2. Treaty People

Around 160 years before Jesus time, the Jewish people living in the land of Israel rose up in revolt against the Greek rulers who ruled them from Syria. These Greek rulers had attempted to make all the peoples of their empire loyal subjects by turning them into Greeks, culturally and religiously. So they banned all things Jewish such as reading the Torah, which they burned and preventing the circumcision of boys. They tried to force everyone to worship Zeus in every town and village, including Jerusalem. They turned the temple of God into a temple to Zeus and sacrificed pigs on the altar. Needless to say, this didn’t go over very well and the Jews revolted.

One of the things that the Greek rulers did in terms of promoting Greek culture was to build a Gymnasium Jerusalem. Now most of you are thinking “Big deal”. So, there was a place to exercise and play games. Well, a gymnasium in that day was quite different than a gymnasium today. When you say the word Gym you are actually saying a shortened version of the Greek word Gymnos which means “naked”. A Gymnasium was a place where Greek boys received physical training in various skills, mostly to do with warfare, and also received their education. All the physical training was done naked. As well, each Gymnasium was dedicated to a Greek god. Again, this didn’t go over very well among the Jews.

So, how does Paul, who before becoming a Christian had been a very zealous Jew, handle the Greek custom of the Gymnasium? He used a part of it as an illustration for being faithful to God!! Read 1 Cor. 9:24-27. Paul uses the imagery of men running a race, In that day in the nude, a very Greek image, to encourage Christ’s followers to be faithful to Christ all their lives, to be completely dedicated to him. So how was Paul able to make such a switch? Well, Paul’s thinking had been transformed by Christ from being focused on only one group of people, Jews, and one place, Israel and Jerusalem, to reaching all the peoples of the world for Christ. This necessitated becoming acculturated to the Greek culture in order to win the Greeks. He said “I have become all things to all people”. In this the Holy Spirit led him. That didn’t mean he picked everything up from the Greek culture and become a pagan. He preached Christ and denounced paganism. But, led by the Spirit, he worked from within the culture of the day and borrowed ideas from that culture in order to convey important spiritual truths.

That wasn’t the first time God had done that kind of thing. God is a God who is Trans-cultural. He is above and beyond every culture on this earth. However that doesn’t mean he doesn’t pay attention to the culture that we as people create for ourselves. Every group of people on earth creates a culture. It’s natural. God has built that into us. Canadians think and act like Canadians which isn’t the same as Americans. Germans are a different in culture than Koreans. Within India you have a massive number of languages and cultures. To assume they are all the same is foolish. Our native cultures are different than our white Canadian culture. E.g. tell story of working with native kids in camp and Cultural Anthropology.

So how does God work with this bewildering array of ways in which people relate to each other? He communicates truth to his people in ways that at times are specific to our cultures and as a result, they, with their particular culture can understand. E.g. Paul using Greek culture with Greeks.

Does that mean that everything God communicates to us is in a cultural robe? No. Many things he communicated to his people were trans-cultural. They apply to every culture all the time. E.g. Commandment to not murder. Every culture intuitively has an understanding that murder is wrong and has a prohibition against it. Another example would be Paul’s use of the one body having many parts imagery that he uses in 1 Cor. to describe the value of each member in the body of Christ. That’s a transcultural concept. Because all people have bodies all people can understand what Paul is saying.

There are, however descriptions of events and teachings in the Bible that seem really weird to us. E.g. When Abram’s wife Sarai couldn’t conceive she gave her servant girl to Abram to have a child. What would possess any sane woman to do so? (Archeology has taught us that in the Ancient culture of the day, this was considered an acceptable practice and the child would be regarded as the child of the wife) Or all the riddles that Samson told when dealing with the Philistines. What’s with all the riddles? (Philistine culture)

So when God rescued his people out of Egypt he didn’t rescue a people divorced from the culture around them. Yes, they were a minority group in Egypt and they had grown up hearing about their ancestors Abram, Isaac and Jacob and his twelve sons. They had grown up hearing about the God who had promised Abram that all the land of Canaan would one day be his descendants. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t influenced by the cultures around them. A lot of what God was doing with his people in the desert was to try to reprogram them from thinking paganly to thinking as a person of faith in Yahweh. A lot about the surrounding cultures wasn’t good. All the idol worship and the practices associated with them both in Egypt and Canaan was horrible. But some practices and customs were neither evil nor good. They just were.

So when God wanted to change his people’s ways of thinking from pagan ways to Godly ways how should he go about it? How do you engender loyalty and faith in a people that have been abused as slaves and will be facing incredible temptation once they enter the land? One way is to use the language and customs that those people are familiar with.

Ancient Hittite Sovereignty Treaties

The kings of the Hittites around the time of Exodus made treaties with a whole range of city states in what is now northern Syria. They were great diplomats and promised to support the kings as kings in their cities in exchange for loyalty to the Hittite king and payment of tribute. These treaties followed a common pattern and because they were so numerous, would have been fairly well known. Moses, being raised in Pharaoh’s household would certainly have been aware of the kind of treaties that the Hittites used because the Egyptians and the Hittites were both major empires and were often at war with each other. This treaty pattern had many variations but here is the common pattern:

7296785-402717000Preamble: An introduction of the Sovereign (Hittite King).

