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• "The Jewish Cincinnatus" : Biblical Republicanism in the Age of the American Revolution
• "The United Tribes, or States of Israel" : The Hebrew Republic as a Political Model before the Civil War
• "A Truly American Spirit of Writing" : Pseudobiblicism, the Early Republic, and the Cultural Origins of the Book of Mormon
• Tribes Lost and Found : Israelites in Nineteenth-Century America
• Evangelicalism, Slavery, and the Decline of an Old Testament Nation
• Conclusion: Beyond Old Testamentism : The New Israel after the Civil War.

The Bible has always been an integral part of American political culture. Yet in the years before the Civil War, it was the Old Testament, not the New Testament, that pervaded political rhetoric. From Revolutionary times to about 1830, numerous American politicians, commentators, ministers, and laymen depicted their young nation as a new, God-chosen Israel and relied on the Old Testament for political guidance. In this original book, historian Eran Shalev closely examines how this powerful predilection for Old Testament narratives and rhetoric in early America shaped a wide range of debates and cultural discussions - from republican ideology, constitutional interpretation, southern slavery, and more generally the meaning of American nationalism to speculations on the origins of American Indians and to the emergence of Mormonism. Shalev argues that the effort to shape the United States as a biblical nation reflected conflicting attitudes within the culture - proudly boastful on the one hand, but uncertain about its abilities and ultimate destiny on the other. With great nuance, American Zion explores for the first time the meaning and lasting effects of the idea of the United States as a new Israel, and sheds new light on our understanding of the nation's origins and culture during the founding and antebellum decades.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• Playing with Leviathan: Job and the aesthetic turn in biblical exegesis
• "Jonah historically regarded": improvisations on Kitto's Cyclopedia of biblical literature
• "Call me Ishmael": the BIble and the Orient
• Ahab, idolatry, and the question of possession: biblical politics
• Rachel's inconsolable cry: the rise of women's BIbles
• Epilogue.

Many writers in antebellum America sought to reinvent the Bible, but no one, Ilana Pardes argues, was as insistent as Melville on redefining biblical exegesis while doing so. In "Moby-Dick, " he not only ventured to fashion a grand new inverted Bible in which biblical rebels and outcasts assume center stage, but also aspired to comment on every imaginable mode of biblical interpretation, calling for a radical reconsideration of the politics of biblical reception. In "Melville's Bibles, " Pardes traces Melville's response to a whole array of nineteenth-century exegetical writings - literary scriptures, biblical scholarship, Holy Land travel narratives, political sermons, and women's bibles. She shows how Melville raised with unparalleled verve the question of what counts as Bible and what counts as interpretation.

• America's Bible: loving it and leaving it
• The story told by numbers
• Does it make any difference?
• Bibles galore
• What if nobody read it?
• The perfect is the enemy of the good
• Moses in cyberspace
• Who says what the Bible says?
• Canon fodder
• The eye of the Bible beholder
• The fragility of teaching and learning scripture
• Speaking personally
• Song and dance
• The story of the greatest story ever told awaits a new chapter.

How can a book -- one that's found in courthouses, libraries, and millions of households across the land -- be everywhere and nowhere at the same time? In this book, veteran religion writer Kenneth Briggs asks how, even as the Bible remains the best-selling book of all time, fewer Americans than ever can correctly articulate what it says, much less how it might offer guidance for their lives. In a quest to make sense of the Bible's relative disappearance from public life, Briggs shares with readers his own two-year cross-country journey to a variety of places. Brigg's narrative incorporates pertinent interviews throughout with preachers, pollsters, scholars, and ordinary citizens from California to Texas to Florida to Massachusetts. As he probes and reflects on his varied findings, Briggs offers keen insight into why and how the Bible's place in American public life has shifted and shrunk -- and he suggests what role the Bible may play in the US in years to come. -- adapted from book flap.