On July 4, 1776, just hours after declaring independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress turned its attention to another important task: designing an official seal for the new nation.
A committee was appointed to come up with a suitable emblem. Its three members were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, some of the most prominent figures in the American Revolution.
Franklin wanted the seal to depict Moses standing at the Red Sea, raising his staff as the waters parted and Pharaoh's army was swallowed by the waves.
Jefferson suggested an image of the Israelites wandering through the wilderness, guided by a cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night.
Think about that – at the very moment America was breaking free of British rule, two of its leading revolutionaries looked back more than 3,000 years to the Biblical Exodus for inspiration.
The story of the Israelites' liberation from Egyptian bondage had long occupied an important place in the religious and political imagination of colonial America. And as the confrontation with Britain intensified, it became a powerful symbol of the struggle against tyranny.
For many Puritan settlers, the Hebrew Bible was far more than a religious text. It was a guide to understanding history, society and government.
The Israelites' journey from Egypt through the wilderness offered a compelling parallel to their own experience of leaving England and crossing the Atlantic in search of a place where they could practice their faith.
John Winthrop, who led the Massachusetts Bay Colony's great migration in 1630, drew explicitly on the Biblical account.
In his famous sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, Winthrop invoked Moses' farewell address to the Israelites in Deuteronomy, warning his fellow settlers that their success depended upon remaining faithful to their covenant with God.
Just as the ancient Israelites entered a covenant that carried both blessings and obligations, the settlers believed their new community would be judged by its conduct.
By the middle of the 18th century, as tensions between Britain and its American colonies grew, Biblical references increasingly appeared in sermons and political arguments challenging royal authority.
The Exodus was especially useful because it told the story of a people suffering under an oppressive ruler who refused to recognize their freedom.
For colonists angered by taxation without representation, restrictions on trade and what they regarded as arbitrary government, the analogy was difficult to resist.
King George III was not literally Pharaoh, of course. But the Biblical account supplied a familiar vocabulary through which resistance to British authority could be explained and justified.
One of the clearest examples came in May 1775, when Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College, delivered a sermon before the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.
Its title was Government Corrupted by Vice and Recovered by Righteousness.
Langdon did not merely invoke the Israelites as an example of a people who had escaped oppression. He went further, arguing that their political system before the establishment of the monarchy offered a model worthy of consideration by modern Americans.
"The Jewish government, according to the original constitution which was divinely established, if considered merely in a civil view, was a perfect republic," he declared.
He pointed to the elders, judges and tribal leaders who had exercised authority among the Israelites, contrasting their system with the dangers of hereditary kingship.
Langdon also reminded his listeners that when the Israelites demanded a king, the Bible presented their request as a rejection of the political order under which they had previously lived.
For Americans increasingly questioning the legitimacy of British rule, Langdon's message was unmistakable: the Bible itself offered a precedent for government without a king.
In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the pamphlet that helped turn growing colonial discontent into an argument for complete independence. Paine's unorthodox religious views would later generate considerable controversy. Nevertheless, when he sought to demolish the supposed legitimacy of hereditary monarchy, he turned to the Hebrew Bible.
In a lengthy discussion of kingship, Paine cited the Biblical account in the Book of Samuel, where the Israelites demand that the prophet appoint a king to rule over them.
Samuel warns them that a monarch will seize their sons for military service, appropriate their property and impose burdens upon the population.
Paine regarded the episode as a devastating indictment of monarchy. For him, the ancient Israelites had been warned about precisely the kind of concentrated political power that the American colonists now wished to escape.
The influence of these Biblical ideas was not confined to pulpits or pamphlets – it also reached the highest levels of America's revolutionary leadership.
That brings us back to the committee appointed on July 4, 1776, to design the Great Seal of the United States. In a letter to his wife Abigail dated August 14, 1776, John Adams described the proposals being considered.
Franklin, he wrote, suggested "Moses lifting up his wand and dividing the Red Sea, and Pharaoh in his chariot overwhelmed with the waters." The proposed motto was equally striking: "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to G-d."
The Americans had rebelled against a king. Franklin proposed commemorating that rebellion through the Biblical account of a tyrant whose army was destroyed while pursuing a people seeking freedom.
Jefferson's proposal was somewhat different, but no less revealing. He suggested depicting the Israelites in the wilderness, led by Divine guidance, with an image of the Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa on the reverse.
Jefferson was drawing upon two different historical traditions, Biblical and Anglo-Saxon, to express the political heritage of the emerging nation. Adams, for his part, preferred a scene from classical mythology showing Hercules choosing between virtue and pleasure. But the fact that both Franklin and Jefferson independently chose imagery connected to the Exodus demonstrates just how deeply that story had entered the American imagination.
Neither proposal became the final national emblem.
After six years of deliberations and several committees, Congress adopted the familiar Great Seal in June 1782, featuring the American bald eagle holding an olive branch and arrows.
Yet the Biblical imagery remained an intriguing part of the nation's founding history, and the connection did not disappear once independence had been won.
Nearly three decades later, in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1805, President Jefferson again invoked the Israelites' journey through the wilderness.
Jefferson appealed to the providence "who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land" and had guided the young republic through its difficulties.
The reference underscored how readily one of America's principal Founders continued to draw upon the Exodus narrative when addressing the nation's destiny.
None of this means that America was founded exclusively upon Biblical principles, much less that the Founders shared a single religious outlook. They plainly did not. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the political ideas that shaped the Revolution drew upon numerous intellectual traditions. But the influence of the Hebrew Bible upon America's founding should not be underestimated.
The Exodus was more than an ancient tale of deliverance. It was a story about the limits of political power, the injustice of tyranny and the right of a people to be free. For Americans preparing to cast off British rule, those were not abstract questions. They were matters of immediate and profound consequence.
As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is worth recalling that the struggle for American independence drew inspiration not only from the political philosophers of Europe but also from the ancient Israelites.
And when Benjamin Franklin was asked to envision a symbol for the newly independent nation, he did not choose a Roman emperor, a Greek philosopher or a British statesman. He chose Moses, standing at the Red Sea, with Pharaoh's army disappearing beneath the waves.
Two and a half centuries later, that choice still speaks volumes about the ideals that helped give birth to America.