Hebrew republic

And so basically that's when things started to change, and Thomas Paine's famous book Common Sense says, It came out in 1776, and what a lot of people don't realize is that he uses a biblical argument.

He looks at what he called the Hebrew Republic.

It was the time of judges in the Bible where Israel were a people that had escaped from slavery, but they weren't a monarchy.

They didn't have a king, and they ended up requesting a king.

You know, they're-- You have the Articles of Inc- Confederation in place.

They're supposed to be changing that, and they show up, "Well, let's just throw it out and, uh, let's start, start over." But they looked at the Hebrew Republic, uh, the Hebrew Commonwealth-

Mm

... is the way that it's framed.

Had never been a republic that was going to be of this size.

And that is really what haunted them, was the failure, as you noted, Neil, of all these republics in the past, whether it was the Hebrew Republic from the Bible, or of course, Rome in particular, as the great... great lesson about the inability of free people to maintain virtue and what they called Republican virtue and put the polity above the self.

So I think their concerns were the scale, the size.

It is interesting when you ask that and you go through their writings.

exactly.

Where do you think American founders got the idea? They wrote clearly and explicitly about this, that they were examining the Hebrew Republic for ideas about how our own constitution should be formed.

Yeah, the prophet, the king, and the priest were the three roles that you had in the Hebrew Bible, then translated into what you have is this Republic of the United States being inspired by those three roles, and knowing full well to separate those three roles that each one has their particular destiny to fulfill in the responsibility of freedom.

I've got a question for you related to—it's not related to the Exodus, but just sort of a side thought here, but related more to the exile.