The separation of church and state, much on the minds of the museum’s critics, is not at stake in any of this. Rather, what we experience is a simple recognition that this nation was founded on a set of ideas, and those ideas could not have taken the shape they did without the influence of the Bible.

Can a leopard change its spots? Is anything new under the sun? How have the mighty fallen?

Is there a phrase in the English language that has not been shaped by translations of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)? Or—if you’re imagining a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or thinking it better to give than to receive, or holding that faith can move mountains—shaped by the Christian Bible or New Testament that in most editions is joined to those more ancient texts?

At the new Museum of the Bible on the National Mall—the subject of Diana Muir Appelbaum’s new essay in Mosaic—the galleries with the least apparent significance, offering minimal special effects but the most promotional content, may really be the most important. They may also be the least appreciated by much of the enlightened opinion on the museum that Appelbaum cites so effectively. These are the galleries devoted to the Bible’s impact, an impact that has been, by any standard, immense—and that is one of the central points made by this $800-million museum.

Most of one floor in the museum is divided into areas of human endeavor reflecting biblical influence: science, justice, health, commerce, language, fashion, art. At first the plenitude might seem absurd, as if no pebble has been left unturned. Actually, however, so few are the aspects of Western civilization and culture untouched by the Bible that the exhibits may not go far enough. The Bible’s interpretation of divine history, and humanity’s attempts to comprehend that history and its interpretation, may form a crucial factor in accounting for the West’s success in molding the material world to the purposes of human advancement and wreaking such extraordinary transformations in governance, science, and art.

This notion now evidently strikes many as a modern heresy: a refusal to appreciate the basic importance of science and reason themselves, retreating instead to the sentimental celebration of a dated, hierarchical universe of values in which menstruating women are ceremonially unclean, homosexuals are deserving of death, and warfare is just another form of self-righteous murder. Indeed, those most afraid of the Museum of the Bible are also, as Appelbaum suggests, the most scornful of the Bible itself. And, often, they have the least acquaintance with what they are condemning, not even recognizing how their own inflated sense of virtue has been shaped by that which they dismiss. For the texts of the Hebrew Bible may be read not only as divine word but as the voice of humanity: an extraordinary account of the birth of a people, its fitful adoption of a code of law, and its wavering visions of a just and righteous society.

Thus, in the museum’s compact but crucial section devoted to the biblical influence on the founding of the United States, one learns that the Bible was used both to support slavery and to oppose it: proof in itself of the difficulty of the interpretive enterprise. A more detailed exploration of the text would have helped further explain just how the Bible figured so prominently in the slavery debate.

Such an exploration might show, first, that in the pre-biblical world, slavery was an invisible institution, taken for granted by all known human societies. In those circumstances, it would have been as absurd to imagine slavery’s disappearance as to imagine a community without childbirth. But pretty early on in the Hebrew Bible, slavery is made visible; it becomes a central phenomenon in the biblical narrative—and one that, unlike anywhere else in the world at that time, bears no relationship to enslavement as the common fate of those vanquished in war. Once the Israelites settle in their land, the problem posed by slavery is a recurring theme. In ancient biblical civil law, the institution itself is periodically undone in 50-year jubilee cycles.

In brief, the Bible turned slavery into an issue, subject to divine oversight and to human interpretation. This meant it could also be abolished.

Read More