Covenant, virtue and desert

We have three notions working here at the same time:

(1) the Sinaitic covenant as a subversive alliance between the supreme authority, on the one hand, and the Israelites' civil society operating through the establishment of mitigating institutions of non-material sanctity, on the other;

(2) virtue as the practical, lived authentic experience of the creative or the authoritative shaping of action; and

(3) desert in distributive justice being mitigated by the sova point, and desert in punitive justice being mitigated by the due processes of purification and sealing away.

Now we need to understand how these three notions relate to each other.