R.C. Sproul

The second way in which it's impoverished is that the benefits of the testament or the diatheka don't accrue until after the testator dies.

Well, obviously when God enters into covenants with people, people don't have to wait for God to die to inherit the blessings from that covenant because He's incapable of dying.

So with those two great weaknesses,

You wonder why the Septuagint translators and the New Testament church chose the Greek word diatheka to translate the Hebrew berit.

I may be telling you more than you want to know about this, but I think it has some significant elements for us.

And the covenant concept among the Hebrews is not simply an agreement.

The concept of berit is an agreement plus.

There is a plus, something added to the agreement, and that something that is added is the divine promise, the divine sanction that rests ultimately on the integrity of God and on His sovereignty and not on our weaknesses as covenant partners, which is very important for us to understand the covenant promises of God.

Now, the other word that was considered

was synotheke, and it has the prefix syn, and you know that's the word that we see with synonym, syncretism, synchronization, and all of that, and that simply means with.

And the idea of a synotheke in the Greek culture was an agreement between equal partners.

and the Hebrews would have none of that.

They didn't want to use that as a translation of the term berit because they wanted to clearly maintain that the covenants that God makes with His people are made between a superior and a subordinate, not between two equal parties.

And so that word was rejected, and they came back to the word diatheka because in its original use, before it developed in the Greek culture as a word for testament, as I've said, it had reference to what is called the disposition for one's self.

A diatheke, we call it later a will or a testament, has to do with an individual's disposition of his goods or property for himself.

That is, it refers to his sovereign determining of to whom his estate will be given.

And so that is an element that blends well with the Hebrew concept because here God chooses to give promises to whom He will give those promises.

He makes a covenant with Abraham that He doesn't make with Hammurabi.

He chooses the Jews.

He doesn't choose the Philistines.