How do you defeat the decline and fall of civilizations, the fate of almost every world power since the dawn of history itself? That is the question posed and implicitly answered in the Haftara for the second day.

It records a momentous event in Jewish history. The year was 622 BCE and the young King Josiah had been engaged in a massive program of reform to remove the idolatrous shrines and pagan practices of his grandfather, King Manasseh. During the course of the cleansing of the Temple a copy of the Torah was found, evidently hidden during Manasseh’s reign for fear it would be destroyed.

Reading it, the king and his advisers were forcibly reminded of Moses’ teachings in the book of Deuteronomy, which identified the nation’s fate with its faithfulness to its covenant with God. Deuteronomy records a terrifying series of curses spelling out what would happen to the people if they strayed from the covenant. This struck fear into the king. These were not abstract theological reflections. They were a clear and present warning of what might happen to the nation now if they did not collectively return and repent. A century earlier, a not dissimilar fate had happened to the northern kingdom, Israel, at the hands of the Assyrians, and now only the smaller kingdom of Judah was left.

The king assembled the people and together with them renewed the covenant:

He read to them all that was written in the Book of the Covenant that had been found in the Temple. The king stood on his platform and made a covenant before the Lord, [pledging] to walk after Him and to observe His commandments and statutes and laws with all his heart and all his soul, to observe the words of that covenant written in the scroll of the Torah – and all the people committed themselves to the covenant. (II Kings 23:2–3)

The king redoubled his efforts to purify the kingdom. That year, as part of the national renewal, there was a massive celebration of Pesaĥ in Jerusalem: “For the Pesaĥ had not been observed [with such ceremony] in the times of the judges who judged Israel, nor throughout the times of all of the kings of Israel or the kings of Judea” (II Kings 23:22).¹

footnotes: ¹ See also the parallel account in II Chr. 35:1–18.

This was not the only historic occasion on which Pesaĥ marked a covenant renewal. A similar event took place earlier in the days of King Hezekiah. The king had messengers go throughout the land, including those sections of the northern kingdom (the text mentions members of the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun) who remained, inviting them to come not just to celebrate the festival but also to renew their commitment to God and the covenant: “People of Israel, return to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, that He may return to you who are left, who have escaped from the hand of the kings of Assyria” (II Chr. 30:6).

Many came. The text reports, “There was great joy in Jerusalem, for since the days of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel, there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem” (II Chr. 30:26). Evidently Josiah’s later celebration eclipsed even this, because in the days of Hezekiah not all the members of the northern tribes responded favorably to his invitation.

These two great celebrations of Pesaĥ represent something fundamental about biblical politics. They are rooted in the idea of a covenant. Covenants were widely known and used in the ancient Middle East as treaties between nations. Uniquely in the case of Israel, the covenant was between God and a people, through which the people recognized God as their Sovereign and committed themselves to keeping His law. The entire book of Deuteronomy is structured as such a covenant.

The idea of covenant reentered the West in the sixteenth and ­seventeenth centuries, notably in Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, ­England and the first colonies in America. Only in America does it continue to exist, if not as an active principle, then at least as part of its rhetoric of self-understanding.

Covenant is a distinctive form of politics, different from three others. One is hierarchical society, of which the greatest in the past were the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Another is the civic republican society, inspired by the city-states, especially Athens and Sparta, of ancient Greece. Most recently, a further type emerged in the liberal democracies of the West in the second half of the twentieth century: the contract society, a new phenomenon in which the state is seen as an enterprise restricted to keeping the peace and providing ­services in return for taxation.

Covenant societies tend to be politically, though not economically, egalitarian. They are fundamentally opposed to hierarchy. They aim to create a nation, in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Although all societies contain some hierarchical, non-egalitarian elements, covenant societies insist that all are equal in dignity and must be treated as such.

They are also opposed to one feature of civic republican societies, namely the belief that there is no higher good than the state. Civic republican societies came into vogue in the modern era with the French Revolution and they tend to turn politics into a form of religion, which is as dangerous as turning religion into a form of politics. So in the European nation-states of the nineteenth century, politics became replete with the trappings of the ceremonial: flags, symbols, emblems, anthems, parades, oaths, coins, national gatherings and institutions. The state became an object of worship with an exclusive claim on loyalty. This, in biblical terms, is idolatry.

As for the politics of contract, it is too new to know what its future will be. The phrase “social contract” is associated with Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, but they did not mean by it what Western liberal democracies have taken it to be since the 1960s: societies with no shared morality, where the supreme values are autonomy and rights, and the primary political calculations are those of advantage. Almost certainly such societies are too shallow to survive in this form, especially since they fail to make sense of the one value on which all politics depends, namely loyalty.² (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Paul Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

footnotes: ² See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

One important feature of the politics of covenant, though, is illustrated by the Pesaĥ celebrations of Hezekiah and Josiah. Covenantal societies are conscious of their origin at a specific time and place. They emerge out of history: usually a history of persecution, followed by the experience of liberation, often involving a struggle, a journey and a conscious new beginning driven by certain principles of a moral nature. In the case of Israel it was to honor God, keep His commandments and serve Him alone, thus becoming “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6).

Covenants can be renewed. That is what happened in the last month of Moses’ life (Deut. 29), at the end of Joshua’s life (Josh. 24), in the time of Jehoiada, High Priest during the reign of Joash (II Chr. 23:16) and in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (Neh. 8–10), as well as during the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah. The renewal – a national ceremony freighted with religious gravitas – always takes the form of a retelling of the history of the people, emphasizing the kindness of God and the waywardness of the nation. When it obeyed God it prospered; when it disobeyed, it suffered defeat. Therefore the people pledge themselves to remain true to the covenant and loyal to God. Covenant renewal is part historical recollection, part mission statement, part rededication, and there is nothing quite like it in other political systems.

This had real historical repercussions. As Shelley made unforgettably clear in his poem “Ozymandias” (see above), even the greatest empires have declined, fallen and been consigned to archeological relics and museums. Except in the case of Israel and the Jewish people, it has become a law of history. The fourteenth-century Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) said that when a civilization becomes great, its elites get used to luxury and comfort, and the people as a whole lose what he called their asabiyah, their social solidarity. The people then become prey to a conquering enemy, less civilized than they are but more cohesive and driven.

Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) described a similar cycle: “People first sense what is necessary, then consider what is useful, next attend to comfort, later delight in pleasures, soon grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad squandering their estates.” We might call this the law of entropy – the principle that all systems lose energy over time – applied to nations.

Covenant renewal defeats national entropy. A people that never forgets its purpose and its past, that reenacts its story in every family every year, a nation that attributes its successes to God and its failures to itself, cannot die. It may go into exile but it will return. It may suffer eclipse but it will be reborn. That is no small exception to the otherwise universal law of the decline and fall of nations – no small gift of Pesaĥ to the eternity of Israel.