Hebrew Religious "covenant" Concept: Theology - A Sociological Approach,

In recent years, Chinese scholars in the field of Christianity study have yielded a rich harvest, and begin to study Bible intensively. For more than 20 years, there were several treatises and scores of monographes about Bible. However, by comparison with Christianity study, the study of Bible has just started in China, in particular, some fundamental notions in Bible, which are the key to understand Bible and Christianity spirit haven't been given weight to. The notion of "covenant" in Bible is chosen as the subject of this thesis. It reviews the understanding of the relationship between God and Israel by ancient Israel people, and discusses its meaning for Chinese culture.In this thesis, the knowledge of history, sociology, theology, etc. and relative theories are applied to my text study, and also comparative method is used to analyze the texts.On the whole, in Chapter 1, it reviews the research achievements on the notion of covenant, and introduces the methods used in this thesis. In Chapter 2, it briefly introduces the origin and development of the notion of covenant in the history of Israel. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, it analyzes the notion in different social and historical contexts respectively, which shows its special meanings in two different texts. In Chapter 5, it points out the relationship and distinction between two covenantal texts and its meaning for talking this topic in Chinese context. The last part is my conclusion.The thesis believes that the notion of covenant is the central idea in Bible. To understand this notion, we can know the religious faith among ancient Israel people and their understanding of the relationship between God and Israel. However, the notion of covenant had different expressions in different historical periods. Therefore, the notion of covenant was not unchanging but always having new experience been integrated into the tradition of covenant.