Ritual rather than political forces

The biblical regime is not predicated on Israel's sons being a unified nation. The lay leadership of the people resided in the head of each of the tribes. The only national institution was the mishkan and the common sacred laws all the tribes shared. Shabbat and miqdash are what unified the nation. 

The secular leadership was in fact not national but tribal; not unlike, under the American Constitutional system, the states’ rights being the sovereigns and the Federal government being the only institutional construct that unites the nation as a whole, but where that unity is not sovereign. The sovereign is the local and not the national state, or, in the biblical regime, the tribe. 

In fact, it could be the tribal character of Israel's sons would have been less threatening to the regional imperial powers, which would have left the people in a more stable political situation than the Davidic monarchy later provided. The tribe owns the land, not the nation. The Davidic regime overrode the system of tribal sovereignty and superimposed a monarchical system that almost immediately fractured the unity of the nation, such as it was. Davidic monarchy replaced the unity of the nation behind shabbat and miqdash with the harsher and less legitimate unity of a single sovereign. Furthermore, the imposition of a monarchy misconstrued the meaning of the intermediating institutions of shabbat and miqdash, and turned them into ritual rather than political forces in the national and social order.