What Has Ur of the Chaldeans to Do with Sinai? The Abrahamic and Sinaitic Covenants in Second Temple Biblical and Extra-Biblical Texts

How did Jews in the period before the rise of Christianity, between the time of the composition of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (ca. 400 BCE – 90 CE), understand the relationship between the Abrahamic and Sinaitic covenants?

Many biblical scholars have insisted that the Abrahamic and Sinaitic covenants are different types, with the former being a covenant of divine promise and the latter a covenant of human obligation. An early form of this distinction appear in the writings of the Apostle Paul who insisted that Gentiles do not need to keep the Mosaic Law before joining the Christian movement. Paul pointed to God’s covenant with Abraham to justify his position, quoting Gen 15:6 in his Epistle to the Galatians (3:6). In Gen 15:6, the writer in Genesis declares that after receiving God’s promise that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars (Gen 15:5), Abraham “believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

The primary aim of this project is to study how three Jewish texts in the Second Temple period portrayed the relationship between God’s covenant with Abraham and God’s covenant with Israel at Sinai. Two of the texts under examination are from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible – Nehemiah (ca. 400 BCE) and Tobit (ca. 225-175 BCE) – and one is the non-canonical Jewish composition, Book of Jubilees (ca. 150 BCE). The project demonstrates that these three works regarded the Abrahamic and Sinaitic covenants in a continuum, portraying God’s covenant with Abraham as a precursor to the God’s covenant with Israel at Sinai.

The ways in which Nehemiah, Tobit and Jubilees portray the two covenants suggest that in the time before the rise of Christianity, Jews did not regard God’s covenant with Abraham as a “covenant of grace” and God’s covenant with Israel as a “covenant of works.”