The Covenant Abraham Cut Before the Law Existed

The rabbis had a problem with Abraham. A theological one.

Abraham lived centuries before Moses. Before Sinai. Before the Torah was given. Before there were commandments to keep. And yet Ben Sira — the great wisdom text of the early Second Temple period, composed in Jerusalem around 180 BCE — says of him without hesitation: “He kept the commandments of the Highest, and came with a covenant with Him” (Ben Sira 44:23).

How do you keep commandments that have not been given yet?

Ben Sira’s answer is embedded in the phrasing itself: not “he obeyed the law” but “he kept the commandments of the Highest.” The Most High. The title is not incidental. It signals that Abraham operated not within the legal framework of Sinai but within a prior, deeper order — an alignment with divine will that predated legislation. In his flesh, a law was cut. In his testimony, it was established. The covenant was not a document. It was a bodily mark, carried inside the skin, transmitted to every son born into the line.

The Book of Jubilees, the ancient rewriting of Genesis and early Exodus likely composed in the second century BCE, fleshes out the scene with the precision of a text that wants you to feel the weight of every ritual moment. In its fifteenth chapter, Abraham — still called Abram at this point — approaches the altar and offers “new offerings, the first-fruits of the produce, unto the Lord.” Not leftover grain. Not the animals he could spare. The first. The best. The ritual is meticulous: a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, a pigeon, laid out in the ancient ceremony of covenant ratification. God speaks. The covenant is formalized. And then comes the command that transforms a ceremony into a permanent mark: circumcision.

Jubilees presents this not as a new idea but as the restoration of something the angels already practiced. The angels of the presence and the angels of sanctification, the text states, were created already circumcised. The covenant carved into Abraham’s body was, in some sense, the covenant that structured creation itself. Abraham was not initiating something unprecedented. He was joining an order that already existed in the heavens and making it visible in the world below.

Later in Jubilees, Abraham gathers his children and grandchildren — Ishmael among them, and all the sons born of his concubines — and delivers a deathbed instruction. Observe the way of the Lord, he says. Keep yourselves from fornication. Flee from idolatry. Do not go near blood. The commands carry the texture of someone who has tested their importance personally. He does not say these things like a man reading from a list. He says them like a man who lived them and watched what happened when they were violated. This is not theology as abstraction. This is a father who has seen what idolatry does to a household and is trying to prevent it from happening again in the generations after him.

What emerges from these apocryphal sources together is a portrait of a covenant that was physical, embodied, ancestral. Not a legal document to be agreed to. A mark in flesh, a ritual at an altar, a deathbed instruction to children who would carry it forward. Ben Sira and Jubilees both understand that the Torah given at Sinai was not the origin of the covenant with Abraham — it was the formalization of something that had been alive for centuries, transmitted body to body, generation to generation, carved into the skin of every child born into the line.

Sinai gave language to what was first spoken in fire and sealed in flesh. Moses formalized what Abraham already lived. The law came later. The covenant came first.

Ben Sira and Jubilees are writing from the same concern, expressed in different registers. Ben Sira, the Jerusalem scribe, is defending the authority of the Jewish tradition against the erosion of Hellenistic culture. If Abraham kept the commandments without being commanded, then the commandments are not arbitrary rules invented by Moses — they are expressions of a natural moral order that predates legislation, an order that any person of genuine discernment can perceive and choose to follow. Jubilees, likely written by a priestly author alarmed at the spread of Hellenistic practices among the Jerusalem elite, takes the opposite tack: it emphasizes that the covenant was communicated directly and explicitly, angel by angel, generation by generation, precisely so that no one could claim it was optional or merely aspirational. Both books are trying to preserve the same thing: the understanding that the covenant with Abraham is not one tradition among many but the foundational structure of existence itself, an order embedded in the bodies of those who carry it forward.

The practical consequence of this reading is not abstract. If the covenant predates the law, then the law’s authority flows not from legal force but from covenant relationship. Israel at Sinai was not receiving rules imposed by a sovereign. Israel at Sinai was receiving the explicit articulation of an order they had already been living in, imperfectly, since Abraham first stood at the altar and let the fire pass through. Ben Sira and the Book of Jubilees are not competing sources. They are complementary voices pointing at the same thing from different angles: the covenant is older than the Torah, the Torah is the covenant’s full articulation, and Abraham is the pivot between them — the man in whose flesh the ancient order became visible in the world before anyone had words for what it was.