Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 56:2 (Jun 2013)
Article: God’s Covenant With Abraham
Author: Jeffrey J. Niehaus

JETS 56:2 (June 2013) p. 249

God’s Covenant With Abraham

Jeffrey J. Niehaus*

* Jeffrey Niehaus is professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 130 Essex Street, South Hamilton, MA 01982.

How many covenants did God make with Abraham? Readers of the Bible for many generations have thought that God made one covenant with Abraham, and so they have spoken of “the Abrahamic covenant.” More recently, some scholars have proposed that God made more than one covenant with Abraham, and they find in Genesis 15, 17, and 22 sufficient material to invite or to bolster such an understanding. Those chapters offer enough data, some of them overlapping, to make the construction of an argument for two Abrahamic covenants possible, as, for example, Paul Williamson and Scott Hahn and others have done. We will see that such arguments are in a sense inductive, leading toward a conclusion by a selection and reassembly of biblical data. Procedurally, this is not much different from the method of scholars who, for example, construct two Flood accounts (“J” and “P”) out of the repetitive material offered in Genesis 6–8. In both cases there is sufficient material, with a mix of overlapping data and distinctive data, to make the reconstruction possible. This, however, does not mean that the reconstruction is correct, since such an approach may be flawed on other grounds.

I would like to suggest another approach, which does not follow an inductive course but rather a deductive one. A deductive approach begins with what the Bible actually tells us about the number of God’s covenants with Abraham. Accordingly, we note that the Bible only ever refers to “the Lord’s covenant (sg.) with Abraham.” I propose that this datum should be the governing consideration in any subsequent analysis. In other words, rather than taking Genesis 15, 17, and 22, and seeing whether one might construe two or even three covenants from them, let us take the biblical affirmation of the Lord’s covenant (sg.) with Abraham as the idea by

JETS 56:2 (June 2013) p. 250

which we understand the materials of the Genesis chapters. If we do, the result will be that their data may properly be seen as all part of one covenant.

It is probably fair to say that people have heretofore thought the Lord made a covenant with Abram in Genesis 15, and then over time added supplemental information,...