ABSTRACT
The status of those addressed in the covenant was also linked to the definition of what Israel was: Abraham’s covenant implied a kin-based definition, and a validity not limited to Israel (for other peoples also descended from Abraham). The Shechem treaty referred to a tribal league, coinciding with a united Israel that more or less corresponded to Zerubbabel’s (albeit utopian) vision. David’s covenant, like Josiah’s, referred to a well-defined political nucleus (the kingdom of Judah), although that could be expanded to a pan-Israelite perspective. The most suitable model on which to build the post-exile period’s prospects (hence the substance of Nehemiah’s and Ezra’s reforms) was undoubtedly that set in the tribal era: not Joshua’s formulation (both because the latter was concretized by territorial allocation and because it was linked to a centre in the north) but that of Moses, when
Israel was a united but abstract concept, wandering in the unreal spaces of the ‘desert’. The events of the exodus, and the person of Moses (from the Sinai covenant to that on the plains of Moab) thus came to be associated not only with the fundamental definition of the covenant (loyalty in exchange for prosperity) but also with all the other casuistically detailed formulations that constituted ancient Israel’s legislative corpus found in ExodusDeuteronomy: the tôrāh, ‘Law’, which historically came to completion in the days of Ezra, but according to legend was attributed to the archetypal legislator Moses. It is a varied and complex body of texts, with many contradictions, within which smaller (and organic) legal collections can be identified, linked with various episodes in the long exodus, but certainly formulated and drafted in different periods. Unlike ancient Near Eastern society, where a legislative corpus was usually linked to the initiative of a king firmly on the throne (from Ur-Nammu in Ur to Hammurabi in Babylon) the Israelite legislative corpus arose in a different situation: conceived mainly during a (real) period of political destructuring, it was retrojected into another (imaginary) period when the structuring had not yet taken place. The ancient Near Eastern codes had a celebrative purpose, describing how well the current kingdom worked (and therefore how prosperous it was), thanks to the prudent activities of the king in power, while Israelite legislative material had, instead, a prospective function, describing what should be done to achieve a prosperity that had not yet been acheieved.
