agree completely with the last half century’s consensus of scholarship that the Hittite-style suzerain-vassal treaty was the metaphor, model, and matrix for the divine covenant in the biblical tradition. (I repeat that those treaties were never secular treaties but always sacred contracts.) Covenant in the biblical tradition is, therefore, a religio-political, religio-social, and religio-economic commitment between God and the world as macrocosm or God and Israel as an experimental microcosm.
