The Bible is back in the news.
In a Pentagon prayer service on April 15, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quoted what seemed to be a verse from the ancient Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, but was, in fact, from the Gospel of Tarantino, as Stephen Colbert quipped.
In response, Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, released a statement on X noting that the homage to the auteur’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction was intentional. Hegseth had “shared a custom prayer... which was obviously inspired by dialogue in Pulp Fiction.”
Two days later, The New York Times suggested that President Donald Trump was likely participating in “America Reads the Bible,” a marathon reading of scripture to take place in Washington, D.C.’s Museum of the Bible, as a means to repair his relationship with Catholics after he publicly sparred with the pope over the Iran war and deleted a tweet depicting himself as Jesus.
“President Trump has a complicated relationship with the Bible,” the paper noted. “He has often called it his favorite book, has posed with it for photographers outside a church, and has sold his own edition for $60. But he has also struggled to name a favorite passage or even pick a favorite Testament between the two.”
At the event on April 21, Trump read a passage from 2 Chronicles, in which God promises to heal the land if its people “humble themselves, pray, and seek My favor.”
As a scholar specializing in the influence of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish ideas on American history, I can attest that the habit of American leaders citing chapter and verse (accurate or not) is as old as the United States itself. In fact, it dates back to the Pilgrims. It has been a powerful and effective means of cultivating covenantal community.
Fight for freedom, liberty shapes how US operates
Americans who cited scripture have forged a country unique in world history in the religious freedom it has offered to all its citizens, not the least of which to us Jews, the original biblically bound people.
The American ethos of fighting for freedom and liberty, drawn from the story of the Children of Israel millennia ago, continues to shape how the United States operates both internally and on the world stage.
Reflecting on the harsh and uncertain early days of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, who signed the Mayflower Compact and would serve as the territory’s governor for roughly three decades, paraphrased the Exodus story and Moses’ final speech in Deuteronomy. Arriving in the New World, he said, his fellow Pilgrims could only see:
"A hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men - and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects."
In the first half of this excerpt from his journal, Bradford was alluding to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt into the rough wilderness in which they would wander for 40 years. And then he referenced the mountaintop on the precipice of the Promised Land, Pisgah, on which Moses stood as his people were about to complete their arduous journey as described in the last of the Five Books of Moses. To Bradford, scripture was a source of strength and solace during communally challenging times.
Ten years later, the Puritan leader John Winthrop would describe in a similarly Hebraic lens how if Massachusetts Bay Colony’s residents would do right in the eyes of the Lord, “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies... For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
Winthrop was misquoting Leviticus 26:8: “Five of you shall give chase to a hundred, and a hundred of you shall give chase to ten thousand.” However, the details were less important than the sense of divine mission that was powering the Pilgrims’ and the Puritans’ project.
Later, the American Founders also possessed a powerful attachment to the Bible, even if the details were sometimes hazy.
John Adams, in 1776, after hearing a sermon paralleling the Patriot cause to Israel’s fight against Pharaoh’s tyranny, ruminated: “Is it not a Saying of Moses, ‘who am I, that I should go in and out before this great People’?” It actually was not a saying of Moses. Adams was conflating Moses’ “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh...” speech in Exodus 3:11 with a request by a much later Jewish ruler, King Solomon, that God “give me now wisdom and knowledge to go out and come in before this people” (2 Chronicles 1:10).
A year earlier, the equally-enamored-with-biblical-analogies Abigail Adams had written to John, wishing upon the “wretched” loyalist and former royal governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson, “the fate of Mordecai,” mistakenly swapping in the hero of the Purim story for his villainous foil Haman, who is hanged at the end of the story.
Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the country’s most biblically literate president ever, often weaved scripture into his seminal addresses, from “four score and seven years ago,” which was likely borrowed from a rabbinic sermon citing a verse in Psalms, to a purposeful paraphrase of Exodus 19:5 when, on Feb. 21, 1861, he referred to Americans writ large as the Lord’s “almost chosen people.”
It hasn’t only been political leaders, of course, who rephrase the Word in an effort to encourage Americans to live up to their highest ideals. Martin Luther King Jr. made reference to that same mountaintop as Bradford in the civil rights leader’s final speech on April 3, 1968, in Memphis. He rousingly reassured his audience that:
"We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop... I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
Citing (and mis-citing) scripture, then, is a longstanding and worthy American tradition.
Some Jews might feel excluded by Jesus and New Testament texts being invoked in a nonsectarian context by public leaders, and verses can be abused, as opposed to being correctly interpreted. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of looking to the Bible to shape the soul of America has served a largely positive purpose. A religious civic space is full of happier, healthier people who give more charity, have more children, and forge a strong sense of community.
Regardless of one’s party or views on those in power today, then, quoting the Bible in the American public sphere has long characterized the American experiment. On the whole, it has been largely good for the American collective character and good for the Jews. Occasionally, these quotes might be imperfect, but they reflect a worthy national will: the desire to see through the long march towards liberty and justice for all.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.