What is the Old Covenant?

For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. ⁸But God found fault with the people and said:

“The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.

⁹It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord.

¹⁰This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ¹¹No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. ¹²For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

¹³By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete, and aging will soon disappear. [Heb 8:7-13]

Moses summoned all Israel and said: Hear, O Israel, the decrees and laws I declare in your hearing today. Learn them and be sure to follow them.
²Yahweh our God made a covenant with us at Horeb.
³It was not with our fathers that Yahweh made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today.
⁴Yahweh spoke to you face to face out of the fire on the mountain. [Deu 5:1-4]

In answer to this question, the following are some of the facts we have thus far been able to establish, and they are quite straightforward and easy to see:

1. The Old Covenant is not the Old Testament, i.e. Genesis to Malachi
2. The Old Covenant is the covenant that God specifically made with the Israelites after he brought them out of Egypt. [Heb 8:8-9, Deu 5:1-5,22-32]
3. It was made at Mount Sinai, which is also called Mount Horeb. [Deu 5:1-5]
4. Only the Israelites are under this Covenant. [Deu 5:1-5] (Gentiles for example were not under this Covenant)
5. Those who lived before the Israelites, e.g. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, were not under the Old Covenant—only the Israelites were under this Covenant. [Deu 5:1-5]
6. The Covenant was embodied in the Ten Commandments. It was the Ten Commandments that God spoke directly to them. [Deu 5:22, 2Co 3:7]
7. They actually heard God speak the words of the Covenant to them, they heard him with their own ears. [Deu 5:4,22-24]
8. The people themselves, after hearing God declare the Ten Commandments to them, called Moses and told him that he should go himself and hear from God whatever else he had to say. They did this because they were afraid. [Deu 5:23-27]
9. Paul called this Covenant “letters” in his second letter to the Corinthians. [2Co 3:6-7]

Paul usually refers to the Old Covenant as the Law because it is actually the Law of Moses. Therefore, since Paul talks a lot about the Law (the Old Covenant), in order to understand what he said about the Law, such as it being abolished, it is important that the Law is understood not only as a Law but as a covenant.

The Old Covenant is one of three major covenants that we must understand if we are really out to understand the word of God. The other two Covenants are the Abrahamic Covenant and the New Covenant. All three are related to one another and we need to understand their relationship with one another and also their relationship to us.

God’s Covenant with David is also quite important to understand.

Without a correct and adequate understanding of these Covenants, both Bible Doctrines and Prophecies will suffer greatly.