at creating a just, free, and good society that was decisively different from the pagan empires the Jews had been freed from. In sum, all the people and all of life were included in the terms of the covenant, so that it has been said that Israel was quietly democratized long before fifth-century Athens, and quietly made egalitarian long before the American and French revolutions. But what mattered supremely, and what shaped the later course of covenants, constitutionalism, and republican freedom,