American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War . By Eran Shalev. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. x + 239 pp. $40.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War . By Eran Shalev . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 2013. x + 239 pp. $40.00 cloth; $28.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesScholars have long recognized that an important strain of American nationalism constructs the United States as a "redeemer nation" based on equating it typologically with ancient Israel and exercising a millenarian appropriation of the Mosaic national covenant. In American Zion , Eran Shalev advances an "expanded sense" of the Old Testament's role in forming a "national and political culture" (2). Between approximately 1770-1830, he contends, lay and clerical writers elaborated an earlier European discourse about the "Hebrew republic" into a distinctive political hermeneutic that wove "America into the Bible and the Bible into America" (143). In demonstrating how generations of early American republicans fashioned scripture into a political text, Shalev has produced a marvelously trenchant study of their religious nationalism.One of American Zion 's greatest virtues is its chronological care in linking ideological developments to politico-cultural change. As resistance to Britain heated up, American Whigs calibrated their civic humanist rhetoric to include biblical Israel along with Greece and Rome in exemplifying the promises and perils of republican government. This process continued during the 1780s as supporters of the Constitution cited the Israelite polity, refigured as having comprised twelve (or sometimes thirteen) "states," for modeling a federal republic that was both structurally balanced and, unlike other cases from antiquity, ordained by God, thereby sanctioning the newly proposed arrangement as simultaneously well-wrought and divinely favored. By 1800, parsing Old Testament politics had become so normative that "pseudobiblicism," a genre of political commentary cast in the cadences of the King James Bible, flourished among pundits who hoped that its "ontologically privileged language" (85) would give their own observations special credence. Constant references to the United States as a second Israel culminated in the notion, particularly vivid after the War of 1812, that the United States had become the new Israel, a viewpoint that granted special cogency to arguments identifying Indians as the Ten Lost Tribes and endorsed the claims of religious groups, most notably the Mormons, to possess an Israelite pedigree. After 1830, however, social transformations associated with the Market Revolution and the Second Great Awakening underwrote the ascendance of an alternative political theology grounded in the New Testament. The dynamics of this hermeneutic played out most prominently during the debate over slavery, in which each side justified its stand by soliciting Gospel examples--what did Jesus do? To slaveowners, Christ condoned slavery as legal and just, while abolitionists held that his ministry to the downtrodden and sacrifice for "bleeding humanity" demonstrated precisely the opposite. Historicizing biblical slavery unintentionally undermined the logic equating the Hebrew and American republics by morally distancing them; if biblical slavery was far less heinous than the South's chattel system, then the United States could no longer claim to be Israel redux.The full impact of Shalev's argument builds as the book progresses, albeit not without some analytical hiccups. He rightly underlines the importance of "biblical republicanism" while also acknowledging that this discovery does not noticeably change our knowledge of republican ideology. …