What Does Exodus 24:7 Mean?

The public reading of the "Book of the Covenant" before the blood-application is the covenant's epistemological requirement: the community that enters the covenant does so with full knowledge of its contents. The covenant is not a commitment to an unknown obligation but to a specifically articulated relationship with specific terms. The hearing of the covenant text and the verbal agreement ("we will do and we will be obedient") precede the blood-sealing that makes the commitment irrevocable. The covenant community agrees to what it has heard, not to what it will be told later.

"We will do and we will be obedient" (Hebrew: na'aseh venshama) is the community's most complete covenant-acceptance formula. The first word (na'aseh, "we will do") is the active performance commitment; the second (neshama, "we will hear/obey") is the receptive submission commitment. Together they encompass both dimensions of covenant relationship: the community's active doing of the covenant requirements and its receptive, ongoing submission to the covenant's authority. Rabbinic tradition meditated on the order, doing before hearing, as indicating the covenant community's total trust: we commit before we hear all the implications.

James 1:22's "be doers of the word, and not hearers only" re-engages the na'aseh-neshama formula: the community that hears the covenant text read (neshama) must also do what it heard (na'aseh). The community that hears the covenant only is the community that has the hearing without the doing: which James calls self-deception. The Sinai community's unanimous "we will do and we will obey" is the covenant-reception formula model that every subsequent covenant community is called to enact: rather than intellectual consent to an acknowledged covenant but total-person commitment to its living practice.