Stephen Flurry
Our survival depends on it.
To understand the unique historical bond that exists between the United States and Israel, just review the sermons and writings of Puritans who fled England in the 17th century, former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger said earlier this week. During a speech at Herbert W. Armstrong College on Wednesday, Ettinger said America’s earliest settlers believed they were fleeing from modern-day Egypt (Britain), rebelling against a modern-day pharaoh (King George), crossing a modern-day Red Sea (the Atlantic Ocean) and heading west to a modern-day Promised Land in New Canaan.
The United States, Ettinger explained, is second only to Israel in the number of cities, sites and symbols bearing biblical names. He’s not alone in making that observation. According to Michael Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy, Americans have given scriptural names like Shiloh, Salem and Zion to more than a thousand cities across North America.
During the revolutionary era, the New Israel concept was especially poignant, Oren writes. Harvard’s president during the War of Independence said that “instead of the 12 tribes of Israel, we may substitute the 13 states of the American union.” Yale’s president during the Revolution, Oren writes, “noted that the number of Israelites present at Mount Sinai—3 million—was precisely the population of the United States at the time of independence.”
Many of America’s first universities even made the study of Hebrew mandatory. In 1777, one year after the United States declared its independence, learning Hebrew became a required course at Yale University for freshmen. One of America’s earliest presidents, James Madison, majored in Hebrew, Oren notes. Alexander Hamilton learned to read Hebrew during his youth.
To this day, several American universities have Hebrew expressions embedded into school emblems. At the center of Yale’s seal, for example, is a Hebrew inscription: Urim v’Thummim. These words were associated with the office of the high priest, Aaron, while the ancient Israelites were in the wilderness—see Leviticus 8:8, where these words appear, as well as in seven other places in the Hebrew Bible. Yale University’s website gives this explanation: “The unknown designer of the seal identified the book [on the seal] as the Bible by words which read ‘Urim and Thummin,’ probably names of sacred lots to be cast for the purpose of ascertaining the divine will.”
The seal of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire also includes a Hebrew inscription, ydv la, or El Shaddai—a name for God in Hebrew.
A kinship with ancient Israel can also be identified in the writings of America’s Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, for example, submitted designs for a national seal portraying Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Franklin’s version carried the inscription, “Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God.”
Congress eventually agreed on a seal bearing the image of an eagle with outstretched wings, which, in itself, may have been rooted in biblical imagery (Exodus 19:4).
In Washington today, there are numerous symbols with Israelitish origins. The Library of Congress contains a bronze statue of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. The Supreme Court also features Moses holding the Ten Commandments—a symbol of the Judeo-Christian roots of the country’s legal system—both in a sculpture on the East Portico of the Supreme Court building, as well as in the actual courtroom. On Capitol Hill, a statue of Moses holding the Ten Commandments takes the center spot among 23 statues of famous law figures in the House of Representatives.
When he was in charge of congressional affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Ambassador Ettinger said during his lecture, he called a curator to ask why the statue of Moses was situated in the center of the House of Representatives, facing the speaker of the House.
“You should know,” the curator said in response to the Israeli official’s query. Moses is the source, he said.
Negotiating Away History
During his speech, Ambassador Ettinger discussed the numerous challenges facing the little nation of Israel today—particularly the intense pressure being applied on Israel to give up more land in exchange for a peace agreement. Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, Ettinger argued, every single inch of the land Israel has given up “has been transformed into a platform of hate education which has been the most productive manufacturing line of generic terrorists and homicide bombers.”
Israel has been digging itself into a hole for 16 years, and it keeps getting deeper, Ettinger said. And what has the international community concluded from all of this? That Israel must dig itself into a deeper hole!
It’s illogical and immoral, he said. Referring to the territories now in question, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Ettinger asked, “Can any nation survive while negotiating away the cradle of its history?”
It’s an important question for Israelis to consider. Americans too.
Four years ago, historian David McCullough described the despicable state of higher education in the United States today, where—forget about Hebrew—most students can obtain a degree without taking even one class in history.
We must teach our children who we are and where we are headed, McCullough said in his 2005 speech. “We have to value what our forebears—and not just in the 18th century, but our own parents and grandparents—did for us, or we’re not going to take it very seriously, and it can slip away. If you don’t care about it—if you’ve inherited some great work of art that is worth a fortune and you don’t know that it’s worth a fortune, you don’t even know that it’s a great work of art and you’re not interested in it—you’re going to lose it” (emphasis mine).
This same admonition can be found in the book that, in so many different ways, underpinned the establishment of the Judeo-Christian nation of America in 1776 and the Jewish State of Israel in 1948—the Holy Bible. •
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