Ep 264: God, Israel, and the Suzerain-Vassal Treaty

In this episode I discuss how the covenant God made with Israel in the Old Testament was a form of an ancient Near Eastern suzerain-vassal treaty. Building from the fantastic work of Sandra Richter’s ‘Epic of Eden’ book, a suzerain vassal treaty is one in which a king or imperial power, the suzerain, makes a treaty with a lesser kingdom or people, the vassal. They are asymmetrical in the sense that the suzerain clearly holds the power but also reciprocal in that both parties are contractually...