ABSTRACT
The Old Testament describes the fact that Yahweh is Israel's God and Israel is Yahweh's people not merely indirectly. In line with this is the fact that the group of texts which essentially represents the third stage has its literary provenance round about the Babylonian exile. These suppositions are supported by an Old Testament passage, Genesis 33.20, which seems to testify indirectly to the worship of a god in Shechem who was probably Israel's God but was not called Yahweh. The dropping of the complete reciprocity emerges even more radically in the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic literature where we frequently find only one half of the formula used the half in which Yahweh declares Israel to be his people. The author has already shown that it is improbable that the complete covenant formula could have been used in the context of any such ceremony.
