ABSTRACT
The essence of the democratic ideal, as the term is used in the free societies of the West, is a basic distrust of all government. A distrust of government, to be meaningful, needs to be expressed in constitutional controls on the state and all its agents and servants- in limits on the powers of government, so that the ordinary citizen may be protected against violence, injustice, rapacity, and all forms of oppression and repression. The institutional means used to maximize the democratic ideal will, of course, reflect a people's history and traditions, its culture, and the level of its social and economic development. In all literature it would be difficult to find another passage that so succinctly and forcefully expresses what is at the heart of the democratic ideal. But the passage is by no means unique in the Hebrew Bible or Jewish post-Biblical literature.
