While the full span of political teachings contained in Biblical and early rabbinic literature still awaits comprehensive analysis, the bases of Judaism's earliest constitutional heritage are sufficiently clear to permit a preliminary synoptic review. Three notions – all formulated in the Old Testament and all enlarged upon to one degree or another in subsequent Jewish writings – are identifiably prominent amongst ancient Israel's formative political traditions. The first, thus placed in recognition of both its axiomatic status and its enduring influence, is the principle of theocratic government; the second, the ideal of covenantal partnership between independent units of the polity, the third, the normative distribution of human rulership amongst specifically accredited jurisdictional domains. Admittedly, formative Jewish texts do not deploy these three great themes in sequential progression. Still less do they severely compartmentalise their respective inferences and implications. Rather, each is portrayed as a necessary complement to the others, with which it interacts. Nevertheless, for the purposes of analysis, the following paragraphs will differentiate between theocracy, covenant and power-diffusion, and discuss them separately. Their aim is not to compress a survey of Biblical and early rabbinic political thought into the space of a few pages, but to direct attention to those earlier traditions which arguably exerted the greatest manifest influence on the rabbinic concept of three ketahm.

Theocracy, covenant and power-sharing

The theocratic principle implies that Jewish government is, in every sense of the term, government by God.