Exodus Exodus 24:1-18
The Book of the Covenant has been read aloud; now it is cut in blood. Moses throws half the blood on the altar and half on the people and declares, 'Behold the blood of the covenant' — the one verse in the canon where the blood-dashing verb meets the word covenant. Seventy-four men then ascend, behold God with the prophetic-vision verb used of him nowhere else, and eat and drink under a pavement of sapphire. The glory settles as devouring fire; Moses enters the cloud for forty days. And the oath sworn at the foot of the mountain is broken at the foot of the same mountain within those forty days — which is why the blood that ratifies a covenant Israel cannot keep already points beyond itself to 'the blood of the eternal covenant.'
Genesis 6:9-22
The toledot of Noah opens with the first canonical tsaddiq, runs through the only OT verse where atonement-noun and atonement-verb co-occur, makes the first canonical covenant, and closes with a sentence that recurs nearly word-for-word when Moses finishes the tabernacle. The Hebrew lexicon discloses Noah's ark as the canonical first iteration of the covenant-sanctuary-atonement cycle the rest of the Old Testament builds out.
Genesis 2:4–25
The cosmos zoomed in. A man formed from dust, a garden built as a sanctuary, a woman built from a side. The covenant name enters the canon at the moment humanity does, and the chapter ends on a single consonantal pun that opens the door to Genesis 3.