Moses and America

Bruce Feiler points out that Moses is depicted all over the place in our nation’s capital–at the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress, the National Archives–virtually every president has invoked him, and his story has been drawn upon in America at nearly every point in its history:

Moses is the patron saint of Washington — and a potent spiritual force in nearly every great transformation in American history, from the nation’s founding to the Civil War to the civil rights movement.

Why did a 3,000-year-old prophet, played down by Jews and Christians for centuries and portrayed in the Bible as a reluctant leader, become such a presence in American public life?

Because, more than any other figure in the ancient world, Moses embodies the American story. He is the champion of oppressed people; he transforms disparate tribes in a forbidding wilderness into a nation of laws; he is the original proponent of freedom and justice for all. . . .

Most striking about Moses’s enduring appeal is that a figure introduced into America by white Protestants proved equally appealing for blacks as well as whites, immigrants as well as the native-born. Moses fits the American story because he embodies the courage to escape hardship and seek a better world. He keeps alive the ministry of hope.

He also encapsulates the American juggling act between freedom and law. Moses represents independence, but as the deliverer of the Ten Commandments, he also represents the discipline of being a people of laws.

This goes beyond the formation of America’s civil religion, in my opinion. It has to do with the way the Bible has not just been influential in this point or that point, but how the Bible has shaped the “deep structure” of our imagination and our thinking. I am especially intrigued with that last point, that Moses is both liberator and law-giver, the embodiment of both freedom and order.