A theological reading of the Covenant as an original relationship of love

“No longer shall you be called ‘Forsaken’,
nor shall your land any more be called ‘Desolate’;
but you shall be called ‘My Delight Is in Her’,
and your land ‘Married’;
for the Lord delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your builder marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:4-5)

Introduction

At the heart of biblical revelation there lies a logic that twenty centuries of moral theology have in part obscured: the logic of love that comes first. God is not primarily a legislator. The Torah is not primarily a code. The covenant is not primarily a contract. And the first commandment — you shall love the Lord your God — is not primarily a command.

To recover the original face of revelation, one must begin with a single Hebrew word: סְגֻלָּה, segullāh. This word, spoken by God at Sinai, contains within it the seeds of an entire theology — a theology of election as desire, of the covenant as marriage, and of the commandments as a response of love. It is this theology that the present article sets out to unfold, from its Hebrew roots through to its consequences for catechesis and Christian life.

I. The Segullāh — A Word that Says Everything

The founding text

The scene takes place at Sinai. Before giving his law, God speaks and says to Israel, through the mouth of Moses, something that might be called a declaration of intent — or rather, a declaration of love. The text is Exodus 19:5:

וִהְיִיתֶם לִי סְגֻלָּה מִכָּל הָעַמִּים         wihyîtem lî segullāh mikkol hāʾ ammîm ‘You shall be for me a treasured possession among all peoples’

The usual translation — ‘you shall be my own possession’ or ‘my people set apart’ — does not fully render the richness of the Hebrew term. The word segullāh designates, at its deepest root, a personal treasure, a precious possession that one keeps jealously close to oneself — not in the storehouses of the kingdom, but in the king’s own chamber.

The royal context of the word

To grasp the full weight of the term, one must situate oneself in the ancient Near Eastern world. A sovereign’s wealth was divided into two quite distinct categories. On one side, the riches of the kingdom: taxes, tributes, spoils of war, agricultural resources — all that belongs to the crown as an institution and serves to finance the army, the administration, the temples. On the other, the king’s private treasury: a personal and intimate collection, carefully assembled, consisting of rare precious stones, works of art, fine metals, exceptional horses. This private treasury does not circulate. It is not destined to be spent. It expresses the personality and the proper glory of the sovereign.

This royal sense of segullāh is explicitly attested in the Hebrew Bible, in Qohelet 2:8:

כָּנַסְתִּי לִי גַּם כֶּסֶף וְזָהָב וּסְגֻלַּת מְלָכִים    kānastiŷ liŷ gam kessef wezāhāb ûsegullat melākhîm ‘I gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasured possession of kings’

Qohelet, speaking as a king, clearly distinguishes this segullāh from his other riches. It is something he has assembled for himself — lî, ‘for me’ — exactly as God says in Exodus 19:5: lî segullāh, ‘for me a treasure’.

The theological logic that flows from this royal usage is striking: since God possesses the whole earth — kî lî kol hāʾāreṣ, the verse itself makes clear — the fact that he chooses Israel as his segullāh is not an economic or political necessity. It is an act of pure predilection. He chooses not because he needs, but because he loves.

The segullāh throughout the Bible

This term does not merely pass through the text of Exodus — it returns like a refrain, at key moments, always carrying the same sense of affective and sovereign election. Deuteronomy repeats it three times: in 7:6, in 14:2, in 26:18. Psalm 135:4 sings it: ‘For the Lord has chosen Jacob for himself, Israel as his segullāh.’ And Malachi 3:17 makes of it an eschatological promise: ‘They shall be for me a segullāh on the day that I am preparing.’

This word thus traverses the entire history of the covenant, from the Sinaitic foundation to the final fulfilment. It is like the signature of God’s love for his people — a signature that can be read in every age, in every circumstance, bearing the same fundamental meaning: you are my precious treasure.

II. The Covenant as Nuptial Relationship — The Original Register

A founding metaphor, not a derivative one

One might be tempted to read the segullāh as an economic metaphor — the king’s treasure — subsequently clothed in affective colouring for the sake of embellishment. But the reverse is true. The nuptial register is not an ornament added after the fact to a juridical logic. It is the primary, original register, within which alone the segullāh takes on its full meaning.

The most ancient evidence for this is found in the Book of Hosea, in the eighth century before our era. Hosea is one of the earliest writing prophets, and his fundamental proclamation is that the covenant of Sinai is a marriage. God addressing Israel says:

וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ לִי לְעוֹלָם     weʾérastîkh lî leʾôlām ‘I will betroth you to me for ever’

The verb אֵרַשׂ — ʾêras — is the verb of betrothal. And Hosea repeats it three times in succession, with an insistence that is almost an incantation of love: ‘I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy, I will betroth you to me in faithfulness.’ This is not the language of a contract — it is the language of a bridegroom. Hosea does not create this image. He reveals it as being what Sinai was from the very beginning.

