Monday, April 20, 2026

Part 2 of my book Reclaiming the Covenant: The Blueprint and the Builders (excerpt)

Here is the beginning of Part 2 of my upcoming book ion America at 250, Reclaiming the Covenant.

The full chapters are being published on my Substack for paid subscribers, and if you are are a subscriber through this blog, PayPal, Patreon or Ko-Fi, email me and I will give you a gift subscription on Substack so you can read the whole book as it comes out.

The Blueprint and the Builders

In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams — three of the five who had drafted the Declaration — to a committee to design a seal for the new United States. Adams reached for classical antiquity: Hercules choosing between Virtue and Sloth. Franklin and Jefferson both reached for the Exodus. Franklin's handwritten proposal described Moses standing on the shore, hand extended over the Red Sea, Pharaoh in his chariot overwhelmed by the returning waters, rays from a pillar of fire in the clouds reaching Moses "to express that he acts by Command of the Deity," with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." Jefferson's written submission was essentially Franklin's design with light edits; in committee discussion he also proposed the Israelites in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The committee adopted Franklin's Moses design for one side of the seal, with Jefferson drafting the August 20 report. Congress tabled it. Only the motto "E Pluribus Unum" — originally Du Simitière's — survived to the final 1782 seal.

The Exodus story encodes a specific answer to the hardest problem in political founding: how do you bind a diverse collection of people together in a way they cannot simply think their way out of? Blood ties do it, but they exclude by definition. Conquest does it, but it generates permanent resentment. Rational argument does it temporarily, until someone finds a better argument. The covenant at Sinai did something different — it made obligation constitutive of identity. The people who accepted it became something they had not been before. You could not exit the covenant without ceasing to be what the covenant had made you, which is a fundamentally different relationship to obligation than any contract or philosophical argument can create. Israel’s greatest king, David, was descended from Ruth, a Moabite who accepted the covenant — membership defined by acceptance, not ancestry, from the beginning.

But Sinai immediately posed the question the founders would later face in Philadelphia: how much uniformity does a covenant require, and how much difference can it tolerate? The twelve tribes that accepted the covenant at Sinai were culturally different. They had distinct territories, distinct economies, distinct characters — the tribe of Judah was not the tribe of Dan, and the tribe of Levi, scattered among the others as a priestly caste with no territorial holding, was different from both. What they shared was the covenant’s common floor: a body of law that applied to all, common national obligations (defense, the Temple service, the pilgrimage festivals), and the dual membership principle — a member of the tribe of Judah was simultaneously of Judah and of Israel, and neither membership cancelled the other.

Above that floor, the tribes governed themselves. The Torah legislated the common minimum; the silence above it belonged to the constituent parts. The leaders of Manasseh petitioned Moses for an inheritance rule that would protect tribal territory when daughters inherited land — and got it, a tribal policy modification within the national covenant’s framework. Centuries later, the Talmud records that marriage customs in Judah and Galilee differed in legally consequential ways, both fully within halacha, neither overriding it. A seafaring tribe and a ranching tribe developed different commercial norms for the same reason Delaware and Texas have different corporate and oil law: the national covenant sets the floor, and the silence above it belongs to the people whose lives actually posed the problems. The word the founders would later use for this structure derives from the Latin foedus — covenant. When they called their system “federal,” they were using, whether they knew it or not, the vocabulary of the model they were recovering.

This is the balance the covenant must maintain: enough unity to hold together, enough pluralism to stay legitimate. It is harder to maintain than it sounds, because the pressures run in both directions simultaneously. The covenant can fail by imposing too much uniformity — absorbing the constituent parts into a single mandatory identity, which destroys the pluralism that makes membership voluntary and meaningful. It can equally fail by tolerating too much fragmentation — allowing the shared floor to erode, the dual-membership principle to dissolve, the common obligations to go unmet. Both failures are real. The Hebrew political tradition experienced both.

The Hebrew legal tradition’s influence on the founders was not merely inspirational — it was jurisprudential.

John Selden (1584–1654) was simultaneously the greatest Hebraist of his century and the most important constitutional lawyer of his generation. He argued against the Crown in the Ship Money cases, helped draft the Petition of Right, and first articulated parliamentary sovereignty in terms English constitutional law still uses. He also spent decades producing the most systematic treatment of Hebrew law available in the European scholarly tradition — De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum — arguing that the Noahide laws, the Hebrew legal tradition’s account of what any person owes to any other person prior to any particular covenant, constituted the foundation of universal natural law. What you owe to strangers — the floor of obligation that exists before any specific agreement, any citizenship, any tribal membership — had a Hebrew jurisprudential source, and Selden translated it into the vocabulary of English constitutional argument.

Locke read Selden carefully; the reading notebooks document it. Jefferson and Madison read Locke. The chain from Hebrew jurisprudence to the Declaration’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” runs through Selden’s legal scholarship, not just through the founders’ biblical literacy. The dignity floor that the American covenant will not breach — the claim that every person possesses inherent worth that no majority can revoke — has a genealogy that is simultaneously theological and jurisprudential, and Selden is the point where those two strands fuse into constitutional argument.

The Puritan founders understood the covenantal structure directly, a century and a half before Philadelphia. John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella in 1630, described the Massachusetts Bay Colony in entirely covenantal terms: “We are entered into covenant with Him for this work.” He closed his sermon by quoting Moses’s last speech to Israel before they entered the Promised Land — Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse; therefore choose life.” The surrounding verses make the passage’s significance explicit: the covenant, Moses says, is not in heaven and not across the sea — it is in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. The covenant does not require superhuman effort or ongoing divine enforcement. It requires acceptance, and then action, and then acceptance again. Winthrop chose this passage deliberately: the structure works through what you become when you accept it, not through what punishes you if you don’t.

The Liberty Bell encodes the same logic in metal. The Pennsylvania Assembly chose its inscription in 1751, twenty-five years before independence: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” — Leviticus 25:10, the Jubilee passage, mandating the periodic restoration of freedom as a structural legal obligation. Exodus tells you how a people is freed; Leviticus tells you how a free people maintains its freedom. The inscription is a constitutional provision, not a sentiment: liberty requires institutional maintenance, it erodes without active renewal, and the law’s job is to restore it when circumstances have undermined it. The founders who chose that verse were reading the legislative books of Hebrew scripture, not just the liberation narrative.

The Hebrew model that Franklin and Jefferson reached for was not, then, a story of success. It was a story of a structural problem brilliantly solved and then, slowly, disastrously mismanaged.

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