Moses the Law Giver

I can't find much to argue about in your last post, except that I don't think the early Hebrews had anything like democracy. Before Moses they had kind of a patriarchal system that was based on obedience to the eldest male in the clan. I don't think that Abraham was a particularly moral guy, he just obeyed God, who spoke to him directly. For it is written: "Abraham obeyed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." God didn't give Abraham any laws to follow, He just told him to leave the Land of the Chaldeans (Mesopotamia) with all his entourage and strike out into the desert. In exchange for his obedience, God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations, and that his descendants would be numbered like the sands of the sea. One day, Abraham got the notion that God wanted him to sacrifice his first born son, and he would have done it too if God hadn't provided him with a sheep at the last minute. Abraham didn't have any rules to follow, he just did as he as he was told, and I'm sure that he expected his subordinates to do the same.

A few centuries later, Moses started out pretty much the same way, but then God gave him the Ten Commandments and hundreds of other rules that became known as the Mosaic Laws. Centuries later, a bunch of rabbis got together and wrote the Talmud, which was basically an extension of the Mosaic Laws, but with a lot more detail. It seems that some people were always looking for loopholes in the
Mosaic Laws, so the Talmud was designed to dot all the "I"s and cross all the "T"s, leaving little room for creative interpretation. Like you said, it took the mind of a lawyer to understand the Talmud, which is probably why Jews make the best lawyers even unto this day.

Moses was one of the first national leaders to come up with the rule of law rather than the rule of men, but he wasn't the first. Hammurabi, King of Babylon preceded Moses by a century or so. Being raised by an aristocratic family in Egypt, it seems likely that Moses would have known about Hammurabi, although I don't think the Bible mentions this. Be that as it may, I think that Moses did a better job of writing laws than Hammurabi did, since the Laws of Moses are well known even unto this day, while Hammurabi's Code is known only to scholars of antiquity and the alumnae of Fred Sears' history class.

The  Jewish laws are so intricate and detailed that it would be almost impossible for the average person to obey them all consistently, which is why the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is based on guilt. Nobody expects you to be perfect, but they expect you to feel guilty that you're not. Atoning for guilt was a big business in Israel until the Romans demolished the Temple in 70 A.D. See, it was forbidden to sacrifice animals anyplace except in the Temple, which provided job security for the Temple priests. With the Temple destroyed, the Jews couldn't sacrifice animals to atone for their guilt anymore so, ever since, they just go around feeling guilty. Meanwhile, Jesus became the Ultimate Sacrifice for the Christians. Once you accept the Grace of Jesus Christ, all your previous sins are washed away, but you can  only do that once, which is why some early Christians waited to be baptized until they were on their death beds. Modern Christians have dealt with this problem in various ways, so anybody who still feels guilty should be able to find a church that works for him.

I understand that modern Jewish congregations are run democratically. They elect something like a board of directors that can hire or fire the rabbi. Many Protestant churches are run the same way, but not the Catholics. I'm pretty sure that the democratic tradition in modern Jewish and Protestant congregations was derived from the Anglo-American model, and not the other way around. The communal system of economics, however, was practiced by the Disciples of Jesus long before Karl Marx claimed to have originated the idea. I know this information may be disturbing for you, but don't blame me, I didn't write the Bible, I just read it.