"Blessing" and "Curse" in the Torah and their Relationships with the "Covenant"

In the Torah, blessing and curse come directly from God and are closely related to the "covenant" design. The prevalence of these concepts in the texts other than the Bible indicates that there has been a general understanding of blessing and curse among the people of ancient Israel. These people regarded them as powerful tools for influencing one another. An examination of the Old Testament reveals that Man can play a role by asking for blessing or passing it onto others. Giving back blessing from Man to God means thanking God and praising Him. The purpose of God's blessing is to restore, strengthen, and maintain Man's relationship with God and ultimately ensure his eternal happiness. The questions are how these concepts have come into being and where and when they have originated. It may not be possible to provide a clear definition of these abstract concepts, while each statement is merely a simple and superficial interpretation of them. However, these terms have an extraordinary and long history. Thus, to understand their depths and richness, one needs to carefully examine how they originated. Based on the Torah and written sources, the present study investigates the concepts of blessing and curse through analytical methods and determine their relations to the covenant with a theoretical approach.God's covenant with Abraham is the beginning of a law that other prophets have offered to their followers thousands of years later. It is also God's command to Abraham and his children to bless everyone. All those who have followed the faith of Prophet Abraham in every generation are the inheritors of God's covenant. Health and wealth are the "blessings" guaranteed in the Abrahamic covenant. In his covenant with Abraham, God has promised him 50 blessings. He has sealed those 50 promises and guaranteed them with an oath.If the Covenant is taken as the axis of the relationship between God and Man in Judaism, all aspects of human life can be interpreted according to this covenant. The understanding of these phenomena by Israel shows an evolutionary state that begins with its mythical meaning in Genesis and reaches its theological meaning in Deuteronomy. In the history of their evolution, Israel’s children gradually realized the following points: first, blessing and curse are both from the holy nature of God; secondly, God’s blessing and curse are directly and indirectly related to the observance or violation of the covenant, respectively; thirdly, the only proper human response to the divine blessing is thanksgiving and its transmission to others.In the Exodus, alongside the vertical dimension of the relationship (God-Man), the horizontal dimension of the relationship (Man-Man) becomes important. Here, along with the blessing of prophecy (Moses), blessings of the kingdom (kings of Israel) and priesthood (Aaron and his sons) have been also mentioned as the agents of blessing. The king is seen as the representative and mediator between God and people and the male offspring of Aaron as the priests of Jehovah.In Deuteronomy, the examples of blessing and curse are specifically addressed. Interpretation of blessing in the pre-exile period is related to a conditional or absolute blessing, but the contents of this period show that God is not only the source of blessing, but also the guide of blessing to people. According to the Torah, blessing includes fertility, domination, nourishment, loving, and, most importantly, intimacy with God Himself. However, blessing is not a mechanical system of punishment and reward. God in the Old Testament is a God whose love and justice are manifested in His blessing and curse, respectively. This research focused on the phenomenon of blessing and cursing in the Torah, but to increase the depth, Israel’s cultural and social aspects and their relationships with other cultures of the ancient Near East had to be explored based on other sources.