The Jewish of Torah's Idea of the Covenant

Terah and his family group were the first plenty identified as Hebraics. In this first meeting, "it is God who proposes a pact to the patriarch, who is now s regular(a)ty-five years old" (Dimont 31). The covenant with Abraham identifies Abraham and his race as the chosen people, and God says that if Abraham will succeed His commandments, God will place the descendants of Abraham under His security department:

God at this time stipulates save one commandment, and makes only one foreshadow. The commandment is that all males must be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, or, of converted into the faith, then circumcised upon conversion. The promise is the land of Canaan (Dimont 31).

This covenant was a new predilection and marked a turning point in mankind history:

The notion of the covenant is an extraordinary idea, with no analogue in the ancient Near East. It is true that Abraham's covenant with God, beingness personal, has not reached the sophistication of Moses' covenant on behalf of an entire people. except the essentials are already there: a contract of regard in return for special favor, implying for the first time in history the existence of an ethical God who acts as a kind of benign constitutional monarch bound by his own righteous agreements (Johnson 17).

The covenant with Moses on Mt. Sinai involved the livery of the Decalogue, which would be "the basis of the covenant with God, first made by Abraham,

Johnson points out that the patriarchs lived and that their stories lived after them, provided what happened was that they "dissolved into myth and became no more substantial than Hercules and Perseus, Priam and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Aeneas" (Johnson 6). Johnson is speak as a historian, and even as myth, the patriarchs and matriarchs teach lessons and purport various important facts nigh the foundation of the Hebrew people. Johnson notes this as well when he writes,

2. An understanding of the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs in Hebrew usance helps explain the development of that tradition and so explains the nature of the Hebrew people, the derivation of their beliefs, events that took place in their history, and so on.

The Judaic people of today are also explained through such a study, given that they have inherited their traditions from the biblical Israel.

As they looked about them, these harbingers of the early Haskala saw half of Eastern Europe's Jews infected with the Chasidic doctrines of salvation. The Hasidists, they realized, were their enemy, and they aligned themselves with the reluctant rabbis to weaken that enemy (Dimont 354).

Maimonides was an intellectual snob, however, who measuredly wrote only for the learned, feeling that nobody else would understand him; but he wrote with the beauty and clarity of a great novelist, and made even the most complex reasoning seem simple (Dimont 184).

Levenson, Jon D. Sinai & Zion. sugar: Winston Press, 1985.

Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Mind. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper, 1987.

The Jewish Enlightenment is most tied to the Enlightenment in Germany because in Germany the movement sought a new understanding and readjustment with the religious spirit in man, as did the Jews:

Maimonides differed with the Talmudic scholars of his time on several points which created disputes and raised criticism of his book
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