Get On Down, Moses: The Exodus and American History

Review of Bruce Feiler, America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story (New York: William Morrow, 2009). 368 pages. $26.99.

Bruce Feiler must have had a great many unused notes on Moses lying around after he finished his best-selling "Walking the Bible: A Journey By Land through the Five Books of Moses." I honestly can think of no other reason for his coming out with "America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story," which resembles nothing so much as a heavily padded term paper -- padded with dialogue and narrative, that is, not with documentation -- by a student whose teacher taught him the importance of having a thesis! And this thesis must be original, and it must be your own! To put it another way: long ago, my dissertation adviser told a seminar in Research Methodology that there were three parts to any successful argument: (a) thesis, (b) oh really? and (c) so what? Simple as it is, it has its uses, and I wish some wise instructor -- or better yet, editor -- had hammered home to Bruce Feiler the importance of (c).
So what?!

For Feiler certainly provides us with his thesis -- repeatedly. And it is this: Moses and the story of the Exodus have served as both catalyst and symbol for many key events, movements and, indeed, whole epochs in American history. The Pilgrims saw themselves as godly refugees in the Israelite mode; the Liberty Bell bears a Mosaic inscription; both Washington and Lincoln were eulogized as Mosaic figures at their deaths; Jefferson and Franklin suggested that Moses appear on the Great Seal of the United States (John Adams went for Hercules); enslaved African-Americans equated themselves with the enslaved Israelites, as did their civil rights-era descendants; and Cecil B. DeMille made a movie about Moses, "The Ten Commandments," in the Red-baiting Fifities.

And that's pretty much it.

If some of the topics listed above sound richer than others, well, they are. Feiler is at his best in his treatment of slavery, and while he uncovers no really new material, he paints a convincing portrait both of African slaves and of their white champions -- including and especially Harriet Beecher Stowe, her father and her brother -- as descendants of Moses; equally laudable is the bulk of his discussion of Harriet Tubman, the "Woman Called Moses." But his meandering treatment of the Liberty Bell as a Moses-figure -- can an inanimate object be inspired by a Biblical patriarch? -- while it provides a fairly interesting discussion of a bell that is, truth be told, fairly negligible in our country's history (it didn't, for example, ring on July 4, 1776), spins some 40 windy pages out of an inscription on the bell that, while it speaks of "proclaiming Liberty throughout the land" (Leviticus 25), almost certainly had nothing to do with America's freedom from Great Britain. And it is hard to find much of anything worthwhile in the chapter about DeMille's long, campy 1956 film. Feiler tries very hard to turn the film into a Cold War allegory -- picture the "Russian" Yul Brynner as World Communism and Charlton Heston as Godly Democracy, if you will -- but in the end one is compelled only by the scene wherein Feiler, shown through DeMille's Hollywood archives, dons the robe that Heston wore when toting tablets down Mt. Sinai and parting the Red Sea in the commie-hating DeMille's "epic."

This isn't meant to be a scholarly book, but even so, Feiler's determined informality is a trial. His Liberty Bell chapter opens thus: "They were trapped. They had broken away from the greatest power on earth but were still far short of independence. They were determined to escape oppression...." You get the picture. Feiler is trying to create the sort of "You Are There" moment that characterizes, say, the work of Dan Brown; and while Feiler's prose style is infinitely superior to Brown's --infinitely, I tell you! -- the fiction-selling machine that is Brown does appear in Feiler's pages in a Da Vinci Code-ish discussion of Moses and the Great Seal of the United States -- all that stuff about the pyramid and the open eye, dontcha know. (Feiler also seems dangerously interested in the Masons, but we'll let that pass.) Another best-selling author makes an appearance: Harold Kushner, author of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People," who weighs in on Moses' relevance to modern life. Any writer would envy these guys' sales. But their inclusion in a book that purports to reveal something new about American history doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the book's author.

There are long stretches of Feiler's book that make for enjoyable, undemanding reading. But there are also places where I'm left scratching my head. "Cincinnati, Ohio, is not really on the way to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania," Feiler tells us, "unless you're coming from, say, Springfield, Illinois....The three cities are virtually in a straight line..." Come again? Dear Reader, I have held a map of the United States every which way, and I still cannot make the route from Springfield to Cincinnati to Gettysburg a straight line. Not even "virtually." The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but to connect these three points you have to dip considerably south between Springfield and Gettysburg to hit Cincinnati. Isn't this the sort of boner editors are supposed to catch?

And what is this about? "When the voice of God calls out from the burning bush...Moses hid his face....DeMille, the master of overstatement, thought this wasn't enough, so he flushed out the scene" [emphasis added]. Since Feiler goes on to describe how director DeMille fleshed out the scene, I can only assume that's what he meant to say in the first place, but again--it doesn't exactly make the reader feel he or she is in good, authorial hands.

The most serious of these irregularities concerns a quotation from Harriet Tubman: "I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming....but dere was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom." Huh? What written source quotes Tubman in dialect? And why? "America's Prophet" has no Notes section, only a sort of postscript on sources which tells me that the "life of Harriet Tubman is painstakingly re-created from limited sources in two recent biographies, "Harriet Tubman" by Catherine Clinton and "Bound for the Promised Land" by Kate Clifford Larson." Am I to assume that either Clinton or Larson reproduced Tubman's words in this manner? Does Feiler know or care what he's doing here, or that it might be seen as offensive? Perhaps all these glitches can be explained by the fact that I read an advanced reader's edition, but somehow I doubt it.

Still, I learned a great deal from this book. How much of it has to do with the effect of the Hebrew Scriptures on U.S. history I'm not certain, but there are many fun facts to be gleaned herein. Did you know, for instance, that "DeMille tested [Audrey] Hepburn for Nefretiri, Moses' love interest, but her breasts were deemed too small for the voluptuous costumes, and the part went to Anne Baxter"? Not central to an understanding of American history, perhaps, but that's worth knowing.