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Towards A Comparison of ‘Biblical’ Nations

Sun, December 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Beacon Hill 1 Complex

Abstract

“On the face of it, it would be hard to imagine a nation more thoroughly biblical than the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War.” So wrote Mark Noll, in a seminal essay on the Bible in early America. Many scholar have debated this claim, but one may profitably challenge this premise with a counterexample: the state of Israel in its formative decades, also an arguably “biblical” nation. This paper (briefly) addresses three points of comparison: first, the Bible as a constructive political model; second, the Bible as relevant metanarrative; third, the Bible as a cultural touchstone.
The American and Israeli Founders rejected the notion that God’s sacred text should be enshrined as a Constitution; both nations adopted democratic over theocratic systems. America turned its back on an established Church, embodied by the power to tax. Christian minorities (non-Congregationalist in New England, non-Anglicans in the Southern Colonies) resisted the religious coercion of post-Reformation Europe. In Israel, by contrast, David Ben Gurion’s infamous ‘status quo’ agreement with the leaders of Agudat Yisrael effectively enshrined Orthodox Judaism. This agreement, which left non-Jewish minorities substantially unaffected, has caused considerable conflict as a panoply of personal status issues (Jewish identity, conversion, marriage & divorce, burial) continue to pit the Orthodox officialdom against the secular majority. Whereas the Constitutional legacy in the United States pointed both ways: in favor of free exercise, but against establishment, Israel’s failure to adopt a constitution left ‘basic laws’ subject to perpetual renegotiation.
The Bible provided a metanarrative for both nations. In America, the Founders frequently employed biblical language and cited biblical passages. The Founders cited Deuteronomy more than Montesquieu, and the Bible more than the Enlightenment philosophes. Of course, the Founders knew that the average colonist would more likely own a Bible than the Second Treatise on Government, nor does citation equal endorsement. Yet Washington referred to the every person “resting beneath their vine and fig tree” (Micah 4:4) too often to allow one to dismiss this as rhetorical convenience. The Founders looked to this and other biblical texts as a desirable model for the new Republic. Initially a Labor Zionist, by the 1950s David Ben Gurion promoted Bible studies, quizzes, archaeological expeditions so didactically that critics accused him of bibliolatry. Ben Gurion’s statism provided instrumental impetus for this move, however, as with Washington, so did affinity for the civic and martial norms of the Hebrew Bible. American biblicism had its critics too, both Edwardians who found the notion of America as the ‘New Zion’ blasphemous, and enslaved blacks who found it a bitter and unredeemed promise.

The Bible provided important cultural components to both nations. In America, proclamations of Thanksgiving and public fasts were common. Congress hired a chaplain to inaugurate sessions, prayers were composed and read for a wide variety of public occasions. Speakers invoked God in a wide variety of public settings. Most American Founders were not Orthodox Christians any more than the Israel Founders were Orthodox Jews, but both groups were soaked in Bible. Israeli culture in the first decades of its existence cannot be understood without reference to the Bible in education, literature, art and music. In these cultural domains, Bible provided themes, vocabulary, and text, both to be appropriated as a link to the distant past, and as a heritage against which to rebel. One may invert Noll’s claim into an invitation to explore the roles Scripture may play in modern nations.

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