In the dramatic events at the sea (Exodus 14-15), the Hebrews experienced deliverance. But deliverance was into the wilderness struggle and not the promised land. At times they did not have enough food or water (Exodus 16-17). The journey was strenuous and long.
In the midst of these hardships, the people "murmured" against Moses and longed to be back in the slavery of Egypt where they had had food (Exodus 16:2-3). To the Hebrews, as to many since their time, the security of bondage looked preferable to the struggles of freedom. In all of these wilderness crises, God, working through Moses, provided the resources the people needed and rebuked them for their lack of faith. They were delivered, but they were not yet a people. That was to be accomplished when the Hebrews finally made camp at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19).
The deliverance from Egypt represented God's initiative toward Israel, but at Mount Sinai the motley group of former slaves was given the opportunity to respond by becoming a community covenanted with God. They had experienced God's grace. How were they to live in acknowledgment of that grace? The central purpose of the message delivered at Sinai was to shape a community of faith that would choose to harness its future to divine power in covenant obedience.
Israel accepted that demanding relationship and began in its encampment to discover the full meaning of covenant obedience. At Sinai, Israel became God's people, called upon to embody the experience of God's deliverance in a community for which love of God was intimately bound with love of neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). Israel was liberated from oppression and suffering, and was liberated for community and mutual responsibility.
An Alternative Community of Covenant
Israel's life as a faith community was definitively shaped by a distinct consciousness of religious and social reality that set it apart from the prevailing cultures of the surrounding ancient world. Israel understood itself as being called to life as an alternative community, clearly different from the models of community seen in the neighboring cultures of the biblical period, the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Canaanite cultures. Of course, influences from these cultures did exist, but at the level of basic perspective, Israel was not to be "like the nations." When Israel was tempted to emulate the nations in ways that compromised the covenant understanding, God's covenant messengers, the prophets, called them back to faithfulness.
The beginning point for this understanding of alternative community is the establishment of covenant at Mount Sinai in the time of Moses. Covenant is the Old Testament term that designates this understanding of alternative community. The Hebrew word for covenant, b'rith, was a common word used for an agreement or a contract. It is used elsewhere in the Bible in this common meaning, sometimes for agreements between human partners (as between Jacob and Laban), but even for the promises given by God to the ancestors (as in Genesis 15). From Sinai onward, covenant becomes the designation for that special relationship established between Yahweh and Israel as a response to God's salvation in the Exodus events. Exodus 20:2 begins the most important of the covenant texts, the Ten Commandments, with this acknowledgment: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."
For Israel the alternative understanding of covenant emerged and was defined over against the imperial reality of Egypt. Egypt was formed in the pattern of the great cultures of that time. The power of the nation was intimately tied to the power of the gods. When Egypt was weak, the gods were said to be weak; but when Egypt was strong, the gods were said to be strong. The power of the gods of Egypt was measured in the world by the strength of Egypt's military might, Egypt's economic strength, and Egypt's cultural greatness. Against this imperial reality Israel emerged with an alternative pattern of community that was quite distinct in its religion, politics, and economics. With only slight variations, this covenant model served as well to set Israel apart from the later empires, kingdoms, and cultures which it encountered.
The following discussion examines how the covenant model understands religion, politics, economics, and their interrelationship in faithful community. This covenant model is very similar to the alternative community demonstrated in the life of the earliest church following Pentecost. For that reason New Testament reflections of the covenant model for faith community will be referred to at points.
The Covenant God
The origin of the covenantal understanding is religious. It rises out of a growing experience of relationship to a God characterized by freedom, vulnerability, and fidelity.
Israel's God is defined first and foremost by divine freedom and not by the fate of any particular culture or nation. This conception of the radical freedom of God emerges in opposition to the nationally defined gods of imperial triumphalism in Egypt. The God of covenant is so free that God can choose to enter relationship with a people who are merely a band of slaves with no standing, no power, no influence in the world. This God is defined by freely offered compassion to those who, by the world's definition, are the helpless, the oppressed, and the dispossessed.
It is the covenant God who says in Exodus 33:19, "I will be merciful to whom I will be merciful." We resist this statement because we usually take it to indicate divine arbitrariness rather than divine freedom. The biblical tradition stresses the fact that we have become God's people not out of special merit, but only out of freely given grace. "It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you...but it is because the Lord loves you" (Deuteronomy 7:7).
The freedom of God is asserted over and over again in the biblical tradition. It is the radically free God who out of the whirlwind reminds Job that even his perfect righteousness and his suffering do not coerce God (Job 38). It is this same God who forgives the Ninevites, much to the disgust of Jonah (Jonah 4). This is the God known to the prophet of the exile who sees the Persian king Cyrus, king of a pagan empire, as the instrument of God's salvation and calls him God's anointed (Isaiah 45:1-7).
