WATCHTOWER · HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION
Was America a “New Israel” 172 years before the modern State of Israel was established? There is a real history behind the claim. In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson proposed Exodus imagery for the new country’s seal. Decades earlier, English colonists had already imagined their communities through Israel’s biblical story. After independence, ministers explicitly described an American Israel. But none of those facts amounts to an official declaration that the United States was renamed Israel.
The finding: 1948 minus 1776 equals 172 calendar years. The dates are real; the conclusion needs care. The evidence establishes a powerful and contested national metaphor, not a legal identity, a discovery about ancestry, or proof that God transferred one people’s existence to another. A central point is that “Israel” has carried meanings of peoplehood, covenant and spiritual belonging that are not reducible to a modern state. Different communities have interpreted and inhabited that story at different times. The more revealing investigation is what Americans did with it: who claimed liberation, who remained in chains, and who challenged the claim from underneath it.
Reported and examined by DaddyBruce95 · November 6, 2026. This investigation prioritizes original letters, proposals, sermons, petitions and constitutional texts. A final, separately labeled analysis considers their moral implications. Quoted scripture uses the public-domain King James Version.
1. What the 172-year claim gets right—and what it leaves out
The two reference points are American independence in 1776 and the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776. Israel proclaimed independence on May 14, 1948, the day President Harry Truman announced American recognition of its provisional government. Subtracting the calendar years produces 172. It does not mean that 172 complete years elapsed between those two particular days. Declaration of Independence; Truman’s recognition statement; State Department historical record.
More importantly, 1776 is not the birth date of the Israel analogy in English North America. It is a useful anchor because the founding seal proposals provide unusually concrete evidence: identifiable authors, surviving documents, a committee and a congressional record. The language had a colonial history before it acquired that revolutionary setting.
The 1948 date refers to a modern state. It is not the beginning of Jewish history, the Jewish people or ancient Israel. Those categories cannot be collapsed into one another. Likewise, an English Christian community comparing itself to biblical Israel was making a religious interpretation. Recording that interpretation is different from verifying its divine authority.
2. Israel as a people, a covenant and a spiritual identity
“Israel” is more than one kind of name in the sources. Genesis 32:28 tells of Jacob receiving the name Israel. Exodus 19 addresses the house of Jacob and the children of Israel as a people entering a covenant, with obligations attached. These are texts about a person, a people and a relationship with God—not the founding documents of a twentieth-century government. They also belong to the history of a particular people; reducing Israel to a free-floating idea would lose that dimension. Genesis 32:28; Exodus 19:3–6.
The spiritual dimension becomes explicit in the New Testament’s arguments over promise and belonging. In Romans 9:6–8, Paul distinguishes descent from participation in the promise. Galatians 3:26–29 describes people belonging to Christ as Abraham’s heirs, across the Jew–Greek and other divisions named in the passage. Galatians 6:15–16 places new creation alongside its reference to the Israel of God. These passages provide material for a covenantal or spiritual reading; they do not mention the establishment of a state in 1948. Romans 9:6–8; Galatians 3:26–29; Galatians 6:15–16.
The precise referent of the Israel of God in Galatians 6:16 is disputed among interpreters. It should not be presented as an uncontested declaration that one later nation or church simply replaced the Jewish people. Scholarly examination of Galatians 6:16 and Romans 9–11.
Those readings must be kept in context. In Romans 11, Paul identifies himself as an Israelite, rejects the claim that God has cast away his people, pictures Gentile believers as branches grafted into the same olive tree, and warns them against boasting over its natural branches. A spiritual interpretation cannot honestly cite Paul’s language about promise while hiding his warning against Gentile arrogance. The passages are evidence of theological argument, not a license to declare Jewish people fictitious or replaced by whichever nation makes the loudest claim. Romans 11, especially verses 1–2, 17–20 and 28–29.
The later sources in this report show different communities finding themselves in that scriptural world. Winthrop’s colonial community imagined covenant and obligation. Stiles applied American-Israel language to the republic. Williams denied that a whole modern civil nation inherited ancient Israel’s sacred position. Wheatley used the Exodus to identify the enslaver, rather than the colonist resisting Britain, with Egypt’s oppressive power. These are different acts of identification, not successive official transfers of a single title. Their evidence appears in the sections that follow.
