Moses our founding founder?

It's not as crazy as it sounds. A new book by Bruce Feiler, "America's Prophet", explores the connection between this Jewish biblical hero and the American consciousness-- and places him right up there with Honest Abe and Great George. Who's next, Queen Esther?

For more than a century, Moses has exercised the American imagination. The stuff of biography and fiction as well as advertisements, he figured in one late 19th-century sermon as a Greek god, but better; in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountains, he was a voodoo priest, and in the Metropolitan Casualty Life Insurance Company’s pamphlet Moses, Persuader of Men, he was dubbed “one of the greatest salesmen…that ever lived.” Clearly, there’s something about Moses that speaks loudly and persistently to an American audience. Bruce Feiler’s America’s Prophet, a sweeping survey of Moses’ recurring role in American history, is no exception. The most recent in a very long line of books to take the measure of the ancient biblical figure, Feiler’s Moses is the quintessential American hero, right up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Better yet, he’s close kin to Zelig, Woody Allen’s cinematic creation who pops up just about everywhere. And so it is with Feiler’s Moses who is sighted on Clark’s Island in New England, in the belfry that houses the Liberty Bell, at the Statue of Liberty, along the hidden byways of the Underground Railroad, and in George W. Bush’s White House.

Equally wide-ranging and diverse are the Americans for whom Moses was a household name and a moral touchstone. In their darkest days, the Pilgrims sought comfort by reading about Moses’ tribulations, Feiler tells us, as did the founding fathers for whom the “reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end[s] up as the favorite son.” An affection for Moses also ran in families: Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe were quite smitten with him. But then, so, too, were Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Luther King Jr. Feiler’s inventory of Moses’ fans and champions is so encompassing and expansive, you have to wonder whether there was anyone at all in America who did not cotton to the man.

Drawing on dozens of vignettes, the author goes further still, insisting that there’s hardly an American institution that has not been touched by Moses’ staff. Feiler is so taken with his subject, in fact, that he is moved to write in one of the book’s most eye-opening sentences that “Moses is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.”