The Hebrew idiom for making a covenant is karath berith, literally to "cut a covenant." The verb karath "meant originally 'to cut,'" and (the ISBE explains) it points to the ratifying ceremony of cutting animals in pieces. The clearest case is God's covenant with Abram: the animals are cut in two and the parties pass between the severed portions (Genesis 15:9–18), except that here it is "a smoking furnace and a flaming torch, representing God, not Abraham, which passed between the pieces" (the same rite is referred to in Jeremiah 34:18). At Sinai the covenant is sealed differently but to the same end: a sacrificial meal and the sprinkling of blood "upon the two parties, the altar representing Yahweh" (Exodus 24:4–8). The ISBE reads the cutting rite as a symbol that the two parties were "taken within the mystical life of the victim", an inheritance from a very old idea that the sacrificial animal was kindred to the parties, so that to share its blood was to be bound as kin. (Source: ISBE 1915, "Covenant, in the Old Testament" [Berry], with "Law in the Old Testament" [Rule].)
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