The central distinction is between a biblical identity and a government claiming authority through it. People have understood Israel through covenant, faith, collective memory and hopes of deliverance in very different settings. That history does not disappear when a modern state adopts the name. Nor can a founding date establish that a government’s borders, leaders or actions are God’s will. Those are theological and political claims requiring their own arguments, not conclusions produced by the name alone.
It would nevertheless be inaccurate to say that the 1948 state has no connection to biblical tradition. Its declaration explicitly invokes Jewish historical attachment, the Bible and the prophets. That is direct evidence of the founders’ claimed connection. It is not independent proof that their political project fulfilled prophecy or that every later state action carries divine approval. Historical connection and sacred authorization are different propositions. The 1948 declaration, preserved by UNHCR’s Refworld.
3. Before America was a country, colonists were making the comparison
The 1630 text traditionally attributed to John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity, describes a covenantal undertaking and invokes the God of Israel. Its conclusion turns to Moses and the choice between life and death in Deuteronomy. The community’s fate is presented as conditional on its conduct, including mutual care, justice, mercy and restraint in the pursuit of private advantage. This is a recognizable use of Israel’s biblical story to interpret a New England colonial project. Read the historical text, especially its closing pages.
A caution matters here. The familiar scene of Winthrop confidently delivering the sermon aboard the Arbella is less secure than popular retellings suggest. The manuscript and later descriptions do not justify treating that setting as an eyewitness certainty. The argument does not need an invented dramatic scene: the surviving text itself provides the evidence. Archival study of the text’s transmission and provenance.
Nor should a text associated with one Puritan undertaking be turned into the unanimous creed of every colony. Its own hierarchy and distinctions belong to a particular religious world. What it demonstrates is a vocabulary: a community could imagine itself through covenant, wilderness, obligation and possible judgment. That vocabulary existed long before the United States or the 1776 seal committee.
4. In 1776, Franklin put Moses and Pharaoh on the table
On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed Franklin, Jefferson and John Adams to a committee to devise a seal for the United States. Franklin’s surviving proposal placed Moses at the Red Sea, with Pharaoh’s forces being overwhelmed. Its motto was “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.” Adams described that proposal in an August 14 letter to Abigail Adams. National Archives history of the first committee; Franklin’s proposal; Adams’s letter.
The political meaning is hard to miss. A people resisting imperial rule could see its struggle in an account of deliverance from a tyrant. The founders were considering a public symbol that would put the new republic inside that biblical frame. This is stronger evidence than an unattributed social-media quotation because the proposal and contemporary correspondence can actually be checked.
But it remains a proposal for a symbol. Franklin did not, in that document, supply an act renaming the country “New Israel.” A proposed image can reveal political imagination without becoming constitutional law. That distinction is the line between an investigation and a myth dressed up as a discovery.
5. Jefferson’s Israelites—and Adams’s very different choice
Adams’s August 14 letter records Jefferson proposing the children of Israel in the wilderness, guided by a cloud by day and fire by night. For the other side, Jefferson suggested Hengist and Horsa, figures associated in his account with Saxon ancestry and political institutions. The combination matters: the proposed national imagery was drawing on more than one historical and religious tradition. Contemporary account of the three men’s ideas.
Jefferson also left a surviving note developing a Moses-and-Pharaoh design. That manuscript should not be confused with the wilderness scene described by Adams. The documents preserve stages and variants of the design process; they are not interchangeable proof of a single finished emblem. Jefferson’s surviving design note.
Adams himself preferred the classical story of the Choice of Hercules, weighing virtue against the attractions of vice and ease. So even inside this three-person committee, the proposals do not show a unanimous declaration of one national theology. Exodus was a serious option. Classical moral allegory was another. The mixed record is more interesting—and more honest—than claiming that every founder secretly meant exactly the same thing.
6. Congress considered the Exodus design. It did not adopt it
The first committee’s report, presented on August 20, 1776, included Moses, Pharaoh and the Red Sea on one side. The other side combined political and heraldic imagery, including Liberty, Justice and the Eye of Providence. Congress read the report and ordered it to lie on the table. That is not an adoption. First committee’s report and documentary history.
The Great Seal Congress finally adopted on June 20, 1782, used the eagle, shield, olive branch and arrows on its front. The reverse used the unfinished pyramid and Eye of Providence. Moses, Pharaoh and Franklin’s rebellion motto were absent. Providence imagery remained, so this was not a simple exchange of a religious design for an entirely nonreligious one. It was a different adopted design. The adopted 1782 report and explanation.
