Scholars have long recognized that an important strain of American nationalism constructs the United States as a “redeemer nation” based on equating it typologically with ancient Israel and exercising a millenarian appropriation of the Mosaic national covenant. In American Zion, Eran Shalev advances an “expanded sense” of the Old Testament's role in forming a “national and political culture” (2). Between approximately 1770–1830, he contends, lay and clerical writers elaborated an earlier European discourse about the “Hebrew republic” into a distinctive political hermeneutic that wove “America into the Bible and the Bible into America” (143). In demonstrating how generations of early American republicans fashioned scripture into a political text, Shalev has produced a marvelously trenchant study of their religious nationalism.

One of American Zion's greatest virtues is its chronological care in linking ideological developments to politico-cultural change. As resistance to Britain heated up, American Whigs calibrated their civic humanist rhetoric to include biblical Israel along with Greece and Rome in exemplifying the promises and perils of republican government. This process continued during the 1780s as supporters of the Constitution cited the Israelite polity, refigured as having comprised twelve (or sometimes thirteen) “states,” for modeling a federal republic that was both structurally balanced and, unlike other cases from antiquity, ordained by God, thereby sanctioning the newly proposed arrangement as simultaneously well-wrought and divinely favored. By 1800, parsing Old Testament politics had become so normative that “pseudobiblicism,” a genre of political commentary cast in the cadences of the King James Bible, flourished among pundits who hoped that its “ontologically privileged language” (85) would give their own observations special credence. Constant references to the United States as a second Israel culminated in the notion, particularly vivid after the War of 1812, that the United States had become the new Israel, a viewpoint that granted special cogency to arguments identifying Indians as the Ten Lost Tribes and endorsed the claims of religious groups, most notably the Mormons, to possess an Israelite pedigree. After 1830, however, social transformations associated with the Market Revolution and the Second Great Awakening underwrote the ascendance of an alternative political theology grounded in the New Testament. The dynamics of this hermeneutic played out most prominently during the debate over slavery, in which each side justified its stand by soliciting Gospel examples—what did Jesus do? To slaveowners, Christ condoned slavery as legal and just, while abolitionists held that his ministry to the downtrodden and sacrifice for “bleeding humanity” demonstrated precisely the opposite. Historicizing biblical slavery unintentionally undermined the logic equating the Hebrew and American republics by morally distancing them; if biblical slavery was far less heinous than the South's chattel system, then the United States could no longer claim to be Israel redux.

The full impact of Shalev's argument builds as the book progresses, albeit not without some analytical hiccups. He rightly underlines the importance of “biblical republicanism” while also acknowledging that this discovery does not noticeably change our knowledge of republican ideology. More originally, his insistence that Americans in the early republic regarded their country as the successor to ancient Israel substantially deepens our understanding of the cultural context surrounding the Book of Mormon's origin. For one thing, it will now be impossible to consider that scripture outside the corpus of pseudo-biblical writing that surely provided its literary template; too, its narrative of ancient Israelites landing in the New World appeared precisely when debates about the origins of the American Indians—fueled by the publication of Elias Boudinot's A Star in the West (1816)—had temporarily (but momentously) elevated a reading of the United States as Israel literally instantiated in the Western Hemisphere above conventional exegesis, which rendered the relationship between the two lands as metaphorical. In this setting, Mormons' seemingly outlandish proclamation of their Israelite genesis was in fact unremarkable. Convincing in its own terms, Shalev's treatment does not, however, solve the “‘Joseph Smith problem’” (111), that is, how a putatively unlettered backwoodsman could have produced such a masterpiece. That Smith probably was exposed to pseudo-biblical works neither refutes the Mormon argument that he received a divine revelation which cannot be reduced to its context nor quiets skeptics who attribute his inspiration to more mundane sources; in either case, Smith's familiarity with a body of literature that Shalev stresses was political, not providential, fails to illuminate the theological and narrative content of the prophet's vision. The assertion that civic humanist ideology could not have “enjoyed widespread appeal” because “only a fraction of eighteenth-century Americans benefited” from a classical education (17) does not ring true against repeated assertions that, for instance, the “cultural ethos of the founding era was neoclassical” (103). One must ask how much the American Zion was a regional rather than a national construct, since the preponderant documentation comes, as the author admits, from northern—especially New England—sources, despite his determined effort to adduce southern ones.

These qualifications notwithstanding, Shalev's thesis about the Old Testament's importance is ultimately convincing, largely because he so carefully historicizes it. Hebrew scripture came to political prominence during the late eighteenth century both because Calvinism's influence in Anglo-America had resulted in elevating the covenant's salvific importance over that of Jesus, and because the Old Testament's immersion in theopolitics made it far more meaningful to individuals seeking constitutional models in scripture than did the New Testament's relative indifference to political forms. As evangelicalism remade the antebellum religious landscape and slavery replaced state-formation as the dominant political issue, Christ and the New Testament became more relevant. Shalev's greatest contribution lies in demonstrating not only how much American nationalism owes to the Old Testament but also the specific ways in which it does. The trope of being a chosen people derives not simply, or even principally, from covenantal millennialism but rather from a deeply exegetical identification of the United States as biblical Israel put forth during the nation's founding—a historical circumstance that explains how and why a population with few Jews and an emergent sense of profoundly Christian identity nevertheless encoded the Hebrew republic so strongly into its national DNA.