Many who have encountered covenant theology quickly and intuitively recognize that this approach to Scripture has tremendous explanatory power.  It reveals the progressive unfolding of the Old and New Testaments, while still providing a unifying coherence to the totality of Scripture, and it does so in a way that keeps the LORD at the center of the narrative.  To me, as one who has been a practitioner in the field of international relations, the fact that the covenants were rooted in ancient Near Eastern diplomacy reinforced the historicity and truthfulness of the Bible.  Scripture is not human reflections upon the divine in the abstract, but the Almighty God working in real history, working in real space and time, to bring about the redemption of a people He has graciously chosen for Himself from all eternity.  And yet, as I have grappled with covenant theology over the years, two issues have stood out for me in terms of how theologians have tended to treat the topic: first, the definition of “covenant” tends to be inconsistent, oversimplified, and malleable; and, second, after making a passing nod to the ancient Near Eastern context, scholars often fail to draw out the significance of that milieu for what God is saying to His people through the covenants.  This essay is an attempt to address those issues, not with the goal of giving yet another overview of covenant theology, but rather to provide sufficient background to make covenant theology clearer readers of Scripture.