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Originally Posted by SemperFideles 
First, my concern with the terms is not antipathy to the differentiation between the two Covenants. My concern is that, perhaps, some lessons are drawn from a Hittite treaty that are not properly grammatico-historical and I'm trying to figure out how the Klinean knows where to stop drawing the lines of connection.
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Hi Rich,
I don't see what the problem is.
It is well established in contemporary OT scholarship that there are strong parallels between the ANE treaty patterns and elements of the biblical covenant formulae. Remember, MGK did not invent this line of investigation. George Mendenhall was already doing it and many have worked on it since. One of the reasons MGK was initially interested in this question, and one of arguments he pursued in
Treaty of the Great King is that the ANE (Ancient Near East) treaty forms reflected in Deuteronomy help us date Deut and refute the liberal allegations about the date and authorship of Deut.
Other scholars have also pointed out the correlation between the Royal Grant treaty and other of the covenant formulae in the OT.
My appeal to John is only one example. There are many other examples of correlation between the biblical literature and the literature of the ANE and the 1st century. I am not an OT or NT scholar, but I honestly can't understand why anyone would object to making a good faith effort to read the Biblical text in its original context. Of course the writers used available literary forms. The writers themselves often reflect on that fact. We should draw the lines where ever they exist. Maybe I'm missing something? Is there something bad that might happen? What would it mean to go to far in drawing connections to the ANE? Our doctrine of inerrancy and inspiration says that God the Spirit inspired biblical texts, in a given time and place, making use of the personality, background, setting, language, etc of the time in which the text was written. The more we know about the setting the text, the better we understand it.
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I hasten to remind everyone not to set up a scheme whereby John 1:1-3 cannot happen. Of course it did happen. What happened? The Apostle John borrowed from ancient PAGAN Greek philosophy by calling Jesus the Logos. That was a bold move and one that, I gather, some would say that he either could not or should not have done.
| On the surface this appeared to be a good analogy but then I reflected upon it a bit more.
First of all, John certainly borrowed a term but then he poured a completely different meaning into the Greek understanding of the way the Logos was understood in pagan philosophy.
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Yes, I'm quite aware that John re-define the Logos! That's the point. He borrowed from a heavily laden philosophical term and made it a heavily laden biblical-theological term. As I understand it, Moses did the same with the ANE treaty forms available to him. He took what was a pagan oath-ritual and transformed it into a vehicle for conveying redemptive-historical truth -- in the case of the Suzerain-vassal treaty.
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Thus there are several issues of discontinuity that make your analogy fall down:
1. He was doing so under inspiration, Moses doesn't use the Royal Grant/Suzerain Treaty "lingo". Klineans do.
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"Klineans" (whoever they are!) didn't invent the term "Royal Grant!" This is an accepted term in OT/semitics scholarship.
You're not arguing, are you, that, if Moses didn't use the term, "RG," that we can't use it either, are you? That would an anti-intellectual argument and it would also be the destruction of theology. I don't understand the biblicism implicit in this line of argumentation. Of course we have to use extra-biblical terms to describe what we find in Scripture. We speak of the "prolgoue" to John's gospel. John himself doesn't characterize the opening verses of his gospel as a prologue. Does this mean that we cannot describe it as a prologue?
Must we be inspired by the Holy Spirit to imitate Christ's or Paul's or Peter's Christocentric hermeneutic? I don't think so. I think we can follow the hermeneutic laid out in Luke 24 or John 8 without being inspired by the Spirit. In the same way, I don't think we must be inspired by the Spirit to see connections between the OT and the ANE.
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2. Is it clear to you that Moses borrowed from the Hittites or is it the other way arond? If the former then the analogy would only work if we saw him using the language but then "cleaned up" the understanding of the terms the way that John does to the term Logos.
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Yes, I understand that Moses borrowed existing forms. Think of it this way. Did Moses invent Hebrew? Did Daniel invent Aramaic? Did Paul invent Greek? No. They all used existing language forms. We haven't believed in "Holy Spirit" languages for a very long time. With the discovery of the Oxyrynchus papyri and other such discoveries we've known for a long time that the language of the NT is not exceptional. Borrowing/using an existing language means using existing thought forms. It means negotiating with them to communicate what one wants to communicate. There's no substantial difference between using and existing language, as the biblical writers did, and using existing cultural forms to communicate biblical truth.
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3. If the latter, what if the Hittites dorked up the treaty form that they copied? How do we know they did a good job of representing their treaty in the same way they imitated the way God cut His treaties with Abraham and others?
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I'm afraid I don't understand this question. In any event I guess that I'm not qualified to answer it. So far as I know, per Mendenhall and Kline and McCarthy and others, there isn't a lot of question about the what the forms were and how they were employed -- at least not about the main lines.
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4. Finally, for the analogy to really "work" we would have to go back into Logos philsophy and import pagan notions about what the Logos represented into John so that we could have a fuller understanding of what he's talking about. In other words, the Klinean approach is not simply saying that the terms are the same but that we need to look at how the pagans understood the thing and bring them over into Scripture so we can understand how God intended us to understand them.
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No, I think there is a misunderstanding here. John appropriated a loaded philosophical term and Moses appropriated an existing civil-religious form or better, God himself appropriated covenant forms to express law and gospel. Neither of these things was innocent. That fact did not prevent God from appropriating and using them.
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In fact, I think that last point really highlights my concern. Why would we not import the pagan Logos notions into the Johannine presentation of the Logos? After all, if the pagan understanding of the covenant for the Hittites is useful to understand the nature of the Covenants then why isn't the pagan understanding of the Logos useful for understanding the nature of Christ?
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My point is only that the problems associated with a loaded term did not prevent John from using it. The religious associations attached to the Treaty forms did not prevent Moses from using them. I'm not saying that Moses appropriated the religious thought behind them.
Of course, as I pointed out before, Justin Martyr did exactly what you suggest and it led to serious error (a form of universalism). He failed to see how John re-defined the Logos.
Moses' appropriation of the two major ANE treaty forms did involve some significant modification of them, but they seem to follow the main lines so that people of the 16th century BC would have recognized the forms that were being used.
Is there something else going on here, behind the question, or is it really just the idea that Moses appropriated ANE treaty forms that troubles?
rsc