To ensure that the requirement is interpreted in the broadest possible way such that no affected party will be able to claim lack of notification, the text goes on to specify: "Assemble the people, men, women, and dependants, together with the aliens who live in your settlements, so that they may listen and learn to fear the LORD your God and observe all these laws with care. Their children, too, who do not know them, shall hear them, and learn to fear the LORD your God" (Deuteronomy 31:12-13). 
For a young Israelite, instruction in the conditions of membership begins shortly after birth, and culminates with coming-of-age in early adolescence, when assumption of the full range of adult duties takes effect. Scripture also mandates public instruction at regular intervals: "At the end of every seven years, at the appointed time for the year of remission, at the pilgrim-feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel comes to enter the presence of the LORD your God in the place which he will choose, you shall read this law [Torah] publicly in the hearing of all Israel" (Deuteronomy 31:10). The last thing that Joshua, the successor of Moses, did after the people had taken possession of the promised land was to restate the covenant in front of all the people and set up a megalith as a continual reminder of their assent. The law, then, is not to be an antiquarian relic or the arcane possession of a coterie of savants. Rather, it is everyone's possession, everyone's business. 
Are individuals afforded permission to withdraw without penalty from the covenant? In a word, no. Great opprobrium is held out for any Israelite who would abandon the yoke of Torah. When Zimri of the tribe of Simeon took up against orders with a foreign woman named Cozbi, they were both neatly skewered on a spear cast by Phinehas, the son of the son of Moses' brother, Aaron. The summary execution was not disavowed; rather, it earned Phinehas great credit (Numbers 25:6-15). The only safe way to resign affiliation was to flee. 
From Phinehas to Fiddler on the Roof, assent is much applauded, but in one direction only: the covenant may freely be taken on but not cast off. Israel's theory of consent is not liberal. This is not a surprising conclusion. 
E. Covenant interpretation. Laws, whether natural or positive, human or divine, are not self-interpreting. Their application in a given situation is a matter of judgment. High stakes often hinge on determinations of legality, so it can be expected that people will not routinely agree concerning whose conduct is innocent and whose is culpable, who owes damages to whom. Absent an authoritative system of adjudication, we remain locked in the "inconveniences" that Locke attributes to the state of nature. 
Quite possibly there is no people in the history of the world that has labored under a greater horror of lawlessness or lack of legal uniformity than Israel. Israel not only takes on for itself an intricate and demanding legal code that is held to issue from the highest quarters, but it also includes within that code extended instructions concerning the code's own interpretation. Various offices with power of investigation, adjudication, and punishment are specified in the text of scripture. A remarkably small area of judicial interpretation is handed over to the king; much more is reserved for the priests and their adjunct functionaries, the levites. The judges sometimes do operate as judges, but more often in capacities we would identify as distinctly nonjudicial (for examples, see the eponymous biblical book).