PASSING OVER INTO A COVENANT.
As these pages are going to press, Dr. Sailer calls my attention to the phraseלעבר בבריתlʾvr vvrtlaʿabhor bibereeth, to enter, or pass over, into a covenant. This phrase, as Dr. Driver[704]points out, is found only in one place, at Deuteronomy 29 : 12. “That thou shouldest enter [or pass] into the covenant of the Lord thy God, and into his oath, which the Lord thy God maketh with thee this day.”
It is evident that here is the idea of passing over a line or boundary, or threshold limit, into another region, or state or condition. Until that threshold is crossed, the person is outside of the covenant with its privileges and benefits; but when it is crossed, or passed, the person is a partaker of all that is within.
This wordʿabharcorresponds with, while it differs from, the wordpasakh. The two words have, indeed, been counted by some lexicographers as practically equivalents. Thus Fürst[705]gives “pasakh=ʿabhar.” In the covenant which Jehovah makes with Abraham, for himself and his posterity (Gen. 15 : 1–21), when the heifer and the she goat and the ram had been slaughtered and divided, and the pieces laid over against each other as two walls, or sides of a door, with the blood probably poured out on the earth as a threshold between, “a smoking furnace and a flaming torch,”–representing the divine presence–“passed,” or covenant-crossed, the blood on the threshold “between these pieces,” between these fleshly walls or door-posts of the sacrifice.[706]
In Jeremiah 34 : 18, the word appears in its twofold signification,in conjunction with a similar double use of the wordkarath(“to cut”). Jehovah says, “I will give the men that have transgressed [ʿabhar, crossed or passed] my covenant, ... which they made [cut] before me when they cut the calf in twain and passed [over its blood] between the parts thereof.” Again, in Amos 7 : 8, Jehovah says of his reprobate people, “I will not again pass by [ʿabhar] them [covenant-cross them] any more.”
There seems to be a trace of this cross-over, or pass-over, covenant idea in the references to the passing through the fire in the worship of false gods, as at 2 Kings 16 : 3, where King Ahaz is said to have “walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea, and made his son to pass through [ʿʿabhar] the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen.”[707]It is evident that this passing through the fire in honor of a false god was not the being thrown into the fire as a burnt offering; for such sacrifices are referred to by themselves, as at Deuteronomy 12 : 31, where it is said of the people of Jehovah that “even their sons and their daughters do they burn [saraph] in the fire to their gods.”[708]In the same chapter of 2 Kings (17 : 17, 31) the two phrases of causing children to “pass through” the fire, and of “burning” children in the fire, are separately referred to, in illustration of the fact that they are not one and the same thing.
It has already been shown[709]that jumping across, or being lifted over, a fire, at the threshold, is an ancient mode of covenanting, still surviving in many marriage or other customs; and that the blood of both human and substitute sacrifices has often been poured out at the same primitive altar.
Under the figure of a marriage covenant Jehovah speaks, in Ezekiel 16 : 8, of entering into a covenant, when he takes the virgin Israel as his bride: “Yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord God, and thou becamest mine.” Here the more common wordbois used for the idea of entering; but its connection with the covenant of marriage would seem to connect it, like the other words,pasachandʿabhar, with the thought of crossing over the threshold or barrier into a new state.
A notable survival of the primitive reverence for the one foundation, or the original threshold, as the earliest place of sacrifice and covenanting,[710]is shown in the famous “Coronation Stone” in Westminster Abbey. This stone is under the chair in which all the sovereigns of England from Edward I. to Victoria have been crowned. It was brought by Edward I. to England from Scone, the coronation seat of the kings of Scotland. The legend attached to it was that it was the stone pillar on which Jacob rested at Bethel,–the House of God where Abraham worshiped, and where Jacob covenanted with God for all his generations.[711]
“In it, or upon it, the Kings of Scotland were placed by the Earls of Fife. From it Scone became the‘sedis principalis’of Scotland, and the kingdom of Scotland the kingdom of Scone.” Since the days of Edward I., it has never been removed from Westminster Abbey, except when Cromwell was installed asLord Protector in Westminster Hall, on which occasion it was brought out in order that he might be placed on it.
As in ancient Babylonia, in Egypt, in Syria, in India, in China, in Arabia, in Greece, in Scandinavia, the one primitive foundation was deemed the only foundation on which to build securely with Divine approval, so in the very center of the highest modern civilization the reputed foundation stone of the kingdom of the “Father of the Faithful” is deemed the only secure coronation, or installation, seat of King, Queen, or Lord Protector. Is it not reasonable to suppose that this feeling has a basis in primitive religious convictions and customs?
Dean Stanley, referring to this Coronation Stone as “probably the chief object of attraction to the innumerable visitors to the Abbey,” says of it: “It is the one primeval monument which binds together the whole Empire. The iron rings, the battered surface, the crack which has all but rent its solid mass asunder, bear witness to its long migrations. It is thus embedded in the heart of the English monarchy–an element of poetic, patriarchal, heathen times, which, like Araunah’s rocky threshing-floor in the midst of the Temple of Solomon, carries back our thoughts to races and customs now almost extinct; a link which unites the Throne of England to the traditions of Tara and Iona, and connects the charm of our complex civilization with the forces of our mother earth,–the stocks and stones of savage nature.”[712]