Ezra Stiles was one of America’s first great college presidents. The seventh leader of Yale University and a founder of Brown, born in 1727, was also a minister, theologian, author and amateur scientist who corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson about scientific discoveries. And he possessed a profound affinity for the Hebrew Bible.

​

Stiles was inspired by his beloved close friend, a rabbi from Israel named Raphael Hayyim Isaac Carigal, the first Jewish communal leader to visit the American colonies. Carigal worked with Stiles on studying ancient Judaic texts during their many meetings. When apart, the two mailed each other letters in Hebrew.

​

Thanks to Carigal, Stiles was eventually able to translate large portions of the Hebrew Bible into English. As president of Yale, Stiles had the rabbi’s portrait hung on a hallway wall, made the study of the Hebrew language mandatory, and even gave commencement lectures in Hebrew.

​

The American Joshua

Stiles’s love for the Bible made him see the American cause for independence in biblical terms. The Revolution, he believed, echoed the great victory of the Israelites over the tyrannical Pharaoh under the leadership of Moses. The hard-fought battle for independence that had forged the nascent United States was the march to a new Promised Land.

​

At the close of the Revolutionary War, Stiles famously preached the 1783 Connecticut election sermon before the governor and state assembly. The sermon was titled “The United States Elevated to Honor and Glory,” and Stiles compared the fledgling country to Israel and presented General Washington as a new Joshua.

​​

“God be thanked, we have lived to see peace restored to this bleeding land, at least a general cessation of hostilities among the belligerent powers. And on this occasion does it not become us to reflect, how wonderful, how gracious, how glorious, has been the good hand of our God upon us, in carrying us through so tremendous a warfare!”

​

In praising the Continental Army’s Commander in Chief, who had achieved a miraculous victory, Stiles alluded to the description in Joshua 4:14 of how “the Lord exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel; and they stood in awe of him all the days of his life, just as they had stood in awe of Moses.”

​

“Congress put at the head of this spirited army, the only man, on whom the eyes of all Israel were placed,” Stiles sermonized.

​

“Posterity, I apprehend, and the world itself, inconsiderate and incredulous as they may be of the dominion of heaven, will yet do so much justice to the divine moral government, as to acknowledge, that this American Joshua was raised up by God, and divinely formed by a peculiar influence of the Sovereign of the Universe, for the great work of leading the armies of this American Joseph (now separated from his brethren), and conducting this people through the severe, the arduous conflict, to liberty and independence.”

​

Not only was Washington to be compared to the figure who led his people into the land of divine covenant, but America itself was also compared to an earlier biblical figure, Joseph. The treasured son of Jacob had survived the machinations of his scheming brothers, as the Revolutionaries had emerged victorious over the British.

​

Led by such an esteemed individual, the general who would, just five years later be elected America’s first president, the U.S., Stiles felt, was undoubtedly an “American Israel, high above all nations which He hath made, in numbers, and in praise, and in name, and in honor.” 

​

Virtue and Welfare

Returning to the theme of his sermon from Moses’s farewell address in Deuteronomy 26:16–17, Stiles then reminded his listeners that “the secular welfare of God’s ancient people depended upon their virtue, their religion, their observance of that holy covenant, which Israel entered into with God, on the plains at the foot of Nebo on the other side [of] Jordan.” America, he believed, would be a similarly holy nation, entered into partnership with God: “I have assumed the text, only as introductory to a discourse upon the political welfare of God’s American Israel; and as allusively prophetic of the future prosperity and splendor of the United States.”

​

No doubt, he said, Washington would not be the last American leader blessed from Above. “Zion’s friends will rejoice in Zion’s welfare: and the religious as well as civil patriot will shine in the faces of the future Moseses and Joshuas of this land,” Stiles believed.

​

Nowadays, Stiles’s legacy is most often connected with his designing the first documented grading system in the history of American education. His name adorns a residential college at Yale. But it’s Stiles’s passion for using the prism of the Bible as the means to which to view America that today’s university and political leaders might most benefit from studying.

​

Commencement addresses are no longer delivered in its ancient languages, but the Bible’s themes are still as relevant today as they were during the Revolutionary Era. As Stiles well understood, a nation with a sense of purpose, mission, and commitment to doing what is right in the eyes of God is a nation that will merit leaders like Moses and Joshua, Esther and Ruth. With the help of such dedicated civil patriots, perhaps we may just yet see the prophetic vision of the future prosperity and splendor of the United States that Stiles hoped for fully realized in our day.