Covenants and Promises, Part 1: Escaping the Covenant

The covenants and promises of the Old Testament were made thousands of years ago, yet they sit underneath what is happening in the Middle East today. Andrew opens this two-part Hot Topics study with a pattern he has seen many times: people who leave the faith they grew up in, and the few who feel guilty about it and go on to attack it. He then looks at three ways Jewish thinkers tried to argue their way out from under the covenant of Moses, with its blessings and curses. **Sigmund Freud.** Near the end of his life, the father of psychoanalysis claimed that Moses was really a priest of the Aten, the single god of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Andrew tells the story of Akhenaten, his abandoned capital at Amarna, Nefertiti, and the boy king Tutankhamun, and points out the problem with Freud's theory: later pharaohs erased Akhenaten so completely that a century later no one would have known what to borrow from him. **Immanuel Velikovsky.** Velikovsky granted that Moses existed but not that God did. In Worlds in Collision he argued that a body thrown off by Jupiter, which later became Venus, passed close to the earth and caused the plagues and the parting of the sea. **Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand.** The third approach questions descent itself. Sand, a historian at Tel Aviv University, challenged the idea of a mass exile after the Bar Kokhba revolt. Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe argued that Ashkenazi Jews descend from the converted Khazar kingdom. If you are not descended from those who swore to the covenant, the argument goes, it doesn't bind you. **The covenant with Abraham.** Andrew sees the Mosaic covenant as temporary and fulfilled in Christ, but the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, 15 and 17 as everlasting, and that includes the promise of land from the Nile to the Euphrates. Who are Abraham's descendants, and what does that covenant mean today? Those questions are why this is still a hot topic. Next time: how Christians should evaluate the covenants with Abraham and Moses, and what, if anything, we owe the modern state of Israel. Part of the Hot Topics series on The Bible in 3D. The Bible in 3D is a Christ-centered Bible teaching podcast from Cogworks Media, hosted by Andrew. Find more shows and ways to give at cogworksmedia.org. Cogworks Media is a 501(c)(3) public charity, and gifts are tax-deductible. Music: The Epic Hero by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/