The biblical patriarch Jacob, also known as Israel, is whom the Jewish State is named for. But he and his 12 sons, Joseph in particular, have also served as founding influences on the United States.

For those in need of a quick refresher, in the Book of Genesis, Isaac, Abraham’s son, marries Rebecca. They have twin boys – Jacob and Esau. As a young man, hungry after a hunt in the fields, Esau sells his birthright, which signals covenantal chosenness, to Jacob. Jacob, eluding the clutches of an angry and regretful Esau, proceeds to have 12 sons. His favorite is Joseph, who, after Jacob gifted him a special coat as a token of his love, is sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. After many years, Joseph is reunited with his father, his favorite brother Benjamin, and the rest of the family. At the end of the story, a dying Jacob blesses his reunited sons. Joseph forgives his brothers and tells them that what happened to him was all part of God’s plan.

The adventures of Jacob and his children have served as a throughline in the genesis of America – from abolition to revolution, the Civil War to civil rights.

Samuel Sewall’s “The Selling of Joseph” (1700) is one of the earliest American tracts decrying slavery. Sewall, who served as the chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, the then-province’s highest court, wrote:

“Joseph was rightfully no more a Slave to his Brethren, than they were to him: and they had no more Authority to Sell him, than they had to Slay him.  And if they had nothing to do to Sell him; the Ishmaelites bargaining with them, and paying down 20 pieces of Silver, could not make a Title. Neither could Potiphar have any better Interest in him than the Ishmaelites had. Gen. 37. 20, 27, 28.  For he that shall in this case plead Alteration of Property, seems to have forfeited a great part of his own claim to Humanity.  There is no proportion between 20 Pieces of Silver, and LIBERTY.”

Sewall saw in Joseph’s sale a testament to the need to treat all humans deserving of freedom, not as property.

In 1775, John Adams compared Loyalists’ affinity for the British to Jacobs’ sinning sons. But he added a generous-hearted line: “However, what the sons of Israel [Jacob’s other name] intended for ruin to Joseph proved the salvation of his family; and I hope and believe that the whigs will have the magnanimity, like him, to suppress their resentment and the felicity of saving their ungrateful brothers.” 

In 1776, John Jay, co-author of The Federalist Papers and later a founder of the American Bible Society, urged his fellow New Yorkers, at their state’s constitutional convention, not to give up on their birthright of freedom. He harkened to Esau’s overly hasty relinquishing of his birthright to his younger twin brother Jacob in exchange for a pot of soup in Genesis 25:

“If then, God hath given us freedom, are we not responsible to him for that, as well as other talents? If it be our birthright, let us not sell it for a mess of pottage, nor suffer it to be torn from us by the hand of violence! If the means of defense are in our power and we do not make use of them, what excuse shall we make to our children and our Creator? These are questions of the deepest concern to us all. These are questions which materially affect our happiness, not only in this world but in the world to come.”

In 1789, at America’s first inauguration, George Washington placed his hand on a Bible, loaned for the occasion by New York’s St. John’s Lodge No. 1. It was open to Genesis 49, Jacob’s blessings to his 12 sons, an expression of his hopes for their future. 

Richard Snowden’s “American Revolution; Written in the Style of Ancient History” (1793) also made a subtle allusion to the brothers’ tale. In discussing Benjamin Franklin’s return from Europe, he purposely echoed the style of Joseph’s brother Benjamin, who was brought down to Egypt by his brothers, after Joseph, in his guise as the viceroy of Egypt, requested his presence. Snowden renders Franklin’s return as:

“And it came to pass, when the ship had arrived, and it was known to the people of the provinces that Benjamin their brother was returned from the island of Britain, that there was great rejoicing throughout the whole land.”

In 1811, after America had successfully begun to flourish and he had completed his two terms as the country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson decried monarchs, which he did not miss, as Esaus: “A people having no king to sell them for a mess of pottage for himself, no shackles to restrain the power of self-defence, find resources within themselves equal to every trial.” The Founder was proud that America would be like Jacob.

Tragically, the Bible was also used in support of slavery. On June 13, 1861, the South Carolina-born Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer delivered a sermon, “National Responsibility Before God.” In it, he tried to enlist scriptural reinforcements taken from the birth story of Isaac and Rebecca’s twins in order to justify secession:

“We have vainly read the history of our Fathers, if we failed to see that from the beginning two nations were in the American womb [a reference to Gen. 25:23 in which Rebecca is informed she will have twins]; and through the whole period of gestation the supplanter has had his hand upon his brother’s heel. The separation of North and South was as surely decreed of God, and has as certainly been accomplished by the outworking of great moral causes, as was the separation of the colonies from their English mother.”

Ironically, and thankfully, the story of Jacob and Joseph would later be reclaimed in support of those seeking equal rights for all Americans.

Outside of Room 306 at what used to be the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, there is a plaque noting that the room is where Martin Luther King Jr. spent the last night of his life, on April 3, 1968. The commemoration of the indelible figure who delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech is inscribed not with a quote from that legendary address, with the words of Joseph’s brothers as they prepared selling him: “Behold, here cometh the Dreamer. Let us slay him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.” The memorial is meant as a call to action, challenging each of us to realize the era in which people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 

The inscription, an abridgment of Genesis 37:19-20, is just the latest, but surely not the last, testament to the indelible impression Jacob, Joseph and the 12 tribes of Israel have had on the character of America itself. ■

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include the newly released “Jewish Roots of American Liberty,” “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”