Jews affirm the covenant (brit) between God and the people of Israel, the bond, initiated by God, that makes Israel a people set apart for a particular relationship and mission. Scripture actually layers several such covenants rather than presenting one: a universal covenant with all humanity through Noah, a particular covenant of promise to Abraham (Genesis 17), and the covenant at Sinai, where the liberated people accept the commandments as the terms of their side of the bond, later renewed and reworked around the line of David. Rabbinic tradition drew from this layered scripture the count of 613 mitzvot, commandments understood collectively as the covenant's detailed terms rather than as isolated rules, so that keeping them is framed as covenant loyalty, not mere legal compliance.
Medieval Jewish thought argued over how to understand the bond's particularity. Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari described Israel as possessing a distinct, inherited capacity for prophecy and closeness to God that other peoples lacked, a strongly particularist reading, while Maimonides framed the commandments and the covenant in more universalist, rationalist terms, as the best available path to intellectual and moral perfection, open in principle to reasoned understanding rather than resting on inherited difference alone. The two approaches represent an enduring tension within Jewish thought between covenant as particular election and covenant as a specific route to a universal good.