In The Jewish Torah, the idea of the covenant recurs several times, and three covenants are detailed, those between God and Noah, between God and Abraham, and between God and Israel at Mt. Sinai. Each of the covenants builds on what went before and so can be seen as developing a relationship over time.
The covenant with Noah represents a new beginning for mankind as God wipes out most of Creation and returns Noah, his family, and the animals Noah has collected to a cleansed world. This is the real beginning of the relationship between God and the Jewish people:
Moreover, not only is Noah the first real man in Jewish history: his story foreshadows important elements in Jewish religion. There is the Jewish god's obsession with detail, in the construction and loading of the ark. There is the notion of the one righteous man. Even more important, there is the Jewish stress on the supreme importance of human life, because of the imaginative relationship of man to God . . . This might be termed the central tenet of Jewish belief and it is significant that it occurs in conjunction with the Flood, the first historic event for which there is non-Biblical confirmation (Johnson 10).
Johnson further notes that the passages in the torah dealing with the Flood "also contain the first mention of a covenant and the earliest reference to the land of Canaan" (Johnson 10).
Abraham is a descendant of Noah (Johnson 10), specifically descended from Shem, and Abraham first encountered "Jehovah" in the land of Haram where he was wandering with Terah and others. Terah and his family group were the first people identified as Hebrews. In this first meeting, "it is God who proposes a covenant to the patriarch, who is now seventy-five years old" (Dimont 31). The covenant with Abraham identifies Abraham and his people as the chosen people, and God says that if Abraham will follow His commandments, God will place the descendants of Abraham u...