In English we make a covenant, the way we make a promise or make a deal — a construction, assembled out of words. Hebrew does not make one. Hebrew cuts one. Karat berit: to cut a covenant. Karat is a woodsman’s verb and a butcher’s verb. It is what is done to a tree, to a foreskin, to a man who is cut off from his people. Whatever a covenant is in the Hebrew mind, it is not drafted. It is severed into being, and something does not survive the making of it.
Abram asks how he shall know. He has been promised a land and an heir, and he wants, reasonably, some assurance. The answer is not a document. Bring me a heifer of three years, and a she-goat of three years, and a ram of three years, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon. He brings them. He kills them. He splits each animal down its length and lays the halves facing one another with a lane of bare ground between, and the birds he does not divide. Then he waits, driving off the carrion birds that come down on the pieces, until the sun goes low.
