What makes a people a people? What shapes their community identity, keeps them together, guides their lives? What do they look for? What should they strive for?
These issues have surfaced in our turbulent times, as the controversy revolves around the goodness of the nation-state and the meaning of “condition of people”. Celebrating globalization, cosmopolitan elites are increasingly active and consider themselves “citizens of the world”. Reaffirming older identities, many citizens who value the customs of their own nation see them as being threatened by foreign ideologies and non-assimilated immigrants. Even in our former American republic, what defines and unifies the nation has become an urgent matter.
For help in thinking about these issues, I turned to the book of Exodus. Why Exodus? This biblical book not only chronicles 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 better or worse.
Many great thinkers, religious or not, studied the Exodus for its political wisdom. In the 17th century, political thinkers found guidance for reform in the former “Hebrew Republic”, while jurists saw in the Hebrew Bible the foundation for universal principles of justice. The idea that the best political body rests on the biblical notion of alliance entered American colonies with the Mayflower Pact, and the American tradition of civic republicanism owes much to the Puritans’ devotion to the Hebrew Bible.
The case for investigating the political teachings of the Exodus was presented perhaps more eloquently and succinctly by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late 18th century: “The Jews provide us with an amazing spectacle: the laws of [Greek and Roman lawgivers] is dead; the much older laws of Moses are still alive. Any man, whoever he is, must recognize this as a unique wonder, whose causes, divine or human, certainly deserve the study and admiration of the wise. “