Covenant, Sacrifice, and Familial Relationships

Abstract In the Hebrew Bible, various instantiations of “covenant” are accompanied or established by various forms of sacrifice. Significantly, these sacrifices are tied directly or figuratively to the importance of generational succession in the reproduction of the bloodline. This indicates a symbolic nexus between covenant, sacrifice, and reproduction. Given this nexus, it is perhaps unsurprising that covenant is analogized to human relational bonds of marriage, the first and oldest instance of which is found in the book of Hosea. In this paper, I trace certain thematic continuities between the association of covenant with sacrifice, the reproductive-familial significance of these sacrifices, and the ethical implications for the association later made between covenant and marriage. I argue that a covenant paradigm should not be applied to marriage for several reasons, notably the potentiality of violence inherent in the covenant-sacrifice-reproduction nexus and the radical asymmetry between God and humans which makes covenant definitive and all-encompassing. My analysis of how the covenant-sacrifice-reproduction nexus functions further nuances the enduring difficulty that Hosea acutely encapsulates for feminist readings of that text as well as covenant paradigms for marriage more broadly.