The record therefore supports a precise sentence: biblical Israel and the Exodus were considered for America’s national seal in 1776. It does not support the stronger sentence that America officially became Israel that year. Nor does the committee’s failure establish why every member of Congress accepted or disliked every feature. Where the evidence stops, the report should stop too.
7. The ministers who explicitly preached an American Israel
If the exact religious comparison is the question, the evidence does not end with abandoned seal designs. Ezra Stiles’s May 8, 1783 election sermon, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor, explicitly refers to “God’s American Israel.” Delivered before Connecticut’s General Assembly, it applied biblical language of national elevation to the republic’s prospects. That is a minister’s public interpretation of the new nation, not a federal law. Stiles’s sermon and scholarly edition; Princeton’s record of the original 1783 edition.
On June 5, 1788, Samuel Langdon preached The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American States before New Hampshire’s General Court. He compared the American states with Israel’s tribes and treated biblical government as a model from which Americans could learn. Yet he also distinguished America’s experience from Sinai: he did not say that God had visibly appeared to Americans and written their civil laws as in the biblical account. Langdon’s full sermon.
These were meaningful public arguments. They were also particular Christian readings, with assumptions—including supersessionist claims about Judaism—that should be identified rather than adopted by a present-day report. Their existence establishes that an American-Israel idea was preached. It does not prove universal agreement, literal descent or the extinction of Jewish identity.
8. A Christian dissenter had already challenged the whole premise
Roger Williams’s 1644 The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution shows that objections to national sacred identity are not merely recent inventions. In its opening propositions, he argued that civil government is essentially civil, that coercion of conscience produces persecution, and that ancient Israel is not a template for any modern civil state. Later chapters ask where the Gospel makes entire European nations counterparts to Israel. Williams’s text, opening propositions 5–8 and chapters CXI–CXII.
Williams was making a Christian theological argument, not speaking as a modern secular constitutional lawyer. His position had its own historical setting and limits. Still, it punctures the idea that there was only one faithful Christian way to understand a nation. A person could take scripture seriously while denying that the state inherited Israel’s sacred status.
That disagreement belongs in the center of the investigation. Quoting a minister who called America Israel without mentioning Christians who rejected the move would manufacture a consensus the sources do not contain. The historical question is not simply whether the metaphor existed. It is how it was contested, who was allowed to define it, and what power followed from treating a political community as sacred.
9. Phillis Wheatley asked who was actually acting like Pharaoh
Before independence, Phillis Wheatley had already turned Exodus against colonial hypocrisy. In a February 11, 1774 letter to Samson Occom, published in the Connecticut Gazette on March 11, she connected the Israelites’ desire for deliverance with the God-given love of freedom among Black people. She called the oppressors “our modern Egyptians.” Wheatley’s letter to Occom; Museum record of the dated letter and a surviving newspaper printing.
Wheatley, recently freed from enslavement, was writing to a Mohegan Presbyterian minister and poet. Her point was not that liberty was an empty ideal. It was that colonists could not honestly cry out against oppression while exercising oppressive power over other human beings. She exposed a contradiction inside the religious and political language of freedom.
This changes the angle of the entire report. The person calling himself an Israelite is not automatically on the side of liberation. The person he enslaves may recognize him as Pharaoh. That is an interpretation grounded in Wheatley’s actual words, not a modern accusation pasted onto an eighteenth-century silence. Her intervention predates the famous seal proposals by two years.
Any investigation that gives Franklin’s Moses a page and Wheatley’s challenge a footnote has missed half the story. Exodus was available to the powerful as a national self-image. It was also available to people demanding that the powerful stop pretending.
10. A promised land was never an empty land
The national metaphor also has to be read alongside the people already living on the continent. Stiles’s sermon did not merely praise future liberty; it placed Indigenous peoples within a subordinate biblical scheme, comparing them to Canaanites. That racialized conjecture was part of his interpretation, not an established account of Native ancestry and not a description this report endorses. Stiles’s sermon.
