F.
THE WRITING OF THE COVENANT OF THE JEWS is had in the ninth chapter of Nehemiah; in which place it is narrated how the people of Israel, returned from the captivity of Babylon, struck a covenant with God, promising that they would thenceforth keep his law — a public writing being added, and an oath, for the confirmation of the covenant. And they sealed the writing; and to it, in the name of the whole people, subscribed the princes, priests, and Levites, all of the Jews.
THE BOOK OF THE COVENANT, in Hebrew ספר הברית Sepher ha-berith, for which the Seventy interpreters rendered Τὸ βιβλίον διαθήκης, that is, The Book of the testament, is commemorated in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus in these words: 1 AND MOSES wrote all the words of the Lord, and built an altar… and they offered holocausts, and immolated twelve calves. And Moses took half part of the blood, and put it into bowls; but the remaining part he poured upon the altar. And taking the book of the covenant, he read it, the people hearing; who said, ALL that the Lord hath spoken, we will do, and we will be obedient. But he took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people, and said, THIS is the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath struck with you upon all these words. Which covenant indeed Paul, some rites being super-added, in the ninth chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews thus expressed: 2 THE FIRST [testament] indeed was not dedicated without blood. For after Moses had read every commandment of the law to the whole people, taking the blood of calves and goats, with water and hyssop, he sprinkled both the book itself and the people, saying, THIS is the blood of the testament which God hath enjoined unto you. These things we have in the divine letters concerning the Book of the Covenant; which was so called 3 because it was as it were a handwriting [chirographum] of the covenant entered into between God and the people of Israel, containing in itself the promises of God to the people, and of the people to God. For such was the benignity of God, that, although he was free from all law and pact, he yet willed to bind himself as it were by an instrument and contract 4 — that even thus he might render the Hebrews the more certain that he would never fail his promises; and that they themselves might acknowledge themselves the more strictly bound to execute what they had of their own accord promised in this Book of the Covenant, as out of a bond [syngrapha]. He willed also that the promises of this covenant, made on both sides, should be confirmed by the effusion of blood and the slaying of animals, according to the common custom of all nations; which, sheep being slain and by the blood of victims, joined mutual covenants among themselves. That this custom flowed down, from a most ancient usage, even to the Alban and Roman kings, Virgil shows in these verses:
[Aeneid 8] Afterward the same kings, a combat being set between them, armed, before the altars of Jove, and holding bowls, stood, and joined covenants by a slain sow.
[Aeneid 12] With such words they confirmed covenants among themselves, in the midst of the sight of the nobles: then they duly slaughter the consecrated beasts into the flame, and tear out the entrails from the living.
But concerning the writing of this volume there is a threefold opinion. 5 The Jewish interpreters, among whom Rabbi Solomon [Rashi], say that the volume was the whole course of the Mosaic narration, from the beginning of Genesis even to the end of the 19th chapter of the book of Exodus; in which are had all the covenants and pacts which God sanctioned with their fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, together with the other deeds of the Israelite people even to the delivery of the law; which [delivery] the twentieth chapter of Exodus relates [to have been made] after the writing of this volume was composed. Augustine judges that in this volume there were only the justifications — that is, the judicial and ceremonial mandates — which are recited from the twentieth even to the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus, the ten moral precepts of the decalogue excepted; which, although Moses reviewed them in the 20th chapter of Exodus (the rule of anticipation being kept, usual among the divine writers), he nevertheless shows afterward, in the 24th chapter, that the decalogue was written by God on stone tablets after the publication of that volume. Thomas Cajetan reckons that in the present volume are comprehended, first and before all, the ten moral mandates, and then the other laws of judgments and ceremonies, promulgated by Moses before the promulgation of the law on the tablets; and this he urges from the very name of covenant which is attributed to the volume. For the sum and head of the whole covenant between God and the people consists in the obligation of the ten precepts. Whence also Moses named the tablets, in which those ten precepts are contained, the Tablets of the covenant. And since God had not yet revealed to him that he would at some time write the laws of the decalogue on tablets, it behooved him, at the beginning of this volume, to write down the ten precepts already brought forth from the mouth of God, that the writing of the pact — which was confirmed by the sprinkling of blood — might be whole and complete; and that the covenant also might be entire, whereby the people, especially through the obligation of the decalogue, were joined to God.