The possessive structure of nuptial love

To understand how the segullāh inscribes itself within this nuptial register, one must look closely at the most fundamental formula of the Song of Songs:

דּוֹדִי לִי וַאֲנִי לּוֹ   dôdî lî waʾ anî lô ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’

This lî — ‘mine’, ‘for me’ — is exactly the same as in lî segullāh. The grammatical structure is identical. But in the Song, the meaning is fully visible: it is the reciprocal belonging of lovers. To possess the other, in this register, does not mean to dominate — it means to cherish, to hold close, to make the other one’s most intimate treasure.

The segullāh must therefore be read in this light: when God says lî segullāh, he is not performing a legal act of ownership. He is pronouncing a declaration of love bearing the same structure as that of the Song. He is saying: you are my beloved, you are what I hold most precious, you are what I keep close to me above all the peoples of the earth.

The Song itself confirms this nuptial reading of election in another formula: ‘She is unique, my dove, my perfect one… unique to her mother, the chosen of her who bore her.’ The word ʾaḥat — ‘unique’ — plays the same role as segullāh: to designate the one who is set apart from all others, chosen not by calculation, but by pure elective love.

The prophets and the nuptial memory of Sinai

It is not Hosea alone who thinks the covenant in nuptial terms. Jeremiah and Ezekiel take up and amplify this reading. In Ezekiel 16, God recalls for Jerusalem the story of their origins with an intensity that is almost overwhelming. He describes Israel as a child abandoned in the open fields, without family, without care — and God passing by and saying: ‘Your time was the time of love.’ And then he spreads the edge of his garment over her.

This gesture — spreading the edge of one’s garment, kānāf — is in the Bible the gesture of marriage. One finds it explicitly in Ruth 3:9, when Ruth asks Boaz to spread his garment over her, that is, to marry her. In Ezekiel 16, God performs this same gesture towards Israel. The exodus from Egypt, as seen by the prophets, is therefore not merely a political liberation — it is a nuptial act. God sees his people in their misery and destitution, he loves them, he weds them.

And this is why idolatry, in the prophetic language, is never simply described as a transgression of the law. It is always described as adultery. This vocabulary is not an incidental metaphor — it is the only adequate description of Israel’s sin, precisely because the founding relationship was nuptial.

III. The Bundesformel — The Covenant Formula as a Bridegroom’s Word

Grammatical structure of the formula

Throughout the Hebrew Bible there runs what biblical scholars call the Bundesformel, the covenant formula, repeated like a refrain from Exodus through the prophets and on to the Apocalypse:

הָיִיתִי לָהֶם לֵאלֹהִים וְהֵמָּה יִהְיוּ לִי לְעָם    hāyîtî lāhem lēʾlōhîm wehemmāh yihyû lî leʾâm ‘I will be their God and they shall be for me my people’

Let us look carefully at the grammatical structure. God says: yihyû lî — ‘they shall be for me’. This lî is identical to the lî of the segullāh, identical to the lî of the Song. The covenant formula is structurally identical to the nuptial formula of the Song of Songs. This is not a coincidence — it is the same register, the same logic of reciprocal and loving belonging.

But let us also note what the formula is not. God does not say only: ‘you belong to me.’ That would be a unilateral possession, a formula of lordship. He says: ‘I will be your God.’ He commits himself. He gives himself. The covenant is reciprocal because nuptial love is reciprocal — the bridegroom gives himself as much as he receives. It is the reciprocity proper to love that precedes and founds every commandment.

You shall be my people — the nuptial dimension

To say ‘you shall be my people’ in this nuptial register is to say something far deeper than ‘you shall belong to my empire.’ The people, in this context, is the king’s segullāh — the treasure he keeps in his chamber, not in his storehouses. To be ‘the people of God’ in the nuptial sense is to be his own possession in the most intimate sense of the word, to be the object of his elective tenderness, to be the one whom the Bridegroom chooses above all the peoples of the earth not because they have merited this choice, but because he loves them.

Deuteronomy 7:6–8 expresses this with remarkable clarity. Moses addresses the people and says: ‘It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you — for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it is because the Lord loves you.’ The verb used for ‘set his love on’ is חָשַק, ḥāshaq — a verb that expresses amorous desire, passionate attachment. It is found in the Song of Songs. This is not a rational, political, or meritocratic decision. It is a desire. God desires his people.

IV. The First Commandment — A Response to a Prior Love

The apparent abruptness of the commandment

If one opens the Bible to Deuteronomy 6:5 and reads in isolation: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength’, something seems abrupt. Almost a contradiction in terms. How can love be commanded? Is a love that is ordered still love? And above all: where is the declaration of love that ought to precede this injunction?

