This week we are reading Parashat Ekev, the third parashah in the book of Deuteronomy (Deut 7:12–11:25). Here is the very first verse of this week’s parashah:
Deut 7:12 If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, the LORD your God will maintain with you the covenant loyalty that he swore to your ancestors.
That’s the NRSV, not the NJPS translation that I often use in this column, partly because I want to look back a few verses earlier — in last week’s episode as we Jews read the Torah, but already in Deuteronomy 7 according to the Christian chapter breaks. Partly, though, it’s because I want to focus on that phrase “covenant loyalty.” Here is where we read it, just three verses previously, last week:
Deut 7:9 Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.
NRSV makes “covenant” an adjective; NJPS turns “loyalty” into an adverb and stretches the phrase out this way: “keeps His covenant faithfully [v. 9] … will maintain faithfully for you the covenant [v. 12].”
Really what we have here is a hendiadys. Per the Oxford English Dictionary, that’s:
A figure of speech in which two words are connected by a conjunction in order to express a single complex idea.
The complex idea we’re discussing today, the “covenant loyalty” in the NRSV translation of Deut 7:9 and 12, is the combination of these two nouns in Hebrew:
בְּרִית b’rit ‘covenant’
חֶ֫סֶד ḥésed ‘loyalty’
Both those English “equivalents” barely scratch the surface of the Hebrew words they translate. Nonetheless, both NRSV and NJPS are coping (in their separate ways) with the fact that YHWH is not really “keeping” or “maintaining” (Hebrew שׁמר sh‑m‑r ‘keep, guard’) two separate things: the brit and the ḥésed combine in a way that needs something more complicated than “the covenant and the mercy” offered by King James.
This idiom of “keeping covenant loyalty” (as I’ll continue to say for simplicity’s sake) occurs just six other times in the Bible:
“You, who keep Your gracious covenant with Your servants when they walk before You in wholehearted devotion” (1 Kgs 8:23, NJPS). The Hebrew of that verse is repeated more or less exactly in 2 Chron 6:14, where (however) a different committee of JPS translators made our phrase into “You who steadfastly maintain the Covenant.”
“I will maintain My steadfast love for him always; My covenant with him shall endure” (Ps 89:29). Here — as in Ps 114:8 — the two words of the hendiadys are pulled apart to be used to link two parallel lines of poetry.
And the three others: “stays faithful to His covenant” (Dan 9:4, Neh 1:5 and 9:32).
Even שׁמר shamar ‘keep’ is not a perfectly easy word to translate in this idiom. As I explained previously in this column at great length, שׁמר shamar is the word that Deuteronomy uses for what we might call remembering information — keeping track of things. A ברית b’rit is basically a treaty, an agreement, or a promise. In this case, it is the contents of the b’rit that YHWH is remembering.
The most difficult word of the three to translate into English is ḥésed. I taught Biblical Hebrew at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College for a while, and when I first started there I asked a student to translate a verse and the student simply said ḥésed where חסד appeared. It turned out that David Golomb, who taught Hebrew there before me, had forbidden his students to translate the word ḥésed into English.
Nevertheless, I’m going to go where angels (or at least Reconstructionist rabbinical students) fear to tread and translate that word ḥésed as “loyalty.” “Fidelity” might work as well. I understand ḥésed to be the kind of loyalty you owe to someone, or something, that you love: a spouse, a parent, a child, your country. The love is genuine; at the same time, it conveys an obligation to maintain that love and all that it entails. You do that willingly because, after all, you actually love the person.
Now, b’rit. Like an agreement between countries, a biblical b’rit can be imposed by the more powerful partner — who of course is always God in these affairs — but it can also be presented as an agreement between equals. That is how God can bind himself to “covenant loyalty.” Loyalty is something that obligates you, and here it is God who is obligated by his loyalty to Israel.
That’s very appropriate for the book of Deuteronomy. As Moses will tell the Israelites a few weeks from now:
Deut 26:17 You have affirmed this day that the LORD is your God, that you will walk in His ways, that you will observe His laws and commandments and rules, and that you will obey Him. 18 And the LORD has affirmed this day that you are, as He promised you, His treasured people who shall observe all His commandments.
What NJPS is translating as “affirmed” (with a note reading “Exact nuance of Heb. uncertain”) is the verb הֶאֱמַ֖רְתָּ he’emarta, the Hiphil or causative form of the verb אמר amar ‘say’. This verb occurs some 5500 times — one of the most common words in the Bible when you see it in the basic, Qal conjugation. In the Hiphil, the two examples in the verses I’ve just quoted are unique. Perhaps this usage was invented specifically for these verses.
What does it mean? When you meet someone whom you’re attracted to and you want to find out if that person is single, you can ask whether he or she is “spoken for.” I think that in Deut 26:17–18 God and Israel are asserting that they have “spoken for” each other. They are a couple.
That is why, at the beginning of this week’s parashah, in Deut 7:12, it is very appropriate for God to promise that if the people obey God’s commandments then God will maintain the brit and the ḥésed with them: covenant loyalty, if you like, or (if you prefer) the fidelity he promised the patriarchs he would maintain.
Next week, Parashat Re’eh and the beginning of the great central section of the book, Deuteronomic law.
