Politics and cult for the sake of civil society

To define religion as primarily a moral law without the cultic elements and, more important, without the political elements is to see it the way the Christians saw things and, perhaps, the way the rabbinic Jews saw things but it wasn't the way the biblical Israelites saw things. For the Israelites religion was simply the code of national conduct, the cultural ingredient to the building of a national entity that was a state ruled by YHWH. 

The point of the biblical religion was the undergirding of the political system that rested on the cultural imperatives the religion defined and the civil society it promoted.