Religious and legal obligations were not so closely identified in Israelite re-
ligion. This is to say that an act contrary to the will of the deity will be punished in
ways which vary, of course, depending upon the concepts of divine action held by
the community. Since the punitive acts of a god tend to be natural calamities such
as plague, drought, and famine which strike the entire community, religious sanc-
tions tend at least to reinforce, if not to produce, the concept of corporate responsi-
bility which is a characteristic of the early stages of legal thought in the ancient
world. Religious obligations tend then to become legal obligations, for the commu-
nity will feel compelled to punish in order to protect itself from the divine wrath
which does not single out the culprit alone for punishment. (4-5)

But the state could not create the biblical norms of personal relationships by power
alone, and when the preservation of the state became the primary concern of official
political and religious leaders, the exercise of power, unrestrained except by oppos-
ing power, became dominant, and the prophets had to predict its destruction....
Early Israel thus cannot be understood within the framework of traditional academic
ideas about a primitive society gradually becoming urbanized, and therefore civi-
lized. Its very beginnings involved a radical rejection of Canaanite religious and po-
litical ideology, especially the divine authority underlying the political institutions,
and the Canaanite concept of religion as essentially a phenological cultic celebration