It is of the freedom of God that Paul writes when speaking of justification by faith alone in Romans 9:14-16: "What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means, for he said to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy…' So it depends not upon human will or exertion, but
upon God's mercy."
God not only is free but also has chosen to use that freedom to enter into relationship. Freedom alone could result in an aloof, uncaring God but covenantal texts instead portray a God who uses freedom to become vulnerable to human experience.
A remarkable word often used to show this side of God's character is the Hebrew word usually translated as "compassion." It is a word derived from the Hebrew word for womb. God's compassion is a kind of womb-love. Here the biblical witness has chosen an image which points to the total involvement and interrelationship of two lives as when a mother carries a child. Thus God's compassion is a metaphor of the womb, which speaks to us of God's total involvement with the covenant people. It is an image of life participating in life, coming together as one in covenant relationship. "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15).
Alongside the freedom and vulnerability of God stands the fidelity of God. The covenant making at Sinai represents the beginning of a story of God's faithfulness which stretches on through the whole Old Testament. Israel can choose to break covenant and therefore sever the relationship, but God's love and the offer of that relationship are never withdrawn. Nowhere is it suggested that covenant is anything less than a permanent and unconditional offer initiated freely by God.
God's fidelity to the freely given covenant relationship becomes the basis in Israel's faith for justice, righteousness, and wholeness (shalom). These qualities can only exist in history if they are based in a radically free God who is not limited by history yet is trustworthy in relationship to that history. Any attempt to locate justice and its related qualities in the social order itself is destined to fail, since even the most noble attempts at just community experience brokenness.
Israel's own history is eloquent testimony to this. Even the covenant community fell into patterns of oppression and privilege. Hope was possible because God, in whom justice rests, was free and faithful. Thus the prophets could announce both judgment and hope in the name of that covenant God.
The Politics of Covenant
In embracing a covenantal understanding of community, Israel adopted a politics of justice that contrasted sharply with the use of centralized and hierarchical power characteristic of the nations that surrounded Israel. The basis of Israel's covenant politics was the equal claim of all persons before God. The use of power and the making of decisions were to reflect this worth as fully as possible.
The covenant community was to resist the granting of special privilege in society to an elite group. Even the great Moses was judged and denied access to the promised land when he began to claim special privilege before God as a prerogative of leadership. The law codes show that Israel's concern was to structure its life in a manner that ensured the fullest possible participation of all persons. The denial of full participation in the community was considered a serious breach of the integrity of the entire community.
Recent studies of the sociology of early Israel have shown that Israel's social structure in the earliest periods was characterized by an egalitarian and decentralized system of authority. This system of covenant federation, tribes, clans, and families represented a kind of dispersed, decentralized political structure that stood in sharp contrast to the patterns of other ancient cultures. Israel tended to operate from the grassroots up rather than from the top down.
It was the principle of justice that was to guard the integrity of Israel's political order. Israel's justice was to reflect God's justice in its valuing of all persons. In attempting to embody this principle, Israel structured its life in a non-hierarchical fashion and resisted the notion of permanent offices for the exercise of power. This political system was buttressed by an elaborate judicial system to ensure the access of all, especially the weak, to justice within the community.
The earliest church as seen in the New Testament reflected a similar alternative pattern. Jesus rejected the authoritarian and hierarchical patterns of society in his time. "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant" (Matthew 20:25-26).
Following Jesus' acceptance of all persons regardless of social status, membership and leadership in the early church crossed the bounds of culturally accepted patterns of class, race, culture, and sex. All had access to God through Christ (Galatians 3:28) in what has been called a tradition of coequal discipleship. The patterns of the early church were, like Israel's covenant, intended to be participatory.
The Economics of Covenant
The third element of the covenantal pattern is an economics of equality. Here we are dealing with the use and distribution of resources within the social structure of the community of faith. The principle by which Israel tried to organize its economic life is captured in the story of the manna in Exodus 16, which follows the experience of deliverance at the sea.
When God sent the manna as food for the people's need in the wilderness, "The people of Israel gathered, some more and some less. But when they measured it with an omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; each gathered according to what he could eat" (Exodus 16:17-18). That conception of equal access to community resources according to need formed the cornerstone for an economics of equality, which was spelled out in radical terms during Israel's early life as a covenant community.
For Israel covenant was expressed not only in love of God but also in love of neighbor, and in particular the neighbor in need. Over and over again, the earliest law codes emphasized the importance of systems that distributed the resources of the community so that everyone could fulfill their basic human needs. This concern to supply the necessities of life extended even to the stranger and the sojourner.
Much can be learned from the seriousness with which Israel attempted to establish concrete structures of care for human needs. God had identified with the dispossessed; therefore, the care of those in need was not regarded in Israel as an act of individual, voluntary benevolence. The poor, the hungry, and the needy were entitled to the care of the community.
