Over the first millennium BCE the religious traditions of the ancient Israelites in the Levant developed into a belief in a single, transcendent God who makes a covenant with a chosen people, expressed through law (Torah) and the writings of the prophets. These ideas were edited and consolidated into the Hebrew Bible particularly during and after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, when the temple cult was disrupted and scripture and observance gained prominence. The result was a portable, text-centred faith independent of any single sanctuary. It bound ethics, law and worship into one framework.
It founded the monotheistic tradition from which Christianity and Islam later emerged, and supplied moral and legal ideas that shaped law, ethics and political thought across much of the world.
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