The impression of abruptness comes from tearing the commandment out of its context. For the text does not begin there. And what precedes the commandment to love transforms its meaning entirely.

The Shema — the declaration of love that comes first

The commandment to love is preceded immediately by the Shema, the most fundamental proclamation of Judaism:

שְמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד       Shemaʹ Yisrāʾêl YHWH ʾElōhênû YHWH ʾeḥād ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’

This verse is habitually read as a theological proclamation on the unity of God. But in a nuptial reading, something else comes into view. YHWH ʾeḥād — ‘the Lord is one’ — can also be read: the Lord is unique. As one says of a beloved: you are the only one for me. And above all: YHWH ʾElōhênû — ‘the Lord is our God’. This our is already a declaration of reciprocal belonging. Before the commandment to love has even been uttered, God has already named himself as ours. He has already given himself.

The commandment to love does not therefore arrive in a void. It arrives after God has said: I am yours. It is the natural response to a declaration of belonging.

The love that precedes all law — Exodus 20:2

But one must go further back still. For before the very first commandment at Sinai, before God opens his mouth to pronounce his law, he says a single sentence:

אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךְ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךְ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם ʾânōkî YHWH ʾelōhekâ ʾasher hôṣeʾ tîkā̂ mēʾereṣ miṣrayim ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt’

The act of love precedes the law. The liberation from Egypt is a freely given gift, accomplished before any obedience, before any observance of the commandments. The commandments that follow are therefore not conditions to be fulfilled in order to merit God’s love — they are the response to a love already given, already accomplished, already offered freely.

The logical structure is this: God loves first, he liberates, he chooses, he betroths, he says ‘you are my segullāh’ — and only then does he say: respond to this love. The commandments come after, as consequence, not as condition.

An analysis of the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:5

Let us now return to the commandment itself, with this nuptial intelligence acquired:

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךְ בְּכָל לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל מְאֹדֶךָ         weʾâhabtâ ʾet YHWH ʾelōhekâ bekol lebābkâ ûbekol napshekâ ûbekol meʾôdekâ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might’

The verb אָהַב — ʾâhab — is the verb of human love in all its fullness. It is the verb of the Song of Songs. It is not a verb of deference or respect: it is a verb of desire and personal attachment.

The three dimensions of this love merit attention. The lêbāb, the heart, is in Hebrew anthropology the seat of the will and the intelligence — to love with one’s lêbāb is to love with a total engagement of the whole person. The nefesh, the vital breath, the desire, the living being in its totality — to love with one’s nefesh is to love to the very depths of oneself, even unto life itself. But it is the third term that is most striking: meʾôd, commonly translated as ‘strength’ or ‘might’, but which literally means ‘very much’ or ‘exceedingly’. To love God with one’s meʾôd is to love him without measure, excessively — which is precisely the logic of nuptial love, which by its very nature overflows all reasonable proportion.

The commandment to love is therefore, in its very formulation, a nuptial commandment. It calls for that excess, that extravagance, that totality which only the love of bridegroom for bride can adequately illustrate.

The paradox of commanded love — resolved

There remains the question: can love be commanded? In the biblical nuptial logic, the answer is that the first commandment is not a command in the juridical sense. It is an invitation to become what one already is.

The people are already the segullāh of God. They are already the beloved. They are already betrothed. The commandment to love says simply: become what you are. Live up to the love that has chosen you. This is what Jewish theologians express in the notion of teshuvah — the return — which is not primarily a return from fault to virtue, but a return to oneself as the beloved of God.

This is why the Gospel of John can write: ‘We love because he first loved us.’ This sentence is not a Christian novelty — it is the most faithful reading of the structure of the Old Testament itself. Commanded love is always a response to a received love. The Hebrew text says so, but it must be read in its narrative depth and not merely in isolated verses.

V. Towards a Unified Nuptial Theology — Morality and Spirituality Reconciled

The diagnosis — what happened in history

The reading we have just undertaken is not a modern invention — it is a reading of the very structure of the biblical text. But it must be acknowledged that such a reading has been in large measure obscured over the centuries. The separation between moral theology and spiritual theology is not original to the Christian faith — it came about gradually, and one can trace its stages.

In the Middle Ages, with scholasticism, moral theology was progressively absorbed into an Aristotelian framework — that of natural law, virtues, and obligations. This is an intellectually admirable framework, but it shifted the centre of gravity. The movement went from ‘how does one respond to the Love that precedes me’ to ‘what are the norms of the good life’.

After the Council of Trent, in response to Protestantism, the Church placed still greater emphasis on the juridical and sacramental framework. Manuals of moral theology became essentially manuals for confessors, organised around sins to be avoided and commandments to be observed. The nuptial relationship practically disappeared from moral teaching.

