Covenant

A binding relationship that constitutes the parties rather than merely exchanging obligations between them.

Theme: Society, politics and power
Tradition: Jewish
Term: ברית · berit
Term fixed: c. 1140

In plain terms

A contract is between parties who exist before it and would still exist without it. Each gives something, each gets something, and either can walk away by paying the agreed cost.

A covenant is meant to be different in kind. The parties are constituted by the relation - a people comes into existence by entering it - and it is not priced, not terminable at will, and not exhausted by the obligations it specifies.

The practical difference shows up when things go wrong. A breached contract is settled by damages. A broken covenant is not settled at all; it is a rupture in a relationship that both sides are still in, which is why the biblical texts are full of denunciation rather than lawsuits.

As a philosopher would put it

The biblical berit takes the form of ancient Near Eastern treaties - historical prologue, stipulations, witnesses, blessings and curses - which locates it in a political rather than a purely religious register. It establishes a relationship in which the parties are unequal in power and mutually bound.

Its political afterlife is substantial. The Reformed covenant theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries supplied the vocabulary for the Scottish National Covenant of 1638 and for New England's founding documents, and the idea of a people constituted by mutual undertaking feeds directly into social contract theory - though Hobbes's covenant is explicitly not one the sovereign joins.

Buber's I and Thou recasts it as a mode of relation rather than an agreement: the covenantal relation addresses the other as a Thou rather than as an It to be used. Soloveitchik's distinction between the majestic and covenantal aspects of the person makes covenant the register in which failure, dependence and community are acknowledged rather than overcome.

Where you meet it

In 1997 Louisiana created a second form of marriage. Couples may choose a standard licence or a covenant marriage, which requires premarital counselling, a signed declaration that the marriage is a lifelong relationship, and restricts divorce to specified grounds - adultery, felony conviction, abandonment, abuse, or a substantially longer separation than the ordinary route requires.

Arkansas and Arizona followed. Uptake has been low everywhere, in the low single-digit percentages of new marriages.

What the statute does is put the distinction into law. Both forms are legally binding; what differs is whether the relationship is treated as terminable by mutual decision or as an undertaking whose dissolution requires cause. A legislature attempted to make a covenant available inside a legal system built for contracts, and the results are instructive in both directions: the category was intelligible enough to draft, and few people chose it.

What is actually disputed

Whether covenant survives outside a religious frame.

Its distinctive features - non-terminability, unconditional obligation, constitution of the parties - are easiest to state where one party is God. Secular covenants have to explain what makes the bond unbreakable when both parties are human and both may want out, and the usual answer is that the relationship changes who they are, which is a claim rather than a mechanism.

The political concern is the reverse. A polity understood as a covenant is one from which exit is not envisaged and dissent is a betrayal rather than a disagreement, which is a considerable part of why the concept has appealed to nationalist movements.

And the asymmetry is unavoidable. Biblical covenants are between parties of enormously unequal power, and reading them as agreements between equals removes the feature that gives them their form.

Commonly confused with

covenant in property law A restriction running with land. Same word, entirely unrelated sense, and a common search collision.

Defined against

Social contract A contract is between parties who precede it and a covenant constitutes them, which makes the pair two rival accounts of what founds a political community

Philosophers

Maimonides The philosophical treatment of law and covenant
Philo of Alexandria The Hellenistic reading of the covenant tradition
Thomas Hobbes The covenant that constitutes a sovereign without binding him
Baruch Spinoza The critical account of the Hebrew polity and its founding
Jean-Jacques Rousseau The act by which a people constitutes itself

Works

The Kuzari The covenant as constituting a people
The Guide for the Perplexed Law, covenant and their rational interpretation
I and Thou The covenantal relation as a mode of address
Leviathan The covenant that founds a sovereign
The Social Contract Its secular successor

Schools

Jewish Aristotelianism Where covenant meets philosophical theology
Maimonideanism Where law is given rational interpretation
Hasidic Philosophy Where the relation is lived rather than argued
Musar Movement Where covenantal obligation shapes character
Natural Law Where the political inheritance is developed

Related concepts

Social contract 1651 · Tikkun olam c. 200 · Legitimacy 1651 · Solidarity 1848 · Duty 1785

Berit is the organising political and theological category of the Hebrew Bible; its philosophical treatment runs through medieval Jewish thought and returns in the twentieth century with Buber and Soloveitchik.