As late as 1965, in his monograph Prophecy and Covenant, Clements held that central to the preaching of the canonical prophets was the concept of the Sinai covenant. Their unique contribution was to have reactivated the idea of the covenant, which had fallen into neglect. Indeed, Clements went so far as to assert that, without the prior fact of the covenant, the prophets would be unintelligible to us (p. 126). Clements, of course, recognised that the actual term for covenant (bērlt) was only found twice in the eighth-century prophets, in Hos. 6:7 and 8:1, but he argued that to elect someone must lead to some kind of special relationship between him who elects and him who is elected, in which the obligations of the latter are set out. The use of the term ‘covenant’ to describe such a relationship was ‘only of secondary importance’ (p. 54).

But a decade later, in the wake of Perlitt (1969), Clements, in his second monograph, Prophecy and Tradition (1975 a), accepted that the covenant theology only gradually emerged to reach its classical expression in the Deuteronomic literature. The attempt to see the prophet as fulfilling the office of covenant mediator based on Deut. 18:15ff must be abandoned, for it was the Deuteronomists who interpreted the prophets as preachers of tōrāh and spokesmen of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel. Further, reliance on Mendenhall's thesis (1954) relating the covenant to the Hittite suzerainty treaties, allegedly reflected in the prophetic curses and lawsuit oracles, must also be given up.