Covenant Confirmation

SUCH a procedure was one of the methods in olden times of confirming a covenant. When the ancient Orientals came together to make an agreement, they had different ways of doing it. For instance, we read in the Bible concerning a covenant of salt. They would sit down and eat salt together, and that was a pledge of covenant relationship. Sometimes confirmation took the form of the striking of the hand. We call it a “handshake.” We make an agreement together and say, “All right, this thing is settled; here’s my hand; let’s shake on it.” That is a confirmation of an agreement and of a covenant. But there was another, far more dramatic way of confirming a covenant. This method was followed when two parties made an agreement or covenant of great importance. They would take an animal, a clean animal, quite often a calf, cut it in two and lay the pieces opposite each other. Then the two parties to this covenant would meet between these bloody pieces, join hands, and standing between the bleeding carcass, would repeat something like this. “Let it be done unto him who breaks this covenant as was done unto this animal. Let him die the death.” That action then became the confirmation of the covenant.

Abram and God are following a similar procedure. Such an act of confirmation is also mentioned in Jeremiah 34:18-20. Here God is finding fault with those who have broken His agreement:

“And the men who transgressed my covenant and did not keep the terms of the covenant that they made before me, I will make them like the calf that they cut in two and passed between its parts— the officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf. And I will give them into the hand of their enemies and into the hand of those who seek their lives. Their dead bodies shall be food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth.”

God here promises judgment upon the nation of Israel because it had broken His covenant made between the pieces of the sacrifice.

Adapted and modified excerpts from Studies in the Life of Abraham by M. R. De Haan (1891-1964)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
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