Native voices make the cost of national self-congratulation concrete. A Cherokee Nation memorial from December 1829 resisted Georgia’s assertion of authority over Cherokee territory and appealed for protection of the nation’s land and sovereignty. The House record notes that Congress tabled it on February 8, 1830. These were people defending their own political community, not scenery in somebody else’s providential drama. Cherokee Nation memorial in the House archive.
An 1836 Cherokee protest against the Treaty of New Echota described the deprivation of political and legal protection and asked the United States to deal with the nation’s true representatives. That petition is evidence of people resisting dispossession in their own words. It should be read as more than an unfortunate complication in an otherwise triumphant national story. Cherokee protest petition, primary transcription.
These later records do not prove that one sermon caused removal, or that every Christian supported it. They do establish why a claimed promised land must be examined from the position of those facing the loss of their homes. A sacred analogy cannot substitute for their testimony.
11. Frederick Douglass refused a celebration that excluded the enslaved
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass addressed an independence celebration in Rochester. He compared the revolutionary anniversary to Passover, praised resistance to oppression, and then confronted his audience with the continuing enslavement of Black Americans. His line “You may rejoice, I must mourn” exposed the distance between the national celebration and the people denied its promises. Douglass’s full oration.
Douglass did not merely dismiss the revolutionary principles. He used their force against the country’s betrayal of them. He also drew on the voice of biblical captivity. The same national and scriptural language could therefore function both as praise and as an indictment. The distinction depended on whose freedom counted in practice.
This was 1852, not 1776, and the chronology matters. It demonstrates a continuing dispute over the nation’s story rather than proving that all Americans had held one consistent belief from the beginning. Read alongside Wheatley, it shows that the counterargument was not outside the historical record. It was spoken by people whose lives exposed the limits of the claim.
12. The governing documents did not create a country called New Israel
The Declaration invokes a Creator and divine providence, while identifying the independent states as the United States of America. It does not rename them New Israel. The Constitution’s Article VI bars religious tests for federal office or public trust. The First Amendment, ratified in 1791, prohibits Congress from establishing religion or interfering with its free exercise. These texts are not identical to a minister’s sermon about covenant. Declaration; Constitution, Article VI; Bill of Rights, First Amendment.
That does not mean religion was irrelevant to the founding, or that eighteenth-century equality was complete. The Constitution accommodated slavery, and the First Amendment’s original wording addressed Congress; state religious arrangements did not all disappear overnight. The accurate finding is narrower: the federal texts did not enact an American-Israel identity or require a profession of Christianity as the qualification for federal office.
It is possible to recognize the influence of biblical language without converting a sermon into a statute. It is equally possible to recognize constitutional religious liberty without pretending that the people living under the new government immediately received equal protection. The documents have to be read alongside the exclusions, not used to conceal them.
13. Jewish Americans were people, not a metaphor to be inherited
The August 1790 exchange between Moses Seixas and George Washington brings actual Jewish Americans into view. Writing on behalf of Newport’s Hebrew congregation, Seixas asserted liberty of conscience and equal membership in the political community. Washington’s reply echoed the promise of a government that gives no sanction to bigotry and no assistance to persecution. The famous wording first appears in Seixas’s address; credit belongs to the Jewish author as well as the president who repeated it. Read both primary documents, Readings 1 and 2.
The exchange matters for more than a reassuring quotation. It shows Jewish people invoking their own religious language and claiming civic security decades before 1948. A Christian minister’s declaration of American Israel did not erase them, convert them into somebody else’s symbol or make their equal rights a favor bestowed by Christians.
This is one reason careless versions of the 172-year claim fail. Ancient Israel, Jewish religious and historical identity, Christian interpretations of scripture, the United States and the modern State of Israel are related subjects, but they are not interchangeable. Confusing them can turn a legitimate historical inquiry into a claim that the documents simply do not establish.
14. What this investigation establishes—and what it cannot
Established: English colonial writers used Israel’s covenantal story before 1776. Franklin and Jefferson proposed Exodus imagery in 1776. The first seal committee reported a Moses-and-Pharaoh design, which Congress did not adopt. Ministers later made explicit American-Israel comparisons. Other Christian, Black, Native and Jewish voices complicate or challenge any claim of a single sacred national identity.
Not established: an official American renaming as New Israel; a unanimous founding doctrine; literal Israelite ancestry proved by the seal; a divine transfer that abolishes Jewish peoplehood; or modern territorial and political rights settled by a colonial sermon. None follows from subtracting 1776 from 1948.
