Mosaic nation

A recent issue of the TLS reviews Bruce Feiler’s  America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story , a study of the influence of Moses on the American political imagination.  Everyone from Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and the other Founders to George M.-for-Moses (so described by the Independent ) Bush invoked the example of Moses.  In the revolutionary era, Deuteronomy was the most-cited book of the Bible (which was far and away the most-cited book).  Franklin and Jefferson collaborated on a Great Seal that showed Moses raising his hand to the Red Sea to drown the tyrant Pharaoh.  Spirituals composed during Southern slavery longed for redemption from the Egypt of the South and an exodus to a Canaan, and the Civil Rights movement picked up the same theme.