America's Prophet by Bruce Feiler Read Free Book Online Page B

Levites are priests and much of the book is taken up with regulations that cover priestly habits, many of which haven’t been practiced for two thousand years. My daughters were born on April 15, during the time of the year when Leviticus is read in synagogues. I feared that in thirteen years they would have to read one of its more boring passages at their Bat Mitzvahs. I asked a friend to find out which Torah portion they were born under, and he reported back, Leviticus 14:1 through 15:33. It features regulations on how to handle leprosy, mildew, nocturnal emissions, and menstruation. Now, there’s a way to get a teenager interested in the Bible! But my friend also came with a message: Even the rabbis agreed this was a tedious portion and advised giving sermons based on the imminent arrival of Passover.
    In fairness, Leviticus also includes some of the loftiest values of the Hebrew Bible—specifically the Holiness Code, which outlines the moral responsibilities of the chosen people. These laws forbid harvesting all your fields or picking your vineyard bare, steps intended to leave food for the poor. They mandate against insulting the deaf or putting objects in front of the blind. They insist that people show deference to the aged and tend the infirm. Leviticus 18 contains one of the moral high points of Scripture, the golden rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And Leviticus 19 includes one of the core themes of the Moses narrative: “You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
    Leviticus 25 occurs in the middle of the Holiness Code. It discusses how the Israelites should tend their fields. The land, like the people, deserves a Sabbath, God says. Every seventh year the Israelites should let their land lie fallow. After seven sets of seven years,or forty-nine years, the Israelites should mark an additional year of celebration. During that year, called the jubilee, all debts are to be forgiven, all debtors freed, all workers are to return to their ancestral land, and all families split by economic hardship reunited. The message is that the land belongs to God, not humans, and nobody should benefit too greatly or suffer too mightily for their work with God’s bounty.
    The King James Bible, which most Pennsylvanians would have been using, describes the central moment as an act of economic liberation: “Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.” But there’s a problem with this translation. The Hebrew word deror, which the King James renders as liberty, is more precisely translated as release . Modern Bibles usually translate Leviticus 25:10 as “You shall proclaim release throughout the land,” stressing that the liberation is a freeing from economic duress, not political servitude. Considering all that would befall Isaac Norris’s bell, the one misfortune that proved most beneficial was preventing America’s treasured icon from being called…the Release Bell.
    What made Norris choose this line? He left no clue. The prevailing theory has been that the inscription marks the fiftieth anniversary of Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, its jubilee year. By adopting Leviticus 25:10, Norris was declaring to the Crown that free men of God should be included in the determination of their economic future. But if that’s the case, why inscribe 1752 on the bell and not 1751? A rival view suggests that Benjamin Franklin proposed the line to Norris. By 1751, Franklin was advocating a union of the colonies and honorable transactions between nations, mirroring a line in Leviticus 25. A third theory suggests that the misspelling of Pennsylvania on the bell (there’s only one n in Penn) was the assembly taking a shot at the founding family, who weren’t paying taxes. Freedom