History can document that someone claimed God’s favor. It cannot turn that claim into a certified message from God. Nor does the discovery of American biblical rhetoric establish a hidden explanation for every later American policy toward Israel. Such policy questions require their own evidence, decisions, institutions and dates. This report should not pretend that one metaphor solves them all.
The strongest version of the original insight survives those limits: America was imagining itself through Israel’s story long before the modern State of Israel was founded. The important correction is that this was a contested story about identity, deliverance and power—not proof of a national exemption from judgment.
15. Analysis: chosen should mean accountable
The following is Watchtower’s ethical analysis, distinguished from the documentary findings above. The danger begins when a community turns a story of deliverance into permission to dominate. Wheatley’s intervention is devastating because it asks about conduct. Who is in chains? Who is demanding obedience? Who gets to narrate the escape while denying somebody else a way out?
Scripture itself contains challenges to the idea that special relationship means immunity. In Amos 3:2, relationship is followed by accountability for wrongdoing. Leviticus 19:33–34 commands love for the stranger and recalls Israel’s own experience in Egypt. In Romans 11:17–20, Paul warns Gentile believers against boasting over the branches. These passages do not settle every theological dispute, but they are powerful reasons to resist national arrogance. Amos 3:2; Leviticus 19:33–34; Romans 11:17–20.
Our judgment is straightforward: no government gets to wrap cruelty in God’s name and call the matter closed. That applies to the United States, to Israel and to every other state. It does not assign guilt to a whole people or faith. It demands scrutiny of the people making decisions and protection for those living with the consequences.
“Stolen valor” is our criticism of a particular political move: a government borrowing the moral authority of biblical Israel, or demanding the reverence associated with God, to shield its conduct from scrutiny. This is an ethical analogy, not a legal allegation or a claim that Jewish history was invented. When modern Israel is presented as automatically righteous because it bears the biblical name, the claim deserves the same challenge as America’s providential self-image. Neither state can turn a sacred inheritance into a permanent certificate of innocence.
A name can be adopted by a state. Faithfulness cannot be established by proclamation. In the ethical reading offered here, identification with Israel’s covenant should deepen the demand for justice, mercy and responsibility toward the stranger; it cannot excuse their abandonment. The question is not which flag owns God. It is whether people invoking God are protecting human beings—or using holy language to make their suffering easier to dismiss.
A flag is not an acquittal. A sermon is not a deed to somebody else’s home. Calling yourself chosen does not make the person you harm disposable. If a nation wants to borrow a story about freedom, it must be willing to hear the people who say it has become the oppressor in that story.
16. Follow the documents. Keep the people in view
The 172-year comparison opens a worthwhile investigation. The sources lead somewhere more demanding than a clever date: into the gap between national self-description and the treatment of human beings. Franklin’s proposal, Wheatley’s letter, Cherokee petitions, Williams’s dissent and Seixas’s address belong in the same field of view. None should be erased to protect a cleaner myth.
Read the linked primary records. Check who is speaking, when, and with what authority. Distinguish an abandoned design from an adopted seal, a religious interpretation from a constitutional rule, and a promise of liberty from the people who actually received it. That discipline does not weaken accountability. It gives accountability something solid to stand on.
For peaceful ways to turn concern into practical work, visit Take Action. For the publication’s approach to evidence, attribution and corrections, read Our Standards. If you find a source error or missing context, use the correction route described there. The mission is to confront power without surrendering accuracy—or anybody’s humanity.
Source record and scope
The principal evidence is linked at the point of use. The founding documents are preserved by the National Archives and its Founders Online project; the seal record includes both the 1776 committee report and the adopted 1782 design. Colonial and early republic sermons are treated as statements by their authors, not as government findings. Wheatley, Douglass, Cherokee petitioners and Seixas are included as historical participants, rather than summarized away as caveats.
The Winthrop text’s transmission is a specific limitation; this report does not stage its uncertain delivery as fact. Modern editorial introductions are distinguished from original works. The 1948 reference is the founding of the modern state, not the beginning of Jewish history. Biblical texts are examined as sources for ideas of covenant and belonging; the analysis of political claims to sacred authority remains identified as interpretation. This is an investigation of an American historical claim, not a genealogy or a determination of God’s choice of a nation. Published and expanded November 6, 2026.