The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan spells out the staggering arithmetic of Moses's judicial reform: "Moses selected able men from all Israel, and appointed them chief over the people — rabbans of thousands, six hundred; rabbans of hundreds, six thousand; rabbans of fifties, twelve thousand; and rabbans of tens, six Myriads" (Exodus 18:25).
The numbers in the Aramaic are precise. Six hundred judges over thousands. Six thousand over hundreds. Twelve thousand over fifties. Sixty thousand — "six Myriads" — over tens. Add them up: 78,600 judges for a nation of roughly six hundred thousand men of military age, plus women, children, and elders.
That is one judge for every eight or ten adult men. Every Israelite had a judge practically within shouting distance. Justice was not centralized in a distant capital; it was distributed down to the neighborhood level.
The Aramaic calls them rabbans — masters, teachers. The word anticipates the later rabbinic title by more than a millennium. These were not mere magistrates. They were also educators, tasked (per Exodus 18:20) with teaching prayer, mercy, mourning, and ethics.
What Moses built in the wilderness, on Jethro's advice, was the first distributed judiciary in recorded history. The takeaway: a free society does not run on a handful of heroes at the top. It runs on tens of thousands of ordinary people of integrity, each responsible for a small circle, each accountable to the next level up.