It is interesting, however, that although the religious conflicts within Israel and Judah were of the highest magnitude, involving, according to their partisans, a literal struggle for the nation's soul, there are no records of any faction, while in the ascendancy, ever attempting to disarm an opposing faction. Perhaps the memory of weapons prohibition under Philistine rule was just too strong.
Keeping arms in the hands of the people did help prevent government from sliding into absolute despotism. Checks and balances were often provided, especially in the northern kingdom, by people who knew how to use weapons to displace unruly kings. Religion acted as another check, especially when prophets arose to rebuke the king and his court.
So Israel under the monarchy always had an armed population (as the 2nd Amendment envisions for the United States). It also had powerful dissidents, the prophets, who were not afraid to use their freedom of speech to rebuke the government (as the 1st Amendment provides). Yet even though ancient Israel might be said to have protected both 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment rights, these were not sufficient to protect the full scope of liberty and prevent serious abuses by government. The concentration of national political power continued to have terrible consequences.
Today, some people naively claim that as long as their favorite right (free speech, for instance, or the right to arms) is protected, American liberty will always be secure. The experience of ancient Israel shows the folly of such claims. The 1st and 2nd Amendments make great contributions to safeguarding freedom, but they are not strong enough by themselves to shoulder the whole burden of protecting liberty from a government that consolidates too much political and economic power.
Israelite Americans
The first two generations of New Englanders saw themselves as Israel in the Wilderness (the 40-year period when the tribes wandered around the Sinai Peninsula, before entering the Promised Land). Around 1690, as increased population and the growth of towns made the Wilderness parallel untenable, the new ideology emphasized "Israel's constitution." The model of good government was Israel's unwritten constitution, which required that society be run according to published laws and fair and orderly procedures. New England's laws and customs should ensure that power could not be abused, as some kings of the Hebrews had abused their power, and should especially ensure that government would not suppress religion, as some Israelite monarchs had attempted to suppress or weaken the worship of Yahweh, while promoting nature religions.
Still later, as New England sought to convince the other colonies to revolt against George III, the dominant story of Israel became the story of what historian Harry Stout calls "the Jewish Republic." Israel had governed itself during the period of the judges, but had sinned against God by becoming a monarchy. America needed to throw off the monarchy and return to the only system of government that God approved: self-government.
To cite one example: Harvard College President Samuel Langdon's 1775 election sermon was built on Isaiah 1:26: "And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning; afterward thou shalt be called the city of Righteousness, the faithful city." Important sermons had a much broader audience than just the people who were in attendance when the minister spoke. Sermons were often reprinted and distributed throughout the colonies. By 1776, New England Congregationalist ministers were preaching at a record pace, over 2,000 sermons a week, and the number of Congregationalist pamphlets from New England exceeded the number of secular pamphlets from all the other colonies, combined, by a ratio of more than four to one.
Peter Whitney, in a 1776 sermon titled "American Independence Vindicated," summed up the attitudes of the New England Congregationalist ministers. He argued that the 13 "tribes" of Americans had been patient in their suffering under oppression, like the ten tribes of Israel under King Rehoboam, until they had no choice but to revolt. The form of government of an independent United States was uncertain, but the model should be premonarchic republican Israel.
Back in 1765, Stephen Johnson's sermon in Newport, Rhode Island, had pointed to Israel throwing off Rehoboam as analogous to Holland's throwing off the Spanish yoke in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and he suggested that both rebellions provided good examples for Americans. In 1780, during the war of independence, Simeon Howard preached a sermon to the Massachusetts legislators, reminding them that "the Jews always exercised this right of choosing their own rulers."
Even the deist Thomas Paine took up the theme in "Common Sense," arguing that monarchy was inherently sinful, because the Israelites had rejected God when they asked for a king. Monarchs usurped prerogatives that belonged solely to God. A person could believe in the Bible or in kings, but not in both: "These portions of scripture are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocation. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government, is true, or the scripture is false."
Although the details changed with time, the intensity of New England's self-identification with Israel did not. In April 1776, when George Washington had just forced the British out of Boston, Samuel Cooper took the pulpit at the newly liberated First Church of Boston for a sermon that the congregation knew would be of great historical importance. Cooper explained that there was a "very striking Resemblance between the Condition of our Country from the beginning and that of antient Israel, so many Passages in holy writ referring to their particular Circumstances as a People, may with peculiar Propriety be adopted by us." Like the Israelites, the Americans were given their land by God, and would always possess it, as long as they stayed faithful to God.
In the famous 1780 "A Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution," Cooper returned to the theme, pointing to "a striking resemblance between our own circumstances and those of the ancient Israelites." If Americans were virtuous, then they would build the New Jerusalem that is promised in the penultimate chapter of the last book of the New Testament: "Thus will our country resemble the new city which St. John saw 'coming down from God out of heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband.' "
Good Americans, like good Jews, needed to be ready to fight. Ministers warned of the ancient Israelite city of Laish, which was destroyed because it neglected to prepare defensively (Judges 18:2728). "Curse ye Meroz," thundered the ministers, recalling the curse of Judge Deborah against a city that failed to arm itself and sat on the sidelines during her war of national liberation against a foreign king.
And good Americans, like good Jews, needed to be ready to overthrow tyrannical rulers. In the early 1770s, the most-read sermon was "An Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty," delivered in 1772 by the Baptist John Allen, who cited the Israelite revolution against Rehoboam as justification for American resistance to England. He warned:
[T]he Americans will not submit to be SLAVES, they know the use of the gun, and the military art . . . and where his Majesty has one soldier, who art in general the refuse of the earth, America can produce fifty, free men, and all volunteers, and raise a more potent army of men in three weeks, than England can in three years.
The problem was and remains the challenge of maintaining a society that is strong enough to resist foreign enemies, yet whose government does not infringe domestic freedom. It is one thing to justify a revolution; it is another thing to maintain a system of limited government.
The writers of the Constitution knew how Israel changed from a decentralized militia society with a small government into a centralized, expensive monarchy with a large standing army. The story of Israel was consistent with what they had learned about England, France, Rome, and other great powers: centralism, monarchy, and standing armies created a vicious cycle of excessive growth and expensive government.
Yet as the founders also recognized, a decentralized, low-tax, militia-reliant society was difficult to sustain. During the era of the judges, the Hebrews had found the problem insurmountable: in times of peril, some tribes would sit out the conflict, leaving the fighting to others. Tribes might battle one another rather than working together against external dangers. So the Constitution tried to balance the centralization necessary to national defense with the decentralization necessary to liberty.
Has it worked? Any answer is likely to be as complicated as the problems to which the Constitution, like the biblical history of Israel, responded.
Further reading on ancient Israel
Chaim Herzog and Mordechai Gichon, "Battles of the Bible" (Greenhill Books, 2002; first published 1978).
Norman Podhoretz, "The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are" (Free Press, 2002).
Further reading on religion in early America
Alice M. Baldwin, "The New England Clergy and the American Revolution" (Frederick Ungar, 1958; first published 1928).
Dale S. Kuehne, "Massachusetts Congregationalist Political Thought 17601790" (University of Missouri Press. 1996).
Daniel C. Palm, ed. "On Faith and Free Government" (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
Robert E. Shalhope, "The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment," Journal of American History, 69 (August 1982).
Harry S. Stout, "The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England" (Oxford University Press, 1986).
John Wingate Thornton, ed., "The Pulpit of the American Revolution or, the Political Sermons of the Period of 1776" (Burt Franklin, 1970; first published 1860).
Several of the sermons quoted in this article are available online.