PASSING OVER INTO A COVENANT.
As these pages are going to press, Dr. Sailer calls my attention to the phrase לעבר בבריתlʾvr vvrt laʿabhor 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 word ʿabhar corresponds with, while it differs from, the word pasakh. 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 word karath (“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 word bo is used for the idea of entering; but its connection with the covenant of marriage would seem to connect it, like the other words, pasach and ʿabhar, with the thought of crossing over the threshold or barrier into a new state.