A Bitter Truth... or 2

Excerpt from above video:

What is far less obvious, and very very few people get this, is that it was revolutionary Jewish precepts in the Hebrew Bible that lie behind what we now understand to be democracy, by which I mean this: there are two things which I single out as being really really important for the development of Western political freedom and democracy. The first was the idea that law had to be founded in the consent of the people, an absolutely revolutionary idea. Moses came down from the mountain with the law and basically said to the people, "Do you agree?" and they said, "We'll do it!" That is revolutionary concept. Because that means, or that meant, that the leader, the ruler, could not be a tyrant. He could not impose laws upon the people. The people had agreed to the laws. Now this is a fundamental principle behind democracy. That's the first principle, which was revolutionary at the time. The second revolutionary principle was the idea of limited rulership. The kings of ancient Israel, some of them were in fact despotic, but the template for the kings of ancient Israel was against despotism, because the kings of ancient Israel understood that they weren't the supreme ruler of the Kingdom. The supreme ruler was God. They were below God, so that was the first constraint, and the second constraint was at their level they were constrained by people called judges and Prophets. And so there's nothing like our current democracy of course, but nevertheless, the principle of limited government, limited rulership and the laws being founded in the consent of the people, those were absolutely revolutionary concepts. Which meant that ancient Israel was not a despotic regime, and it was completely contrary to the way in which the Ancients, the Greeks and the Romans, conceived of the way politics had to be instituted, as a
set of tyrannical beliefs forced upon the people, and practices forced upon the people.

Now those revolutionary principles were absolutely key in what became Britain's constitutional settlement after the Civil War in the 18th century when Parliament was invested with the power to constrain, basically, the king of the church. Parliament was the Supreme Sovereign body and the people who constructed that constitutional settlement Drew explicitly and at Great length on the Hebrew Bible, and on these and other principles in the Hebrew Bible.

Melanie Phillips, "The Builder's Stone"