What makes a people a people? What forms their communal identity, holds them together, guides their lives? What am I looking at? What should they strive for?
These questions have surfaced in our troubled times, as controversies revolve around the goodness of the nation-state and the significance of the “people.” Celebrating globalization, cosmopolitan elites are increasingly acting and considering themselves “citizens of the world.” Reaffirming older identities, many citizens who value the ways of their own nation see them as being threatened by foreign ideologies and unassimilating immigrants. Even in our American republic for a long time, what defines and unifies the nation has become an urgent question.
To help me think about these issues, I turned to the book of Exodus. Why Exodus? This Bible book not only relates the political foundation of one of the oldest and most important peoples in the world. It also invites us to think about the moral meaning of communal life, the requirements of political self-government and the standards for judging a social order for better or worse.
Many great thinkers, religious and not, studied the Exodus for its political wisdom. In the seventeenth century, political thinkers found guidance for reform in the ancient “Jewish Republic,” while jurists saw in the Hebrew Bible the foundation for the universal principles of justice. The idea that the best body policy is based on the biblical covenant notion entered the American colonies with the Mayflower Pact, and the American tradition of civic republicanism is largely due to the Puritans’ devotion to the Hebrew Bible.
The case for investigating the political teachings of the Exodus was made most eloquent and succinct by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late eighteenth century: “The Jews give us an amazing spectacle: the laws [Greek and Roman lawgivers] they are dead; the much older laws of Moses are still alive. Every human being, whoever he may be, must recognize this as a unique miracle, whose causes, divine or human, certainly deserve the study and admiration of the sages. “