There is something bizarre, even clumsy, about the transition of power from Moses to his right-hand man Joshua in this week's Torah reading. God tells Moses that he has reached the end of his life, instructing him to climb the mountain of Avarim and die there. But who will take over?

God doesn't even raise the subject until Moses implores: "Let the Lord . . . set a man over the congregation, . . . that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep that have no shepherd" (Numbers 27:16–17). Only then, accepting Moses' request, does God appoint Joshua, "a man in whom is spirit," to succeed him. The fact that Moses has to ask, and in such strong language, suggests that the divine decision is almost an afterthought. Could it be that the sheep really didn't need a shepherd?

God's hesitation suggests that the question is far from a simple one, and His answer turns out to be more complex than Moses may have expected. While command of the military, and executive leadership more generally, will be handed over to the loyal Joshua, the power that God gives him is far from absolute. Before any military campaign can be launched, Joshua—and, we presume, future leaders—will need to seek the approval of the urim v'tumim: a kind of oracle under authority of the High Priest, "who shall ask counsel for him . . . before the Lord."

This is not the first or the last time the Bible calls into question the idea of absolute human authority. Soon after crossing the Red Sea, Moses himself is forced to delegate his own judicial control to a whole system of lower-level courts; later on, he is similarly compelled to share the powers of prophecy with the seventy elders of Israel. In Deuteronomy, God insists that strict limits be placed on the power of kings lest they accumulate too much wealth or war-making power.

Once the Israelites occupy the land, the very idea of absolute rule is repeatedly challenged—the most famous case being when, after centuries of rule by ad-hoc "judges," the Israelites turn to the prophet Samuel to give them a king. Samuel complains to God, Who answers: "Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you: For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them." Here and elsewhere the institution of absolute rule, so critical to the political theologies of other ancient peoples, is perceived as competing with God Himself. And indeed the period of the kings, after the glory years of David and Solomon, is marked by an overall sense of prolonged political failure; bad royal decisions result in the division of Israel into two competing kingdoms, ultimately issuing in iniquity, corruption, collapse, and destruction.

All of this seems to point to a broad critique of political power—or, more precisely, a critique of the kind of centralized power that will rival God's presence on earth. And this is not so hard to understand: the Bible's messages are aimed, first of all, to each of us as independent, thinking individuals. The Ten Commandments are written in the second-person-singular: you, the individual, shall not murder or steal. What makes the prophets great is their willingness to challenge the authority of kings. The biblical ideal is not the king but the shepherd, a strong individual who depends on no one else for his sustenance and therefore has no fear of political authorities. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and David are all shepherds.

Ancient Israel was by no means a democratic regime as the term is understood today. There was no universal suffrage, slavery was still institutionalized, and the separation of powers was in its infancy. Yet by calling into question the absolute regimes that dominated the ancient world, by challenging the logic of control that gave rulers sanction to oppress, displace, or even kill individuals at will, the Bible set into play what is surely the cornerstone of democratic thinking: the idea that what happens in the world is not just the whim of whoever holds power but in the first instance a product of  our private lives as thinking, feeling, moral beings—and that each of us has a duty to take responsibility for our world.

This also may help explain another oddity in the transition from Moses to Joshua. God instructs Moses to lay his "hand" on Joshua's head. But Moses, we read, laid his "hands"—plural—on him: a shift that was not lost on the rabbinical commentators. Rashi suggests that Moses was going beyond God's orders in a show of ebullient devotion. Yet, in the wake of the all too recent incident when, instead of speaking as commanded, Moses struck the rock and thereby earned the punishment that has led to the very ceremony now taking place, it is hard to read this passage so simply.

Perhaps Moses was sending Joshua a message: the truly bold shepherd of Israel, as an indelible mark of his humanity, will at one point or another need to act on his own, ignoring even God's authority. Sometimes, as in the incident of the rock, he will have every reason to regret it. But sometimes—as when Moses smashed the tablets of the covenant—it is exactly what is needed.

David Hazony's first book, The Ten Commandments, will be published in September by Scribner.