covenant

The word for covenant is a present participle. That is unusual. Most English nouns for binding agreements are built from past participles, where the participle freezes the agreement after the agreement has been made. Contract is Latin contractus, past participle of contrahere ("drawn together"); the agreement is the thing that has been drawn together. Treaty is Latin tractatus, past participle of tractare ("handled, managed"); the agreement is the thing that has been handled. Compact is Latin compactus, past participle of compingere ("packed together, fastened"). Pact is Latin pactus, past participle of pangere ("fastened, fixed"). Deed, in its legal sense, is Old English dǣd ("that-which-has-been-done"). In every case the morphology says: the agreement is the residue of a verb of joining, the noun is the past tense of the joining. The verb is over; the thing is what remains.

Covenant doesn't do that. The Old French covenant — the form English borrowed in the late 13th century — is the present participle of the verb covenir ("to come together, to agree, to be fitting"), from Latin convenire (com- "together" + venīre "to come"). The participle was nominalized in Old French to mean "the thing that is coming-together" — the agreement-as-act-of-arrival, not the agreement-as-result. The motion is in the noun. To enter into a covenant is, in the bones of the word, to be in the act of arriving — not to have arrived. The Latin underneath has the same shape: convenientem (accusative of conveniens, the present participle) was used in late Latin both for "agreement" and for "what is fitting." Both senses preserve the present-tense action. The verb is still happening when the noun names it.

This morphological distinction quietly does real work in the difference between contract and covenant. The English legal vocabulary now uses these words almost interchangeably — a covenant in property law is just a contractual promise attached to a deed — but in the older religious senses the difference is still visible. When William Tyndale began translating the Bible into English in the 1520s and 1530s, he had to render the Hebrew bĕrīt (the word for God's binding agreements with Abraham, Moses, David, Israel) and the Greek diathḗkē (the word in the Septuagint and the New Testament for the same kind of binding agreement, including the "new covenant" in Christ). The Vulgate had used testamentum for both, and Wycliffe's late-14th-century English Bible had followed the Vulgate — "testament" was the inherited English word, and survives in the names Old Testament, New Testament. Tyndale used both covenant and testament, but he shifted the balance — for the agreements between God and Israel (the recurring uses of bĕrīt in the Hebrew Bible), he reached most often for covenant, where Wycliffe had had only testament. The Geneva Bible followed and extended the pattern; the King James inherited it; most major English translations since — the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the New Revised Standard — have kept the predominant use of covenant for bĕrīt, even where they preserve testament in the traditional book-titles. The shift was not casual.

What the choice preserves is the present-participle force of the agreement. A biblical covenant — God with Abraham, God with Moses, God with David, the new covenant — is not enforced by an outside authority. There is no third party to compel performance, no court to which damages can be appealed, no proxy who can hold the parties to the agreement when one party drifts. The parties are bound because they have come together and are still coming together — the agreement holds because the going-toward is still happening. The marriage covenant, in the older religious register, is not a contract whose breach can be cured by damages; it is a coming-together whose breach is the unbecoming of the thing itself. The thing is the going-toward. When you stop going, there is no thing. The contract names the pulling-toward (and the puller behind it — the state, the consequence, the implicit force that keeps the parties in proximity). The covenant names the going-toward, with the agreement still happening every moment the parties are still moving. Two grammars, two operating logics, both preserved inside their participles.

Underneath the Latin venīre is Proto-Indo-European *gʷem-, one of the basic motion-verbs of the reconstructed parent language. The Germanic branch carries the root through the sound change *gʷ → *kw and gives Proto-Germanic *kwemaną, whence Old English cuman, modern English come. The Latin branch carries the root through *gʷ → v before front vowels and gives venīre. The Greek branch gives baínō ("to step, walk, go") with derivatives básis (a stepping, a base) — the Greek branch of the same root gave English its word for the foundation a thing stands on, and the same Greek verb gives acrobat ("one who walks at the top") and diabetes (named for the body's apparent diabaínō, "passing-through" of fluid). The Indo-Iranian branch gives Sanskrit gam- ("to go"), still surviving in Hindi jānā. Across the family, the root is the bare verb of motion-toward. The Latin reflex is exceptionally prefix-friendly — almost every Latin preposition forms a compound with venīre: advenire, convenire, devenire, evenire, intervenire, invenire, obvenire, pervenire, praevenire, provenire, revenire, subvenire, supervenire. Every preposition becomes a verb of arrival when attached to venīre; every direction of coming gets its own compound. Covenant is the one of those compounds that didn't enter English as a verb at all. It came in as a noun, in its participial form, with the motion preserved inside.