'Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land': America’s relationship with the Torah - review

In 1850, with the country 11 years from tearing itself apart, Herman Melville wrote a sentence that no one has improved on: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.” He was not speaking metaphorically. Neither were the men who built the country.

This is a sourcebook: the founding documents of American public life, each printed alongside the Hebrew verse it drew upon, in the original and in the King James translation the founders read.

“One cannot understand the American political tradition and its articulations through time,” the editors write, “without understanding America’s relationship with the Hebrew Bible.”

Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that he had never seen a greater effect upon an audience. It seemed, he wrote, as if Heaven had ordained that psalm to be read on that morning. The editors draw the only conclusion the moment allows. “The American Republic was born to the music of the Hebrew Bible.”

It never let up. Before Washington and Jefferson there was John Winthrop, telling the passengers of the Arbella in 1630 that they stood in covenant with God, that they would answer for breaking it, and that “we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.”

The Puritans named their towns Salem and Zion and Canaan, required Hebrew at Harvard, and read their own Atlantic crossing as a second Exodus. The Hebrew Bible was the single most cited source of the revolutionary era, more than Montesquieu, Cato, and Plutarch.

When Congress needed a seal for the new nation in 1776, Franklin proposed Moses “standing on the shore and extending his hand over the sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh...” Jefferson proposed the Israelites led through the wilderness by a pillar of fire. Thomas Paine, who had little patience for religion, argued the colonies out of monarchy in Common Sense by way of the Book of Samuel, where Israel demands a king and God hears it as a rejection.

When they wanted to move people, they reached for our book because they knew it was the one that would move them.

We were there too. In September 1787, while the framers were finishing the Constitution in Philadelphia, a Jew named Jonas Phillips sent them a letter.

The country was built in our language, and Phillips showed up to say so.

This weekend, America turns 250. Its deepest observation is the one the anniversary most needs. “The Bible of the slave taught freedom,” the editors write, “the Bible of the slave master, obedience.”

The same Scripture that gave the country its moral language was turned, by both sides, into justification. David Walker built his 1829 appeal on Exodus and asked why the people who lived under Pharaoh’s Egypt were treated better than the enslaved in America.

Morris Raphall, a New York rabbi, climbed his pulpit in 1861 and called slavery the “Bible view,” tracing it through the patriarchs. The editors print him in full, on the same pages as the abolitionists who read the same verses and heard the opposite God.

Lincoln found the only honest sentence. “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” he said in his Second Inaugural, “and each invokes His aid against the other.”

After the Civil War, the editors argue, the Hebraic note in American public life grew fainter. What they do not say, but what their own evidence shows, is where it went.

W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in 1903, described how his people had longed for emancipation as a promised land of “sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.” The promise was still unkept.

There is perhaps no community, the editors write, that so deeply embodied the Hebraic spirit after the founding generation as the African American community. The people America had enslaved became the truest keepers of the country’s own scripture.

Martin Luther King Jr. ended his last speech in Memphis, with death threats in the air, in the only language he had for that night. “I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.”

“One cannot understand this country,” the editors write in their final pages, “without reference to the Hebraic sources that inspired its architects, founders, and public leaders.”

They wrote that before the argument it documents moved from the page into the streets. It showed that this argument is as old as the country, that the same grammar has been used for liberation and for slavery, for covenant and for betrayal, and that it is still the grammar America argues in when it wants to say something that matters.