The result, over several centuries, is a presentation of Christianity structured thus: God exists, he has given laws, you must observe them, otherwise you sin, you go to confession, and you begin again. This is a juridical and penitential cycle, not a nuptial and transforming movement.

The face of God that changes

This distortion is not merely pedagogical — it is theological. For the God of juridical morality bears a specific face: he monitors the observance of the laws, he judges infractions, he forgives when the conditions are met. He is first and foremost Legislator and Judge.

The God of nuptial theology has a radically different face: he desires — ḥāshaq —, he seeks the beloved who has strayed, he suffers from infidelity as Hosea states without equivocation, he waits as the father of the prodigal son, he runs to meet the one who returns. He is first and foremost Bridegroom and Lover.

These two faces produce two radically different types of believer. One lives in fear of transgression. The other lives in the joy of responding to love. One obeys out of fear of punishment. The other obeys — if the word retains any meaning — out of desire for the Beloved.

For a restructured catechesis

If nuptial theology is the original register of biblical revelation, then catechesis ought to be restructured from this centre. Not a superficial restructuring that softens the language whilst retaining the same juridical logic, but a deep restructuring that changes the very starting point.

Catechesis ought to begin not with the existence of God as an abstract truth, but with the elective love of God for each person. You are a segullāh. Before every commandment, before every fault, before every merit or demerit, you are the beloved, the unique one, the precious treasure that God keeps close to himself.

From this starting point, the whole biblical story reads differently: no longer as a series of doctrinal events, but as the acts of a love that will not relent. Creation is an act of love. The covenant is a declaration of love. The incarnation is the coming of the Bridegroom in the flesh. The cross is the most absolute expression of this love that goes all the way.

The commandments then arrive in their rightful place: not at the beginning, as laws imposed from without, but after the declaration of love, as the concrete form that the response to this love naturally takes in daily life. The Decalogue becomes the grammar of nuptial love — the way in which the beloved expresses their love in the totality of their existence.

Morality as spirituality — unity restored

It is here that the most radical proposal imposes itself: moral theology and spiritual theology ought not to be two separate disciplines. Their separation is artificial and damaging. In the nuptial vision, their unity is natural.

Spirituality is not a domain reserved for contemplatives and mystics — it is simply the life of the beloved with the Beloved, accessible to every baptised person. Morality is not a code of obligations — it is the form that love takes in concrete life. The two are nothing but two faces of a single reality: the response of the human person to the love that precedes and constitutes them.

What the great mystics have always known — John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Bernard of Clairvaux in his sermons on the Song — is that the most demanding morality and the most intimate union with God are the same thing lived at different depths. They never separated ethics and loving union. Bernard of Clairvaux, commenting on the Song, does not treat two different subjects — he shows that the moral life is the life of love, and that the life of love is the moral life.

Sin re-read in the nuptial register

In this perspective, sin itself changes its face. It is no longer primarily an infraction of the law — it is an infidelity to a relationship. Which is at once more serious and more merciful.

More serious: because a wound of love is deeper than an administrative infraction. Adultery is not merely a transgression of a rule — it is a betrayal of the beloved. This is why the prophets can speak of idolatry with an intensity that far exceeds juridical vocabulary.

More merciful: because God’s response to infidelity, in the nuptial logic, is not primarily judgement — it is the return of the wounded bridegroom to the unfaithful bride. Hosea receives from God the strange command to take back his adulterous wife — and this prophetic sign says something essential about God’s love: it is a love that returns. A love that takes back, that forgives not from legal obligation but from longing for the beloved.

Conclusion — Recovering the Original Face

The segullāh, the Bundesformel, the Shema, the first commandment — all of this forms a single movement. God loves first, freely, in an elective and personal way — as a bridegroom chooses his bride above all others. He says: you are my segullāh, you are mine and I am yours. He liberates, he betroths, he dwells with his people. And the commandments are then the response of the beloved who seeks to live in accordance with this received love — not out of fear, not out of calculation, but because love naturally seeks to conform itself to the Beloved.

What this reading proposes is not a new theology — it is the most ancient theology, at last rendered visible. It is not a revision of Christianity — it is a return to its original structure, as it is read in the Hebrew text itself, in its deepest roots.

To change the starting point of catechesis, to reconcile morality and spirituality, to re-read the Decalogue as the grammar of love — all of this flows from a single fundamental intuition, which the biblical text sustains on every page: God is first and foremost Bridegroom, and it is in response to this prior nuptial love that the whole of Christian life takes its meaning, its form, and its joy.

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Jean Khoury, with the help of AI Claude

Read also:

The Human Being as God’s Dwelling Place: A Theology of Sacred Indwelling

Was the Exodus Nuptial From the Outset?

The Promised Land is Union with Christ: The Necessary Christian Reading of the Old Testament