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American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War . By Eran Shalev . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 2013. x + 239 pp. $40.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.
Book Reviews and Notes
Scholars have long recognized that an important strain of American nationalism constructs the United States as a "redeemer nation" based on equating it typologically with ancient Israel and exercising a millenarian appropriation of the Mosaic national covenant. In American Zion, Eran Shalev advances an "expanded sense" of the Old Testament's role in forming a "national and political culture" (2). Between approximately 1770-1830, he contends, lay and clerical writers elaborated an earlier European discourse about the "Hebrew republic" into a distinctive political hermeneutic that wove "America into the Bible and the Bible into America" (143). In demonstrating how generations of early American republicans fashioned scripture into a political text, Shalev has produced a marvelously trenchant study of their religious nationalism.
One of American Zion's greatest virtues is its chronological care in linking ideological developments to politico-cultural change. As resistance to Britain heated up, American Whigs calibrated their civic humanist rhetoric to include biblical Israel along with Greece and Rome in exemplifying the promises and perils of republican government. This process continued during the 1780s as supporters of the Constitution cited the Israelite polity, refigured as having comprised twelve (or sometimes thirteen) "states," for modeling a federal republic that was both structurally balanced and, unlike other cases from antiquity, ordained by God, thereby sanctioning the...