Karat means to cut, and it is the verb Hebrew reaches for at the two extremities of covenant life. A covenant is not made, signed, or sealed in the Hebrew idiom; it is cut, karat brit, the way HaShem cut one with Avram between the pieces (Genesis 15:18) and swore to cut a new one with Israel and Judah (Jeremiah 31:31). And the one who despises the covenant is himself cut off, nikrat, the penalty the Torah calls karet.

The KJV, ESV, NASB, and NIV all print "make a covenant," and the knife disappears. What remains is contract language, paperwork, and the reader loses the blood on the ground that made a brit unbreakable in the first place.

Then watch the verb do something no contract can. When Israel crossed into the land, "the waters coming down were wholly cut off," nikratu (Joshua 3:16), the covenant-cutting verb spent on a river, at a town named Adam. And in the law of the niddah, the same Niphal falls as sentence: "both shall be cut off" (Leviticus 20:18). One root: the cut that binds, the cut that banishes, the cut that opens a road through the water.