William Safire praises Bush's second inaugural speech in today's NYT, calling it "among the top 5 of the 20 second-inaugurals in our history."
He writes,
In Bush's "second gathering" (Lincoln called it his "second appearing"), the Texan evoked J.F.K.'s "survival of liberty" phrase to convey his central message: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Bush repeated that internationalist human-rights idea, with a slight change, in these words: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."The change in emphasis was addressed to accommodationists who make "peace" and "the peace process" the No. 1 priority of foreign policy. Others of us - formerly known as hardliners, now called Wilsonian idealists - put freedom first, recalling that the U.S. has often had to go to war to gain and preserve it. Bush makes clear that it is human liberty, not peace, that takes precedence, and that it is tyrants who enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace.
He concludes with,
Cut out of a near-final draft was the line on the side of the bell from Leviticus that rings out Bush's theme: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ... "
That verse is Leviticus 25:10, which reads in its entirety,
And 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.
Leviticus covers everything from the slaughtering of herd and bird sacrifices, to the preparation of grain sacrifices and the removal of mold from the walls of a house. It contains the laws that were intended to keep the people of Israel holy in the sight of their god, so that they could successfully maintain their relationship with him. These laws were said to be part of the whole ethical package received by Moses.
Leviticus 25 deals with the sabbatical year and the Jubilee year. Like the seventh day, which is to be a day of rest, every seventh year is to be a year of rest. The sowing and reaping of fields, and the pruning and picking of vines, is prohibited. During a sabbatical year, only what grows naturally is for the taking.
Every fiftieth year is a Jubilee (yovel in Hebrew) year. In addition to the normal sabbatical year observances, all tenured land reverts to its owners, and all indentured Israelites return to their homes.
In his commentary on Leviticus, Baruch Levine outlines what the Israelites meant by "liberty" in this context:
The Hebrew term deror has conventionally been rendered "freedom, liberty." More has been learned about it in recent years, however. Hebrew deror is cognate with Akkadian andurāru, which designates an edict of release issued by the Old Babylonian kings and some of their successors. This edict was often issued by a king upon ascending the throne and was a feature of a more extensive legal institution known as mesharum, a moratorium declared on debts and indenture. The Akkadian verb darāru, like Hebrew d-r-r, means "to move about freely," referring in this instance to the freedom granted those bound by servitude. In Jeremiah 34:15, we read that, as the Chaldeans approached Jerusalem, King Zedekiah ordered the people to release their indentured servants, to proclaim a deror, "release." In Isaiah 61:1, the Judeans are to be freed under terms of a deror as they are restored to their land. The biblical laws of the Jubilee year thus incorporate Near Eastern legal institutions of great antiquity.
Great antiquity, indeed: the Old Babylonian period ranges from 1728 to 1685 BC. Across more than 3700 years, the culture of the ancient Near East reaches us through the words of the 43rd President of the United States of America, delivered on the steps of our secular temple, our Capitol. Concepts directly derived from a time of blood sacrifice and theophany are now expressed in a purportedly rational age.
I don't believe that the President is aware of these things. He's not that sort of man, which is unfortunate, but not the unmitigated disaster that so many of his opponents believe it to be. In place of an acute sense of the long flows of history, the President has his faith. In the West, that faith, and faiths like it, are what connect many people to the ancient temples of Babylon, the sands and vineyards of Mesopotamia. That faith, with its attendant, multiply-translated, heavily redacted, 2,500 year old texts, can create a sense of cultural resonance that operates at an irrational level, but can nonetheless guide actions and form convictions.
This isn't always a good thing. In the extremist elements of Islam we see a bad resonance, a dissonance. The waveforms of the ancient blood sacrifice elements of pre-Islamic, nomadic faiths and early Islam have created an unholy bloodlust, whereby the power and rush of murder are mistaken for the power and rush of the approving presence of Allah.
These two sensations, the harmonious and the dissonant, can recognize one another. You don't need to be explicitly aware of the Near Eastern roots of our culture and its extreme elements to recognize the equally ancient roots of another culture and its extreme elements. You don't need to know about the Hebrew and Akkadian roots of "liberty" to sense when someone is opposed to it.
Although President Bush isn't "intelligent" in the sense that is currently the fashion among academics and the intelligentsia, he has enough perception of the great resonances of human history to recognize evil when he sees it, and to feel the pull of the long centuries that draw him to approve actions that are, more or less, in proper opposition to it.
And that is all that history requires of him.
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For more on Bush's inaugural speech, how it well it played (or didn't), and some speculation about "damage control," see Mr. Gandelman.
