CHAPTER 6
Covenant Faith and Qohelet’s Questions
JOHN GOLDINGAY
My title riffs on the title of a lecture on The Wisdom Movement and Israel’s Covenant Faith by David Allan Hubbard and on two sentences in it, “Proverbs seems to say, ‘Here are the rules for life; try them and find that they will work.’ Job and Ecclesiastes say, ‘We did, and they don’t’”.1 Proverbs is close enough to Israel’s covenant faith to use the name Yahweh for God, and its assumptions about rules resemble those of the covenant that we are to consider. I use the word “covenant” to denote a formally sealed commitment between two parties. But it is a tricky word. In British English it can denote a one-sided commitment; people “covenant” their charitable giving, whereas in US English they “pledge” it. And US English uses covenant more in political contexts; the word has complex political and cultural connotations. In Bible translations, covenant usually renders the Hebrew word “ bərît”, but bərît can also be translated by words such as treaty, contract, pledge, or obligation, and can denote a two-way relationship or a one-
sided one. In the Septuagint, diathēkē is the usual translation of bərît, though translators occasionally use sunthēkē in passages suggesting an agreement between two parties; the New Testament regularly uses diathēkē. The Vulgate usually uses foedus but sometimes words such as “ pax” or “ amicitia ”. A further complication (or perhaps a simplification) is that both the Testaments see the relationship between God and his people as covenantal in the sense of involving a definite ongoing commitment between the two parties, even where the words “ bərît” or “ diathēkē” do not occur.
The framework of thinking implied by the word “theodicy” is a modern one that has become prominent in Old Testament study only in recent decades.2 While it can obscure an understanding of the Old Testament, it can also illumine it. Differences between a modern and an Old Testament worldview can give modern readers some insight on the culture-relative nature of our framework. Theodicy is an aspect of our mental horizon 1David Allan Hubbard, “The Wisdom Movement and Israel’s Covenant Faith”, Tyndale Bulletin 17 (1966): 3–33, 6.
2David Noel Freedman published a study of “The Biblical Idea of History” in 1967 with which the following study of the Deuteronomistic History overlaps, but it was too early to use the word “theodicy”. The same applies to Martin Noth’s work of 1943, “a type of theodicy”; see Walter Dietrich, “Martin Noth and the Future of the Deuteronomistic History”, in The History of Israel’s T raditions: The Heritage of Martin Noth, ed. Steven L. McKenzie and M. Patrick Graham (JSOT 182; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 153–75, 173.
BLO_06_TTEV_C006_docbook_new_indd.indd 50BLO_06_TTEV_C006_docbook_new_indd.indd 50 06-12-2022 18:22:5106-12-2022 18:22:51 COVENANT FAITH AND QOHELET’S QUESTIONS 51
that overlaps enough with the Old Testament ’s horizon for it to provide a way into understanding an aspect of it and also into broadening our horizon.
Within the Old Testament, Deuteronomy and the books that follow are among the works that are especially confident about an understanding of God ’s ways and of the propriety of them, and thus about the question of theodicy, while Qohelet questions the possibility of such understanding. Neither deals with the wider question of theodicy, of how evil comes to exist and how it relates to the will and power of God. Both focus on the human experience of blessing and calamity and the possibility of understanding its relationship to whether we act faithfully or faithlessly. It is thus possible to set them over against each other, though the thesis of this chapter is that both resist an unequivocal or binary understanding.
COVENANT FAITH
While Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers work with the concept of covenant and sometimes use the word, the word itself is most prominent in Deuteronomy. Covenant is the framework for portraying the relationship between Yahweh and Israel. Deuteronomy leads into the account of Israel ’s story in Joshua to Kings, which is a “Deuteronomistic History” where Deuteronomy states the principles of Yahweh ’s relationship with Israel, and Joshua to Kings tells Israel ’s story in light of that statement.3 The relationship of Yahweh and Israel is indeed a mutual bərît; Yahweh blesses Israel as Israel lives by Yahweh’s instructions, but afflicts them if they do not. The answer to the problem of theodicy is then that there isn ’t a problem. This framework of thinking appears elsewhere in the Old Testament, especially in Jeremiah and Chronicles, but Deuteronomy to Kings is its classic articulation. It finds clear expression in Yahweh ’s address that opens Joshua, in the account of a confirming of the covenant in Joshua 24, in the framework for telling Israel’s story in Judges, in Samuel ’s address in 1 Samuel 12, in the commentary on the fall of Samaria in 2 Kings 17, and in the recounting of the reigns of kings in 1 and 2 Kings.
At the same time, there is variety in the form of the narrative, in the difference (for instance) between the short stories in Judges, the songs of praise near the beginning and end of Samuel, the extensive narrative about David in 2 Samuel 11 –20, and the linked stories about Solomon in 1 Kings 1 –11. One implication is that an author has not simply created this work as a whole but has assembled earlier material and set it in a framework. In examining its exposition of the covenant faith, we will consider both the material that directly reflects that Deuteronomistic framework and also the rest of the material that the work includes. In their theological perspective as well as their form, the successive books vary in how Deuteronomistic they are; Israel ’s covenant faith as presented in the Deuteronomistic History as a whole is more nuanced than a bald summary of the Deuteronomistic framework indicates.
3This understanding goes back to Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien I: Die sammelnden und bearbeitenden Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1943); English translation: The Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup 15; Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1981). Study of the Deuteronomistic History has become complex, convoluted, and controverted; see, e.g., Albert de Pury et al., ed., Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research (JSOTSup 306; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Thomas R ömer, The So-called Deuteronomistic History (London: T&T Clark, 2007). The discussion focuses on the redactional process behind the work.
BLO_06_TTEV_C006_docbook_new_indd.indd 51BLO_06_TTEV_C006_docbook_new_indd.indd 51 06-12-2022 18:22:5106-12-2022 18:22:51
