What makes a village a village? What shapes their community identity, keeps them together, guides their lives? What are they looking for? Why should they strive?
These questions have surfaced in our turbulent times, as controversy swirls over the goodness of the nation-state and the meaning of “people”. Celebrating globalization, cosmopolitan elites act and increasingly consider themselves “citizens of the world”. Reaffirming older identities, many citizens who treasure the paths of their own nation see them threatened by foreign ideologies and immigrants they do not assimilate. Even in our former American republic, what defines and unifies the nation has become an urgent issue.
For help in thinking about these problems, I turned to the book of Exodus. Why Exodus? This biblical book not only recounts the political foundation of one of the oldest and most consistent peoples in the world. It also invites us to think about the moral meaning of community life, the requirements of political self-government, and the standards for judging a social order better or worse.
Many great thinkers, religious and not, have studied the Exodus for its political wisdom. In the seventeenth century, political thinkers found guidelines for reform in the ancient “Hebrew Republic,” while jurists saw in the Hebrew Bible the foundations of universal principles of justice. The idea that the best political body is based on the biblical notion of covenant entered the American colonies with the Mayflower Pact, and the American tradition of civic republicanism owes much to the devotion of the Puritans to the Hebrew Bible.
The case for research into the political teachings of the Exodus was given perhaps more eloquently and succinctly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late eighteenth century: “The Jews provide us with a startling spectacle: the laws of [Greek and Roman lawgivers] they are dead; the very old laws of Moses are still alive. Any man, whoever he may be, must recognize it as a unique wonder, the causes of which, divine or human, certainly deserve the study and admiration of the wise. ”