American Talmud

The American Bible, Stephen Prothero’s latest assault on the best-seller lists, is a compendium of writings that, Prothero insists, together define Americans as a nation. “Words matter,” he tells us in the introduction, and conversations about our identity as a people are essential to our common life. “In every generation our pluribus threatens to overtake our unum,” he writes; “in every generation the nation must be imagined anew.”

Although Americans are not bound together by creed, they think of their nation as a religion of sorts. “The stories we tell about our nation are sacred stories,” he says. “The heroes we recall on our holy days are saints and martyrs, as ancient and permanent as granite on Mount Rushmore.” But just as the Bible, which is for many the foundational text of the United States, admits of many interpretations, so too have the writings of Americans themselves, from Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., engendered intense debate. This collection, then, in the tradition of Noah Webster’s readers, “is a record of what Americans value enough to fight about.”

As befitting an American “Talmud” (Prothero’s term), The American Bible reproduces not only the original texts but also a representation of various interpretations. Prothero inventively organizes the writings into biblical categories: Genesis (works like Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence), Law (the Constitution and court decisions), Chronicles (novels), Psalms (music), Proverbs (such as “Give me liberty or give me death”), Prophets (Henry David Thoreau, Malcolm X and others), Lamentations (the Gettysburg Address), Gospels (political speeches), Acts of the Apostles (the Pledge of Allegiance) and Epistles (“Letter from Birmingham Jail”). He includes no apocalyptic writings, however.