It is hard to imagine what the United States might have looked like without the influence of the Hebrew Bible, but there is little point in trying to envision such an extreme counterfactual. Beginning in the 17th century with the migration of English Puritans to New England, biblical narratives and imagery have played a surprisingly large, even outsized, role in the formation of the American national consciousness and institutions. The Hebrew Bible's unique cosmology, its moral teachings, and its prophetic admonitions were brilliant threads woven into the rich sermons and intense devotional texts produced by these zealous Christian settlers. Its account of the covenant as the ultimate form of binding community in ancient Israel—the community of God and man, as well as that of man and man—would serve as a blueprint for the theological and political structures the New England settlers would go on to create.
But as this valuable new anthology of American political, legal, and ecclesiastical texts from the first half of American history shows vividly, the influence went even deeper than that. As scholars have long understood, but many Americans have forgotten, Puritans identified themselves with ancient Israel. So much so that it would not be an overstatement to say that the deep structure provided by the great stories of the Jewish people became the template according to which they sought and found the meaning of their own history and lives.
Most importantly, the book of Exodus seemed to them to trace out the same path that they too were commanded to follow and whose ultimate destination was the one for which they too yearned. They had been delivered out of the moral bondage of a decadent land and directed into a new Zion. Like the ancient Israelites, they came to regard themselves as God's instrument, his vehicle for the redemption and restoration for the whole world.
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