Babylonia, explicitly foresees the restoration of the covenantal polity in its full multi-tribal form. While the proximate restoration of Jewish rule in Jerusalem (on a home rule basis within the Persian Empire) did not even approach that messianic vision, its political dimension was clearly based on a popular renewal of the covenant at the initiative of Ezra when the people assembled on Succoth to hear the Torah and to assent to its authority, as graphically portrayed in the Bible (Nehemiah 8-10). As at Sinai, the Succoth covenant set the framework for the renewed Jewish polity while the details of the regime were developed subsequently within it. Overall, the regime seems to have been a non-centralized union of families and community-congregations within the framework of the Torah and the developing oral law, whose local and national institutions and leaders respectively, were extremely powerful within their respective spheres. The Succoth covenant was the last of the biblical covenants. The regime it produced survived until the time of the Hasmoneans, and nominally continued to be the basis of the Hasmonean regime as well. It was supplemented by an additional covenant between "the priests, the people, the heads of the nation, and the elders of the land," on one hand, and Simon the Maccabean on the other -- whom they designated as "high priest, commander-in-chief and nasi (literally one raised up [to leadership], in modern Hebrew, president) -- which was embodied in a covenant document (given in full in I Maccabees 14: 25-49). Even