The Hebrew covenant, from its beginning with Abraham (or Adam or Noah), promised expansion, and represents a spiritual and material path to prosperity for an embattled people. A second feature of covenant lies in its ever-expanding nature. Covenant requires regeneration: each generation must consciously remember, lest the people lose their identity and let their traditions die.
Patriarchs, judges, kings, and prophets must continually remind the people of their cultic and ethical duties, otherwise they begin to worship other gods and cheat the weakest members of society. The chosen people tend to forget their special relationship with Yahweh. Hebrew scripture tells the story of covenant: a constant, unending renewal of the relationship between God and the descendants of Abraham. How do the three covenants inhere within one another? I address this question by taking cues from scripture in order to articulate a more profound respect for earth and its creatures. God is the “between” that links Jews, Nations, and Earth, that connects the various chosens in a common vision of reciprocity, kinship, and peace. The lines connecting the dots would be the proper sets of relations among these three covenant-bearers, and it is the proper ethical and spiritual relations that can be termed “the Kingdom of God” in Christian parlance.
Envisioned as a triangle, one point would be Abraham and his line, the second point would be the Nations, and the third point would be the land and the animals, all bound together in ties of mutuality. These covenants are not separate, but represent different, non-sequential aspects of the same unfolding of sacred history. The Hebrew covenant unfolds along three trajectories, what can be called three “covenants” or three “aspects” of the divine plan for creation. The Third Covenant: People, Animals, and Land in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures
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