entities to forging of a new polity through union of previously separate entities to create a new whole. A covenant-based politics is not simply a symbolic matter; it has to do with very concrete demands for power-sharing and the development of institutionalized forms and processes for so doing. Whether in its theological form or secularized as the compact theory of the origin of civil society, the covenant idea is one of the two or three fundamental political concepts illuminating the origins and basis of political life. As a major political idea, the covenant principle has manifested itself in a wide variety of ways and conditions, in different places and times, always enduring as a central element in political thought, Jewish and non-Jewish. 1O Ultimately the concrete political embodiment of the covenant model took two forms -- the union of families or individuals to form bodies-politic and the federation of bodies-politic to form even more complex political systems. Both forms have manifested themselves in Jewish history. What follows is a brief survey of those manifestations within the Jewish body politic over space and time and then a survey of the ways in which the covenant idea has been applied through the Jewish political tradition. It should be understood from the first that the covenant has consistently manifested itself on three levels: the intellectual, the cultural and the operational. Here we shall treat all three without necessarily distinguishing between them in so many words at every turn. The reader should be prepared