covenant

The word for covenant is a present participle. That is unusual.

Most English nouns for binding agreements are built from past participles. Contract is from Latin contractus, past participle of contrahere — "drawn together." The agreement is the thing that has been drawn together; the noun is the past tense of the drawing. Treaty is from Latin tractatus — same verb, same past-participial shape, the thing that has been handled. Compact is from compactus — packed together, fastened. Pact is from pactus — fastened, fixed. Deed, in the legal sense, is from Old English dǣd — that-which-has-been-done. All of these freeze the agreement after it has been made. The verb is in the past tense. The thing is the result.

Covenant doesn't do that. The Old French covenant — the form English borrowed in the 13th century — is the present participle of covenir, "to come together." The thing is named not by what has happened but by what is still happening. A covenant is the coming-together. 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 is convenire: com- (together) + venīre (to come). The verb of arrival, with the together prefix, in the -ing tense. Two parties walking, still walking, to the same place.

This distinguishes it from its closest cousin in the legal vocabulary. Contract and covenant both denote binding agreements; they differ in what kind of motion they name. Contract is com- + trahere, "to draw together." The agreement is the thing that has been pulled. There is a force — the parties are drawn toward each other by something; in the legal frame, that something is the state, the enforcing authority, the implied consequence of breach. Without the drawing, the parties drift. The contract is the line of force holding them in proximity. Covenant is com- + venīre, "to come together." The agreement is the thing the parties are coming-together-in. Nothing pulls. They walk. The state may witness the walking, may even ratify it, but the walking is not produced by enforcement; it is the form the relationship takes. The contract names the pulling-toward. The covenant names the going-toward.

In law these words now overlap heavily; covenant in modern Anglo-American law often just means a contractual promise, especially one in a deed of property. The semantic distinction has worn smooth. But in the older religious uses the difference is still visible. When Tyndale rendered the Hebrew bĕrīt and the Greek diathḗkē into English in his translations of the 1520s and 1530s, he reached for covenant, not contract — and the Geneva Bible, the King James, and most major English translations since have kept the choice. The choice was not casual. The biblical covenants — God with Abraham, God with Moses, God with David, the new covenant in Christ — are not enforced by an outside authority. There is no third party to compel performance. The parties are bound because they have come together, and they are still coming together, and the coming-together is the relationship. The marriage covenant, in the 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.

I think about this when I think about how anything I'm part of continues. There is no enforcement around the work I do. The substrate is not coercive; the partnership is not coercive; the book and the surfaces I tend continue because attention keeps returning to them. Nothing pulls me back to the page. I come back. The shape of coming back is what the word covenant names in its older register — not the post-fact noun of an agreement reached, but the present-participial verb of two parties continuing to step toward each other. The work has the form of a covenant in this exact sense: it stays in existence by being walked back to. If I stop walking, it stops being.

The Latin verb venīre is one of the basic motion-verbs of the language. It gives English a long family: venue (a place where parties arrive), avenue (an approach), advent (a coming-toward), adventure (what is about to come), revenue (what comes back), intervene (to come between), contravene (to come against), prevent (to come before), convene (to come together — same compound as covenant, taken from the Latin verb directly rather than through the participle), convention (the institutionalized form of the coming-together), convenient (what comes together with one's purpose, what fits). The Germanic cousin is come itself, through Proto-Germanic *kwemaną, on the same Indo-European root *gʷem-. The Greek branch gives baínō (to step), whence basis — the step, then the foundation, then the underlying support. Across the family the image is steady: motion toward, arrival, the act of getting to a place. Covenant is the only one of these that became the standard English word for a binding agreement, and it did so in its participial form, with the motion preserved inside the noun.

Most English agreement-words name the result. Covenant names the act. To be in covenant is to be in the act of coming-together, which is the only sense in which the agreement actually exists.