Americans looking back at the Declaration did so through court cases, political debate, and celebrations in popular culture. Numerous judicial decisions beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the twentieth century have upheld the view that the Declaration of Independence created one nation, the United States of America. This was also the view of some of the greatest lawyers of the mid nineteenth century: Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln. Even Andrew Jackson, largely seen as a proponent of states’ rights, embraced this view in the nullification dispute with South Carolina. And ordinary Americans have celebrated the Fourth of July as the birth of a nation from the very beginning. For the thirteen independent nations view to be correct, all of these decisions, statements, and celebrations would have to be wrong. (They are not.)

This chapter illustrates how a biblical text can bring certain philosophical problems to the fore, especially when attention is paid to its literary techniques. Such techniques are used in midrashic interpretations but have been put to extensive use by contemporary biblical scholars like Robert Alter. The story in Genesis of Joseph and his brothers provides a dramatic rendition of a philosophical problem: the seeming opposition between God’s control of history and human free will. I show how the problem is expressed through the narrative; discuss how a variety of midrashim and biblical exegeses address the problem; and relate the issue at hand to work by analytic philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Flint, and Peter Van Inwagen.

The Barren Fig Tree parable is modeled on features of the famine in Egypt to portray the imminent coming of God’s kingdom. The dying tree and dead earth beneath, reminiscent of threatening conditions during the Egyptian famine in Joseph’s time, evoke the prospect of the end of the world in Jesus’ time.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America is widely recognized as one of the most definitive accounts of American society and political culture. However, his thoughts on the US Constitution have often been overlooked. In this chapter, Jeremy D. Bailey argues that this neglect is unfortunate insofar as Tocqueville’s view of the US Constitution diverges in significant ways from the authoritative rendition of The Federalist. Rather than echoing classic explanations of the workings of the US Constitution by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Tocqueville’s understandings of federalism, Congress, US elections, the presidency, and the Supreme Court are more influenced by the constitutional interpretation of Thomas Jefferson. Despite his extensive discussion of other parts of the US Constitution, however, Tocqueville has little to say about the Bill of Rights. This apparent oversight may be explained by the fact that he sees a respect for rights as emerging from political culture rather than any specific institutional framework.