Historical Prologue A summary of the prior relationship of the two parties with explanation of what led to this treaty.

Stipulations Detailed outline of the response demanded of the vassal, usually focusing on absolute loyalty to the Sovereign.

Document Clause Arrangements for the transcription of the document, its storage, and regulations for its reading in treaty renewal contexts.

Blessings and Curses A detailed outline of the consequences of the vassals’ response, with an emphasis on the curses as warnings against disobedience or disloyalty.

Covenant Witnesses A detailed listing of the names of all the gods invoked as guarantors of the treaty.

By Dan Block

When the archeologists and scholars began to translate these treaties and understand what their pattern was, those among them who were familiar with the books that Moses wrote immediately noticed a similarity between these treaties and certain sections of his books. Exodus 19-24 which includes the giving of the Ten Commandments, or as Block prefers, the Ten Words is set up according to this Hittite treaty structure. We usually call it the Sinai covenant. But the word we translate as covenant, “Berit”, is also the word for treaty. A covenant being an agreement between two parties is really the same as a treaty. So at Sinai, God makes a treaty with the people of Israel that he will be their God and they will be his people. All the parts of the treaty outline are in that section of Exodus. In Joshua 24 you have something similar.

So what does all this have to do with the Gospel According to Moses, Deuteronomy? Well, really, the entire book is structured more or less according to this treaty form.

The Treaty Form of Deuteronomy

Preamble (1:1-5).This is not an introduction of the king but an editorial introduction to the document that follows.

Historical Prologue.A summary of Yahweh’s relationship with Israel, including a sermonic

(1:6-4:43)exhortation by Moses (4:1-40).

General Stipulations.This section contains the actual covenant document, the Decalogue, and

(4:44-11:32)an exposition of its principal terms, particularly the call to exclusive devotion to the divine sovereign.

Specific Stipulations.These chapters outline in detail how the general principles are to be

(12:1-26:19)applied in the Israelite community.

Document Clause.According to 4:13 and 5:22, Yahweh provides Israel with a written copy

(4:13 and 5:22; 10:1-4)of the Decalogue—the fundamental covenant document “stipulations of (31:9-13) the covenant”; “the ten words”), and when the original is broken, he provides and exact duplicate, which is deposited in the Ark of the Covenant (10:1-5).

Blessings and Curses.A detailed outline of the consequences for Israel of their response to the

(28:1-29:1) covenant terms. Vv. 1-14 summarize the blessings; vv. 15-68 the curses.

RecapitulationA general restatement of principles and objectives of the covenant.

(29:2-30:14)

Covenant Witnesses.For the first time there are references to external witnesses, but in a

(4:26; 30:15-20; 31:28) monotheistic context there cannot be an appeal to other gods. Instead Yahweh calls on heaven and earth to witness the renewal of the covenant. This is a public event.

The Poetic ChallengeIsrael’s National Anthem.

(31:1-32:47)

EpilogueThe Account of Moses' Departure and Benediction.

(32:48-34:12)

By Dan Block

Does this mean that all we have in Deuteronomy is a complete replication of a Hittite treaty document? No. Much is the same or similar. But not everything. Listen to what J. A. Thompson says about this:

“The terms for 'covenant', 'covenant stipulations', ‘witness’, 'oath', 'blessing', 'curse', 'treaty document', 'obedience', etc., are closely equivalent. On the other hand, the formal and legal elements of the covenant did not exhaust the covenant idea which had to be enlarged to include such concepts as 'love', 'election', ‘covenant loyalty’, 'forgiveness', 'repentance', and a number of ethical concepts which were to characterise the covenant people. The Old Testament understanding of covenant had depths of meaning which were never dreamed of in the secular covenants between the suzerains and vassals of the ancient Near East. A profound transformation and an intimately personal application of the covenant idea took place when Israel adapted the Near Eastern metaphor to express her covenant with Yahweh.”

Conclusion

I find this quite fascinating and some of you do to. So what? Some of you ask. What difference does it make for us today? Does anyone have any ideas? I’ve got a few but I would love to hear yours first.

Leads to a greater confidence in Deuteronomy as a real historical document with forms that date back to the time of Moses.

God is above culture and therefore not bound to any one culture of the world. This means he is a God for everyone.

God is not against culture and is willing to use cultural forms we have devised in order to communicate his truth and his desire to be in a deep relationship of love and loyalty with his people.

This makes God a missionary God, willing to enculturate his truth and love in order to reach more and more people. A modern version of the treaty agreement might be along the lines of a modern sports team drafting players and giving them the identity of the team, or, a Bill of Rights and responsibilities outlining the rights and privileges of citizenship. Paul actually used that kind of language.

God is God. He is the divine sovereign to whom we owe allegiance. There is no other. We are his people and owe him love and loyalty. He in turn has promised to love us and provide everything we need.