What makes a people a people? What shapes their common identity, keeps them together, guides their lives? What do they look up to? What should they strive for?
These questions have surfaced in our turbulent times as controversy swirls over the goodness of the nation-state and the meaning of “peoplehood”. Celebrating globalization, cosmopolitan elites act and increasingly see themselves as ‘citizens of the world’. By reaffirming older identities, many citizens who cherish the ways of their own country see that they are threatened by foreign ideologies and non-assimilating immigrants. Even in our long-standing American republic, what defines and unites the nation has become an urgent question.
For help in pondering these issues, I turned to the book of Exodus. Why Exodus? This Bible book does not only tell the political foundation of one of the world’s oldest and most consistent peoples. It also invites us to consider the moral significance of community life, the requirements of political self-government, and the norms for judging a social order better or worse.
Many great thinkers, religious and not, have studied Exodus for its political wisdom. In the 17th century, political thinkers found guidance for reforms in the ancient “Hebrew Republic,” while jurists in the Hebrew Bible saw the basis for universal principles of justice. The idea that the best political body rests on the Biblical notion of a covenant entered the American colonies with the Mayflower Compact, and the American tradition of civilian republicanism owes much to the Puritans’ commitment to the Hebrew Bible.
The argument for examining the political teachings of Exodus was argued most eloquently and succinctly at the end of the 18th century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The Jews present us with an astonishing spectacle: the laws of [Greek and Roman lawgivers] are dead; the much older laws of Moses are still alive. Every man, whoever he is, must recognize this as a unique miracle, the causes of which, divine or human, certainly deserve the study and admiration of the wise. “