Competing Concepts of Covenant in the Hebrew Bible: Grant and Obligation

This lecture will introduce two core concepts of covenant found in the Hebrew Bible, with particular emphasis on the variety of ways in which the two concepts interact.

Benjamin Sommer is Professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary (New York) and Senior Fellow at the Kogod Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought of the Shalom Hartman Institute (New York/Jerusalem). His books, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (Yale, 2015), The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2009), and A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40–66 (Stanford, 1998), received multiple prizes. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz described Sommer as “a traditionalist but an iconoclast – he shatters idols and prejudices in order to nurture Jewish tradition and its applicability today.”