Underlying this practice was the assumption that genuine need was due either to a breakdown in the equitable distribution of community resources or to the possession of a social identity, such as that of widow or orphan, over which an individual had no control. Thus the responsibility for initiative lay with the privileged rather than with the dispossessed themselves, just as God had taken the initiative to deliver Israel.
The rights of the poor and those in need are delineated in the law codes of the Old Testament. The clearest statement appears in Deuteronomy 15:4-5, 7-8, and 10-11:
There will be no poor among you... if only you will obey the voice of the Lord your God.... If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need…You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging…For the poor will never cease out of the land; therefore, I command you, You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor.
This passage suggests that if the demands of the covenant were fully embodied, there would be no poverty and need. But since Israel, like all human communities, is less than perfect, some of its inhabitants will inevitably be poor. Therefore God's people are commanded to care for them. This task is part of what it means to be the people of God, and it is not an optional activity.
Israel's covenantal law codes give major attention to provision of food for those in need. The poor could pick grapes or pluck grain when passing by a field (Deuteronomy 23:24-25). They also had the right to glean in fields and vineyards and to take any sheaves left behind. Owners were urged, for the sake of the poor and hungry, not to be too efficient in their harvest (Deuteronomy 24:19; Leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22; Ruth 2:1-3). Anything that grew up in fallow fields belonged to the poor (Exodus 23:10-11), and they were to receive the tithe of every third year (Deuteronomy 14:28-29, 26:12).
The Old Testament law codes also provided for the protection of the poor and powerless in the socioeconomic system. Persons were urged to lend money to the poor (Deuteronomy 15:7-8), but the law prohibited the taking of interest (Exodus 22:25). Garments or other items necessary for survival, if taken from the poor as security for a debt, were to be returned each night so that a person might not have to face the night without them (Exodus 22:26-27; Deuteronomy 24:10-13). So that the poor would not remain permanently in debt, the law called for the remission of debts after seven years (Deuteronomy 15:1-2). If a poor man sold himself into servitude because of debts, he was to be given freedom in the seventh year (Leviticus 25:39-55). He should not then be sent out empty-handed but given provision from the flocks and the harvest (Deuteronomy 15:12-15).
A special word must be said about the biblical concept of the jubilee year. Israel knew that the covenant would be broken, and that societal structures for corporate care would be perverted and abused. Thus, the law included a provision for every seventh year to be a sabbath year, and after seven sabbath years, the 50th year was to be a year of jubilee. In these years the inequities of the social order were to be rectified so that justice might be restored in the covenant community.
The jubilee ideal was an attempt to structure the social order in a way that prevented those in need from being locked permanently into poverty. It called in particular for letting the land lie fallow, remitting all debts, liberating slaves, and returning family property to its original owner (Leviticus 25). Many have debated whether such provisions were ever fully carried out. No doubt the jubilee represented an ideal standard of radical societal renewal to restore wholeness and equity. But even if Utopian, jubilee has come to represent the kind of daring vision called for on the part of God's people. Considerable evidence indicates that many faithful figures of the Old and New Testaments, such as Jeremiah and Jesus, took this ideal standard of jubilee seriously, even though the society around them refused the vision.
Most importantly, jubilee became an essential ingredient in the biblical vision of God's future. The language of jubilee is used to describe that final "Day of the Lord" when justice and righteousness shall be established in their fullness. It is the age when "swords shall be beaten into plowshares" (Isaiah 2:4), and "the wolf shall "dwell with the lamb" (Isaiah 11:6).
The economics of equality were also a part of the pattern of community in the early Christian church. In the book of Acts, this report immediately follows the Pentecost experience: "All who believed and were together held all things in common. And they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all as any had need" (Acts 2:44-45; see also 4:32).
Even more striking is Paul's letter to the church at Corinth concerning a collection he is taking up for the church in Jerusalem, which has fallen into severe economic difficulties. "I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that, as a matter of equality, your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality. As it is written, 'He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack'" (2 Corinthians 8:13-15). Paul has returned to the principle of the manna story.
On to Sinai
The church in our time desperately needs to appropriate the images of Sinai as well as those of Exodus. We must become involved in working for social structures that embody God's demand for justice and righteousness. The stress of Sinai is upon corporate as well as individual action. The call is for systemic care rather than for episodic concern. The crises facing this world with its limited resources and its great gap between those who are rich and powerful and those who are poor and powerless cannot be forestalled by band-aid responses to crises while the need for whole new structures of justice goes unnoticed.
The biblical word is clear; we cannot seek our own salvation without seeking that of our neighbor, and we cannot minister to the anguish of our neighbor's soul without ministering to the suffering of our neighbor's body. We have been called into covenant by the action of a free God who has chosen caring relationship to this world. Exodus frees us from the forced labor that builds the Pharaoh's cities, but Sinai calls us to the covenantal labor that is necessary to build the just community.
Bruce C. Birch was professor of Old Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared.
This is part three in a six-part series on the Old Testament roots of our faith, published regularly in 1984.
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