By Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern
While this July 4th, most Americans are, amidst the barbecues and jumps in the pool, unlikely to pop open a Bible and start reading the book of Joshua, they might at least take a moment during the festivities to consider how the book’s eponymous Israelite hero helped shape the United States from the colonial period to the Civil Rights era.
Joshua first appears as Moses’s assistant after the parting of the Red Sea in the book of Exodus. We see him with Moses on Mount Sinai to receive the Law, and leading the battle against Amalek. Eventually Joshua becomes Moses’s successor, leading the people of Israel across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land.
Sidney and Separation of Powers
In the colonial era, Joshua began to serve as a model for what would become the independent nation. Algernon Sidney (1623–1683) was an English political philosopher and major intellectual influence on Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. He directly advised William Penn on Pennsylvania’s early constitution. And in Sidney’s 1698 volume Discourses Concerning Government, he proposed the government of the Jews prior to the monarchical age as a model to be admired.
In describing the system Joshua set up, Sidney declared that “we shall easily find that it consisted of three parts, besides the magistrates of the several tribes and cities. They had a chief magistrate, who was called judge or captain, as Joshua, Gideon [from the book of Judges], and others, a council of seventy chosen men, and the general assemblies of the people.” This separation of powers, of course, would serve as a foundational principle of the U.S. government.
Rodney and a Promised Land
Caesar Rodney of Delaware—member of the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence—saw in Joshua’s journey both the culmination of Moses’s liberation of the Jews from Egypt and a prefiguring of the American story.
In a 1776 letter to his brother, Rodney recalled how “The Israelites—the chosen people of God—met with crosses and disappointments in their journey from the land of bondage to that of liberty, but by a steady perseverance and Divine assistance they at length possessed the Promised Land.” Similarly, the United States, “with a firm reliance on Him” will have its “virtuous endeavors” crowned with success as God would “cause the modern Pharaohs with their hosts to be buried in the sea of their Toryism, as He did the ancient Pharaoh in the Red Sea.”
A Founding Epic
Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), who would serve as president of Yale University and was a grandson of the renowned theologian Jonathan Edwards, saw in the emerging United States a sequel to the biblical story of Joshua. Inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dwight in 1785 published a 300-page epic poem titled The Conquest of Canaan and dedicated to George Washington. In it, he has Joshua proclaim as he guides the Israelites across the Jordan River:
Our sons, with prosperous course, shall stretch their sway,
And claim an empire, spread from sea to sea
In one great whole th’ harmonious tribes combine,
Trace Justice’ [sic] path, to choose their chiefs divine;
On Freedom’s base, erect the heavenly plan;
Teach laws to reign, and save the rights of man.
The references to tribes, the population choosing its chiefs, and the rights of man, are all clear allusions to the foundational American values of federalism, democracy, and liberty.
A Prayer in the Civil War
On April 30th, 1863, Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Philadelphia as minister of its Mikveh Israel congregation, turned to Joshua in a moment of crisis. In response to President Lincoln’s declaring a national fast day focused on prayer and introspection amidst the Civil War, Morais dedicated a portion of his sermon that day to the book of Joshua’s 7th chapter. There, the Bible describes how an Israelite named Achan was responsible for a military disaster due to his selfishness. Achan had seized some property after the Israelites’ battle against the city of Jericho, despite God forbidding the taking of spoils. As punishment, the Israelite forces lost their next battle, against the city of Ai. Eventually, Achan’s actions were discovered, and Israel subsequently defeated Ai on its way to taking full possession of the Promised Land in fulfillment of God’s wishes.
The resonance of seizing property (in the case of the Civil War, slaves) that should not be taken meriting a polity’s military defeat (in this case, of the Confederacy), was clear. “Like the inflexible Joshua,” Morais thundered, “we must destroy the impious Achans with their plunder. Then will the land be cleansed of her impurities and the breath of God reanimate the drooping spirits of her children.” Like the eventually triumphant Israelites, “likewise will that people [the Union] stand high and be immovable as impregnable rocks, who fulfil the laws of the Eternal.”
Justice across the Jordan
Enslaved Africans in America themselves also saw in their plight echoes of Israel in the time of Joshua seeking solace in a new home. Yearning to cross the Ohio River and other boundaries between slave states and free ones, they sang spirituals like “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” alluding to Israel’s crossing the Jordan River as described in Joshua’s 4th chapter. The lyrics include an allusion to Joshua 5:13:
O march the angel, march
O march the angel, march
O my soul arise in Heaven,
For to hear when Jordan roll.
Little children learn to fear the Lord
And let your days be long.
The fight for Civil Rights would also enlist Joshua. Multiple times as a candidate and then later as president, Barack Obama would refer to the “Moses generation” of Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and the current, “Joshua,” generation. Thus in a 2013 speech delivered—fittingly for the framework of Israel’s first national leader to inhabit its homeland—in the modern State of Israel, President Obama noted:
“As Dr. Martin Luther King said on the day before he was killed, ‘I may not get there with you. But I want you to know that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.’ So just as Joshua carried on after Moses, the work goes on for all of you, the Joshua Generation, for justice and dignity; for opportunity and freedom.”
This Fourth, then, let’s raise a toast to Joshua, a founding—and ongoing—inspiration for the United States.
Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern serves as the senior advisor to the provost at Yeshiva University, and the deputy director and chief strategy officer of its Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. He has edited nineteen books and has lectured about the Hebrew Bible’s impact on the United States across the globe. His essays on the topic have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Tablet, Jewish Review of Books, First Things, and The Jerusalem Post.
