JULY 5, 2026 20:04
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
Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States opens with that sentence as its epigraph, and the choice is a statement of intent.
This is arinted 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.”
The proof begins on August 10, 1774, when John Adams left Boston in a red coat on his way to the First Continental Congress. The delegates could not agree on whose minister should lead them in prayer, so they brought in an Episcopal clergyman, who opened to the psalm appointed for that day. It was Psalm 35, David calling on God to fight those who fight him without cause
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 citedlutarch
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
He had fought in the Revolution and prayed at mikveh Israel, and he asked the framers to drop a Pennsylvania oath requiring belief in the New Testament so that “all religious societies are on an equal footing.” He signed it, “Elul, 24, 5547, or September 7, 1787.”
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.”
That is Moses on Mount Pisgah – where he viewed the Land of Israel before his death. It is also Memphis, 1968
“One cannot understand this country,” the editors write in their final pages, “without reference to the Hebraic.”
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
The language America reaches for, at its best moments and its worst, has always been ours. Not borrowed. Ours. We wrote the story it keeps retelling. We are still here to see how it ends
PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND:THE HEBREW BIBLE IN THE UNITED STATES:A SOURCEBOOKEdited by Meir Y. Soloveichik, Matthew Holbreich,Jonathan Silver, and Stuart W. HalpernThe Toby Press/ Koren Publishers Jerusalem345 pages; $30
