Don’t you know that the Lord, the God of Israel, has given the kingship of Israel to David and his descendants forever by a covenant of salt? [2 Chronicles 13:5 (NIV)]
Eighteen years after the kingdom divided and Jeroboam became king of the northern kingdom of Israel, Rehoboam’s son Abijah became king of Judah, the southern kingdom. As Solomon’s grandson and David’s great-grandson, Abijah was part of David’s dynasty; Jeroboam was not. Although 1 Kings called Abijah a sinner, 2 Chronicles recorded the one highpoint of his short reign. War broke out between Israel and Judah and Judah’s warriors were outnumbered two to one. As the two kings squared off, Abijah shouted out to Jeroboam and his army. Referring to the “covenant of salt” between God and David, Abijah called Jeroboam a traitor, his men scoundrels, and charged Israel with rebellion against the Lord’s chosen Davidic dynasty of kings. Their rebellion hadn’t been against Solomon or Rehoboam; they’d rebelled against the kingdom of the Lord! Continuing with his tirade, Abijah charged the northern kingdom with apostasy because of their idolatry and illegitimate priests. After pointing to Judah’s faithful worship, he warned Israel they would not succeed because God was with Judah. Indeed, in spite of overwhelming odds, Scripture tells us “God routed Jeroboam and all Israel” and the Judeans were victorious because they “relied on the Lord, the God of their ancestors.”
I was curious about the “covenant of salt” mentioned by Abijah. The Hebrew word for covenant was berith which meant a pledge, treaty, alliance, or agreement between two or more parties. Personal covenants were made between people, political ones between nations, legal ones within a nation, and sacred ones between God and people. There usually were conditions that needed to be upheld for the covenants to remain in effect. The Old Testament records God’s covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David. The covenant to which Abijah referred was God’s promise that David’s line would have a kingdom and his royal dynasty would last forever. This one verse in Chronicles, however, is the only mention of that being a “covenant of salt.”
Maybe no detailed explanation of a covenant of salt was needed simply because salt, as a symbol of permanence and perpetuity, was part of covenant making throughout the ancient world. Along with its mention in Hebrew scripture, evidence has been found that the Babylonians, Persians, Arabs, and Greeks all used salt in the context of an agreement or covenant. When used in conjunction with the sealing of treaties and covenants, it symbolized a lasting agreement. Parties commonly shared a meal featuring salted meat when establishing a treaty and it was understood that people who shared salt were united by mutual obligations. An ancient letter from the Neo-Babylonian/Chaldean Empire refers to a tribe’s covenantal allies as those who “tasted the salt of the Jakin tribe.” When Ezra wrote of being “under obligation” to the Persian king, a literal translation of the verse explains their commitment was because “we have salted with the salt of the palace.” [4:14] Today, some Arabs continue to seal a pact of friendship with a gift of salt.
A “covenant of salt” signified an everlasting covenant or agreement that was sealed or ratified with salt. When Abijah spoke of the covenant of salt, he was asserting God’s unswerving faithfulness to the Davidic covenant—a covenant that was to last for perpetuity. There was, however, one more covenant—the new covenant prophesized by Jeremiah and fulfilled in Jesus. Rather than a covenant of works, it is one of grace—one of forgiveness, new hearts, and the indwelling Spirit! This was the new covenant of which Jesus spoke during that last supper—quite likely at a meal where people shared salt as well as bread and wine.
For many in the Christian community, last Wednesday marked the beginning of Lent, a season in remembrance of the forty days Jesus fasted in the wilderness and was tempted by Satan. For them, Lent is a penitential season of repentance, fasting, and self-denial leading up to Easter. The idea of fasting as a form of preparation for Resurrection Sunday comes from Jesus’ statement, “But the time will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them; and when that day comes, they will fast,” found in Mark 2:20.
When talking with my husband about the story of Jonah, he said that the fish story was a “little too hard to swallow”— too incredible to believe. Miracles! The Bible is full of them and, since they are supernatural events, they’re all hard to accept as true. Improbability is the nature of miracles. Along with the fish saving Jonah, the story is filled with other miracles: the immediate calming of the storm once Jonah was thrown in the sea, the deliverance of the prophet from the fish safely onto the beach, Nineveh’s immediate repentance, the appointment of the plant, worm and scorching east wind as teaching tools, and even God’s revelation of Himself directly to Jonah! Yet, if we believe the Bible is God-breathed and without error, we don’t have the privilege of picking and choosing which miracles we will believe and which ones we won’t. We have only one choice to make—all or none!
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it was to warn the people that they would be destroyed for their sins. While we tend to focus on the miracle of Jonah and the sea creature, the real miracle in the Book of Jonah is the city’s response to the prophet’s message—Nineveh immediately repented of its sinful ways. Some forty years later, however, the Assyrians were once again back to their old behavior: rejecting God’s authority and worshipping idols. Around 740 BC, they attacked northern Israel and, in 722, they invaded the remaining kingdom and took Samaria, just as both Hosea and Amos had prophesized they would. The northern kingdom’s population was resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire and Samaria became the center of a new Assyrian province.
Since Nineveh was famous as the religious center for the worship of Ishtar (Astarte), the goddess of fertility, we might wonder why this pagan city repented after hearing Jonah’s prophecy? Jonah was an Israelite not an Assyrian—he believed in Jehovah and the people of Nineveh were pagans. Some speculate that the Ninevites had learned of Jonah’s miraculous delivery from the fish but Nineveh was about 500 miles from the sea and, since the fish delivered Jonah onto the beach, that seems highly unlikely! Was Jonah such an eloquent speaker that the heathen people of Nineveh would respond to him when, more often than not, the people of Judah and Israel ignored the words of warning they heard from the prophets who were their own countrymen? What caused the king and 120,000 of his subjects to make such an immediate turnaround?
The first thing to clear up when writing about the Book of Jonah is whether it was a fish or a whale. Both the Hebrew word (dahg) and the Greek word (ketos) in later translations were used to describe this sea creature. In 785 BC, at the time of this story’s writing, neither language had a word that could identify the exact species so it could have been a fish, shark, whale or some other now extinct large sea creature. For those who choose to use this discrepancy to attack the Bible’s veracity, it’s probably wise to remember that Linnaeus’ classification of living things occurred in the 18th century and not 2,800 years ago when Jonah was swallowed by something huge in the sea. When learning the story in Sunday school, most of us were told it was a whale. Having seen Disney’s Pinocchio with Geppetto living in a whale’s belly, it was easy to picture Jonah doing the same.
