Banterings, Jestings, Historical Precedents & Typological Appropriations of the Mosaic Corpus among Key American Founders, 1750–1800

This chapter turns in yet another direction. As the previous chapters make plain, English common and thus also New England colonial law were both guided away from Mosaic-based Puritan visions, in more humanist and “natural law” directions, following The Glorious Revolution (1688–89) and subsequent related events which affected both the metropole and its colonies. Mosaic Law nonetheless continued to be critically assessed and appropriated on certain rare, select occasions by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in their respective Pennsylvania colonial and Virginia state contexts. Both of these developments took place against the backdrop of ongoing critical reflection on the relative status and role of Mosaic Law from Christian theological, legal, and historical-critical points of view across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These developments were all concerned with theoretical speculations and related practical applications of Mosaic Law as law in relation to conceptualized as well as actualized national and state law codes. These types of historical cases stand in stark contrast to various other references to Mosaic Law and the broader Mosaic corpus which were intermixed within the diaries, autobiographies, and private written exchanges of American Founders which should more properly be distinguished as banterings, jestings, symbolic-typological appropriations, and appeals to historical (cf. symbolic) precedence (as opposed to historical-legal content). These types of allusions and references form the substance of this chapter which covers the period from 1750–1800, starting from the reference to the Quaker-inspired Levitical verse on the Liberty Bell down to Washington’s numerological appropriation of the Ten Commandments as alleged proof of the Providentially guided destiny of the new United States on its tenth anniversary.