Lagash and the ruler of Umma to a Hellenistic Greek treaty between Rome and Lycia. In between, one finds all of the known major law collections (e.g., the laws of Ur-Nammu and Lipit-Ishtar, the Code of Hammurabi, etc.) and treaties (e.g., those of Hatti, Mari, Sefire, Assyria, etc.) from the ancient Near East.

As far as covenant is concerned, Kitchen and Lawrence derive all of their examples from the Bible; they include both covenants between individuals (e.g., David and Jonathan) and those between humans and Yhwh (e.g., Yhwh and Noah, Yhwh and Abraham, Exodus-Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua 24). However, the authors include only those covenants for which they believe they can isolate something like a covenant document. Consequently, covenants that the Bible mentions without citing—like the one between Solomon and Hiram—are excluded. Also excluded—somewhat perplexingly—is Genesis 17, which would seem closer to a covenant text than, say, the material concerning Zelophahad’s daughters in Numbers, which somehow made the cut as a supplement to the Sinai covenant. A second noteworthy interpretive move that must be disclosed here is the inclusion of 2 Samuel 7, which never mentions a covenant between Yhwh and David and therefore qualifies only through appeal to such texts as Psalm 89, 132; and Jeremiah 33 (pp. 2:84–86).

Before...