Forgetting the Covenant of Her God

Abstract Three main proposals have been put forward for how to understand the covenant of the foreign woman’s God in Prov. 2:17: (1) the marriage covenant; (2) a covenant with her foreign god; or (3) the covenant with Yhwh, usually specified as the Sinai covenant. In this essay it is argued that the Sinai covenant is indeed in view, but that to properly square this with the fact that the woman is in fact depicted as “foreign” requires further explanation. It is argued that, with due attention to the socio-political and religious dynamics of the late Persian period (when Proverbs 1–9 is widely agreed to have been written), along with a robust understanding of the constructed nature of ethnic foreignness, emerging tensions between Judah and Samaria in the late Persian period provide a probable scenario for seeing how this was so.