I translated the complete Hebrew Bible. Trump’s ‘USA Bible’ betrays its greatest asset
A career spent studying the Bible has shown me that its true value is in its diversity
President Donald Trump poses with a bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 2020. Photo by Getty Images
Donald Trump is now selling Bibles — at $59.99 a piece, a hefty price for a Bible — with the red-white-and-blue title God Bless the USA Bible, and including the pledge of allegiance and the constitution. (Apparently the traditional title of “Holy Bible” was not good enough.) Trump’s two most prominent roles have been huckster and showman, both combined in his highly effective performance, while president and during his latest campaign, as demagogue. The Bible he is touting is all about making money, which he now desperately needs, and wrapping himself in a mantle of piety for his evangelical supporters.
But what does the actual content of the Bible have to do with Trumpism? Virtually nothing.
In his speech promoting sales of the book, Trump said that every home should have a Bible, and that it is his favorite book. If that is so, he has shown a peculiar lack of familiarity with its texts. This latest scam is of a piece with his notorious appearance in front of St. John’s Church in June 2020, supposedly to counter protesters outside the White House, during which he held the Bible high and looked as grim as death.
Trump’s greatest appeal is perhaps to evangelical Christians, who for years, well before Trump became president in 2016, have been claiming that they want to return the country to biblical values. But in point of fact, there is no such thing.
I became keenly aware of this in spending more than two decades translating the Hebrew Bible — a total of more than 3,000 pages — a project that showed me, very clearly, how sharply divergent the worldviews and ethics within it are.
That diversity is one source of the vitality of the Hebrew Bible, which comprises texts written by different hands over close to nine centuries, and contains sharply divergent views on many things. This is less true of the New Testament, because its sundry components were written over just a few decades, but even in those texts, originally composed in Greek, there is diversity.
The Hebrew Bible begins with a grand evocation of the choreographed harmony of creation, which God plans to be dominated by humankind. But immediately, a second version of creation is introduced — what’s known as the “J source” after the initial “P source” — in which creation is enacted through the potter’s craft, not through speech, as God fashions Eve from Adam’s rib. Instability, danger, seduction and curses quickly become part of the story.
And against both these early and highly influential versions of how the world came to be, we get late books like Job, a radical rejection of the anthropocentric vision of creation, and Kohelet, which envisages not an orderly progression in time to fulfillment from day one to the first Sabbath, but rather an endless cycle of futility. These different books continue to speak to us, but where in all the vehement diversity — even when it comes to a single question, like where did we come from? — are “biblical values”?
It is true that one can find expressions of Israelite nationalism in some of the biblical texts — perhaps a foundation for some of Trump’s supposed biblical appeal, especially for white nationalists. But the prophet Jeremiah argues strenuously against the nationalist agenda, recognizing realistically that the kingdom of Judah is a tiny state at the mercy of the powerful empires to the east. And Jonah, in a later era once the Israelite faith had become increasingly universalist, argues that God’s concern is for all peoples, including even the Assyrians, destroyers of the northern kingdom long considered arch enemies of the Jews. There is not much comfort for nationalism in the Hebrew Bible.
What there is is an abiding source of inspiration for millions of people, especially in English-speaking countries.
One reason the Bible has retained that power, even as times change, is that it provides many different perspectives and moods, from exaltation to desperate hope, and many different viewpoints, from the comforting notions of reward and punishment in Psalms to the sharp questioning of their validity in Job. It is fine to say that there should be a Bible in every home — but not as a bolster to a sense of self-righteousness and not as an assured blueprint to the virtuous life.
Instead, the Bible should be, as it was in ancient times, a source for inquiring about reality, for pondering the unfathomable complexities of the human condition.
Seeing the Bible as it is meant to be seen — as a vehicle meant to prompt learning and introspection — makes it clear how shameful Trump’s exploitation of the Bible for monetary and political ends is. To wrap it in a flag — any flag — and turn it into a rallying-point for a political agenda, is what some biblical writers would have called an abomination before the Lord.
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